July 21 2010
At the 12th and final public hearing of the 9/11 commission on 16 June, 2004, in Washington DC, a phalanx of senior law-enforcement and intelligence officials from the US government arrived to offer their testimonies. “You’ve looked [at] and examined the lives of these people as closely as anybody … What have you found out about why these men did what they did?” asked Lee Hamilton, the former congressman and vice-chair of the commission. “What motivated them to do it?”
The answers to these questions were provided by supervisory special agent James Fitzgerald of the FBI. “I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States”, he said. “They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States.”
No mention of religion. No mention of Islam. No mention of virgins in heaven, 72 or otherwise. For the lead investigators into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, politics, not faith, was the key motivating factor. Terrorism, as even that notorious Islamist-baiter Martin Amis once conceded, “is political communication by other means”.
Curiously, Fitzgerald’s testimony was not included in the final 9/11 commission report. Nonetheless, in recent years, there has been a plethora of intelligence reports, official inquiries and academic studies which support this rather obvious if unfashionable view that the root causes of terrorism are more political than theological, more worldly than next-worldly.
In his landmark work, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, for example, US political scientist Robert Pape studied every known case of suicide terrorism between 1980 to 2005 – amounting to 315 attacks in total – before concluding that there “little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world’s religions … Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.”
So does counterterrorism need to have a religious and, in particular, an Islamic angle? Should our leading spooks and cops be dabbling in theology? In Qur’anic tafsir and the science of hadith? Does it matter if a special branch officer can’t tell a Salafi from a Sufi?
Perhaps it should. But I’ve long been opposed to government attempts to infuse counterterrorism and counterextremism programmes with so-called moderate Islamic theology – and not just because of the political drivers behind Muslim radicalisation and jihadist violence.
Why? First, it is not the business of a secular state to back one or other interpretation of Islam – or for that matter, of Judaism, Christianity or any other faith. It is for the believers to decide on the nature, origins and legitimacy of their beliefs. Governments should only enforce the law of the land and promote tolerance and dialogue.
Second, as soon as western governments anoint a particular Islamic scholar, he or she becomes tainted in eyes of ordinary Muslims; it is the kiss of death. The same applies to western backing for any of the religious sects, schools of thought or theological interpretations with which Islam is riddled. It is one thing for Muslim countries like Indonesia or Saudi Arabia to promote scholar-led, Qur’an-based deradicalisation programmes, but quite another for non-Muslim countries like the United Kingdom and the United States. It just isn’t credible. Plus, not all of the non-Muslim westerners working in the counterterrorism field have the best interests of the Islamic faith, or the Muslim world, at heart. Do you remember Cheryl Bernard’s infamous Rand Corporation report (pdf) in 2003 which urged the west to try and liberalise Islam by pitting “modernists” and “secularists” against “traditionalists” and “fundamentalists”?
Third, it reinforces the prevailing trend amongst ministers, civil servants and police officers to view Islam, and Islamic issues, purely through the prism of national security and counterterrorism. This is counter-productive, if not self-defeating, given the need for the state to have good relations with British Muslim communities, based on mutual trust, if the scourge of radicalisation and violent extremism is to be stamped out.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for improving official awareness of Islam, educating the political classes on the distinctions between Deobandis, Barelwis and the rest, promoting dialogue and discussion between Muslims and non-Muslims and having ex-prime ministers swan around the globe with copies of the Qur’an under their arms.
But it’s not the best way to beat terrorism.