Writing in the Sunday Times on Sunday 2nd August 2015
On a daily basis the world witnesses the savagery and utter lack of respect for human life that is the hallmark of jihadists. From beheadings and restrictions in Iraq to the slaughter of innocent tourists on the beaches of Tunisia, Islamic fundamentalists are an example of human nature at its very worst.
To counter it, we have increased the size and scope of our internal security architecture with some success and launched limited military activity against terror groups abroad with rather less effectiveness. Yet for most people there is little understanding about the motivation or historical background of these fanatics. If we are to understand and consequently be able to deal with the threat of Islamist terror, we have to understand some of its origins.
The current campaign of violence being waged by Islamic fundamentalists around the world is a toxic phenomenon fed by increased personal mobility, the rapid improvement in communications (particularly the internet) and a grotesquely distorted and simplified view of history.
To say the phenomenon is nothing to do with Islam is clearly untrue, as its adherents self-define by their religious beliefs. What is true to say is that these extremists represent a blasphemous interpretation of Islam that sanctions, or even encourages, the killing of citizens of all nations and religions, even those moderate and orthodox Muslims who do not agree with this radicalisation of their faith.
The prime objective of the Islamists is the establishment of a caliphate — a global Islamic state strictly governed by sharia (or, more accurately, the fundamentalists’ interpretation of Islamic law). The purpose of such a Muslim superstate is to convert the rest of the world to this particular brand of Islam, if necessary by violence.
One of the main inspirations behind contemporary extremist Islam is Sayyid Qutb, who was executed for his part in the attempted overthrow of President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt in 1966. His extreme views took fundamentalism a stage further than before by proclaiming that not only infidels but also “not sufficiently Islamic” Arab rulers should be killed.
His ideology has encouraged the terrorists to see all westerners, including innocent civilians, as combatants and therefore legitimate targets. Qutb’s views had deep ideological roots, particularly in Wahhabism, the most fundamentalist interpretation of Sunni Islam, which became the dominant form of Islam in Arabia. In the course of the 19th and the 20th centuries, the Arabian peninsula was almost entirely cleared of non-Wahhabi Muslims with that doctrine supplanting what had been traditional respect for the so-called “people of the book” — Jews and Christians. Jihad was declared against them, resulting in their expulsion.
The main perpetrators of anti-American and anti-western jihad today are the radical Wahhabi-Salafi sects and their 20th-century mutations: the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1928 by an Egyptian, Hassan al-Banna), Jamaat-e-Islami (started by Abul Ala Maududi in British India in 1941), al-Qaeda and its affiliates and, more recently, Isis. What they have in common is that they took an essential element of their faith and twisted it into a warrant for destroying the norms and practices of their own society and then for exporting it worldwide. Their heretical view allows them to justify almost any action however grotesque, barbaric and destructive.
As I set out in my book, Rising Tides, what makes Wahhabism distinct is that it has launched a global challenge to mainstream Islam. Fundamentalists begin by defining themselves as different from (and better than) their co-religionists, who are labelled unbelievers and thereby targeted for conversion or death.
They then look outwards and divide the world into two — the land of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and the land of war (Dar al-Harb), which ultimately, of course, needs to be converted and subjugated or destroyed.
Today such groups have a growing global presence. Not only do they unflinchingly attempt to subvert and destroy moderate Muslim states, but they have also become adept at using the legal systems and liberal sensitivities of the West to give themselves maximum room to manoeuvre.
It has been said that western legal systems fail to see that for terrorists, first comes the jihad of the tongue, then that of the purse and finally that of the sword, which is supreme.
We need to counter all three aspects. We must use our military might to crush Isis. We must encourage prosperity and pluralism to diminish the reservoir of potential jihadists. But most of all we must recognise the scale of the ideological battle and recognise that this is a competition for hearts and minds, a conflict of values and ideologies.
No less than in the Cold War against Soviet communism, we must bring every tool at our disposal to the task — including a reawakening of our lost skills for propaganda.
Above all, we must be clear about the defence and promotion of our own values. For too long we have wallowed in the mire of moral relativism. We need to stop talking about our values as being different from the alternatives and start talking about them being better. It is better to treat women as equal citizens, better to have religious tolerance, better to have independent justice and free markets. They are what have made us free.