The danger of culture talk

In the course of the discussions at this CSIS conference in Washington on Countering Extremism, other speakers have dipped into a key, but bitter debate in the study of terrorism: one about whether socio-economics or ideology motivate terrorists.

The debate goes something like this: materialists argue that political and economic conditions - war, occupation, poverty, alienation - breed terrorism. On the other side, critics point to the number of well-educated, middle class suicide bombers - those involved in 9/11 for instance, or the "doctor bombers" this year in the UK. It's not poverty that drives such acts, they say, but psychology and fervent ideology

This piece is adapted from remarks delivered at the "Overcoming Extremism" conference held by the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington, DC.

Visit CSIS' blog on Prevention, Conflict Analysis, and Reconstruction.

And it is subsequently the broader acceptance of such ideas by a public that allows that extremism to turn violent.

This is not a enough of an explanation. Take, for instance, the United Kingdom and its ongoing fit about "home-grown" Islamist terrorists. British multiculturalism has probably rightly taken a battering in recent years, especially from the likes of the conservative columnist Melanie Phillips. In an interview with terrorism.openDemocracy shortly after the release of Londonistan, she waded into the hot water of this debate.

According to Phillips, "the ideas that are driving this terrible jihad against the west are shared by a large number of Muslims who would not lend themselves at all to terror or violence but who, nevertheless, share these ideas; the idea, for example, that the west hopes to cripple Islam and that the Arab and Muslim world is the historic victim of the west.

"These are false. These ideas should be faced down in public. The people should be told that these ideas are simply wrong."

Kanishk Tharoor is Editor of terrorism. openDemocracy

She goes on in the same interview to argue that the west should emulate the Australian model by clearly defining national identity in terms of "western civilisation", language and traditions.

The war on terror for Phillips and many others is not only a battle of ideas, but a battle of culture, pitting the west against Islam. Its combatants are champions of vying civilisations (Not just in the west does this view have traction: Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilisations was a best-seller in Egypt). Such a blinkered way of thinking not only distracts us from what matters, it dangerously misleads.

In thinking about Phillips' recommendations for Britain, we first of all shouldn't forget the material conditions and political developments that have contributed to the alienation of many British Muslims. Heavy-handed counter-terrorist tactics (numerous night raids and sweeps in recent years, the planting of informants within the communities, and deep police surveillance) drive minority communities towards a siege mentality.

Many of these tactics are necessary in dealing with what are undeniably real threats. But at the same time, we must also recognise their very real costs: namely, the sense on the part of an entire community that it is under the magnifying glass of society and the cross-hairs of the state.

Second, as poisonous as may be many of the ideas that Phillips details, it is absurd and somewhat dangerous to expect a state to take to the pulpit and tell its minority communities what to think. The strident defence of majoritarian values and civilisational ethos should be the preoccupation of theocracy, not of pluralistic democracy. Preaching so to the unconverted is a blunt approach.

In confronting Islamist terrorism both in the west, west Asia, and elsewhere in the world, governments need to arrive at more nuanced understandings of the cultural phenomena they're facing.

What's happening in cultural terms is far more complicated. We must be able to distinguish between political Islam and religious Islam.

What we refer to as Islamist terrorism is, as has been eloquently argued by Mahmoud Mamdani in Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, a political phenomenon rooted first and foremost in recent history: in the Islamic reformist movements of the last 150 years and in the violence and fragmentation of the Cold War middle east.

In Europe, the attack on symbols like the veil and the cartoon depictions of the prophet Mohammed only mix and confuse matters. Such attacks invariably link the substance of religious belief with the trappings of political Islam. They give greater traction to extremists and fear-mongers that Islam as a religion is under attack.

Ideology - and an ideology that claims to be religious - should not be dismissed. But we'd be hard-pressed to separate ideology from surrounding political factors. Would al-Qaida have blossomed in Iraq if not for the war? Of course not. Would bombs have gone off in a Manila mall last week if not for the stuttering progress of negotiations between the government and Muslim militants in southern Philippines? I don't think so. Would the blasts earlier this year in the Indian city of Hyderabad have happened were it not for the relative poverty and growing ghettofication of Indian Muslims? I doubt it.

This is not to justify or excuse terrorist actions. It is just to reaffirm that terrorism is not, as many suggest, a symptom of the inevitable and eternal clash between western and Islamic civilisations, or the irreconcilable differences between Islam and democracy.

So when politicians and journalists emphasise the "problem of Islam" when speaking of terrorism, this is not only a misnomer, it is a distraction from serious investigation into the causes of Islamist violence.

Similarly, countries that have been targeted by political Islam should not, as the likes of Melanie Phillips suggest, try to rally around some mythical set of metanational values. Attempts to wave the flag of western or European or Hindu civilisation will only foster more alienation and resentment.

Part of the problem of the ideology-approach is that it makes terrorism and the passions that motivate it seem inscrutable and irrational.

But we should never be fooled into thinking that terrorist violence is beyond rational inquiry. The appeal of al-Qaida to its young recruits and sympathisers may lie in what the British scholar Fred Halliday has described as its "intoxicating incoherence". But al-Qaida, and its ideology, have sprung from very real and discernible political events, political conditions and political trends. Suicide bombers may be fuelled by apocalyptic fantasies and a burning sense of self-abnegation. But so too were kamikaze bombers in the Second World War or the bombers of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

Explanations and solutions to political Islam will not be found in Islam as a religion or culture. In the years after 9/11, we saw a large surge in interest in the west in Islamic scripture and doctrine, as people sought to better understand the threat posed by al-Qaida and other Islamist terrorists. But the Koran is not a guide to insurgency, nor is it a guide to counter-insurgency. It is a text, open in large part to interpretation, which political actors read through the lens of their motives. Ideology and culture are more often the tool than the generator of politics, and that politics - diverse, difficult, and at times incomprehensible - should remain our focus.

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