Civitas Blog

It is, firstly, inadequate to dismiss suicide bombers by pretending they can’t be dignified with being called anything other than psychopaths. Psychopaths don’t receive a heroes’ welcome, but thousands of people attended the funeral in of Shehzad Tanweer Pakistan, one of the ‘martyrs’ who blew themselves up on July 7.

Secondly, and connectedly, it’s dishonest to talk in terms of the incompatibility of Islam and violence (The Guardian line, for instance, of publicly endorsing the views of Hitzb-ut-Tahrir by employing one of their number as a commentator) since the defence of suicide bombing is widespread. The radicalisation of mainstream Islam, perhaps since the spread of Wahabism, and the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood, certainly since the Iranian Revolution, is more pervasive than people like to think. This was recently attested when Muslim Weekly, Britain’s biggest selling Muslim newspaper, published Abid Ullah Jan’s, ‘Islam, Faith and Power’ on July 8. The editors clearly knew his views would be well received – including his defence of warfare, jihad, for the expansion of an Islamic state across the world, subject to the kind of severe shari’a law enforced in Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Thirdly, however, on the contrary, it is wrong to treat this as a war. Or rather, it is possible to prevent this becoming a war. Much as evangelicals (the kind who read the metaphor of the armour of God at the end of Ephesians in literal terms) and neocons (Mark Steyn’s article in The Spectator this week concludes, ‘If it’s a war, you can win it. Anything less is unlikely to end in victory.’) are keen on their gung-ho adrenaline, it will only make things worse to react as if this is a war of simple opposites, a clash of civilisations. And this isn’t just because polarisation plays into the terrorists’ hands.

But if it looks like a war of sorts, why shouldn’t we define it as all out war and react accordingly? Quite apart from the fact that the Iraq war should remind us that effects (it obviously wasn’t the beginning of suicide bombing) can also become causes (it has been a recruiting sergeant), making worse what’s already bad, a war forces people who would otherwise intelligently mediate to take sides. After the furore in The Sun about Tariq Ramadan, the supposedly ‘extremist’ cleric, it now turns out that he's an important moderate. On the Today programme last week he categorically condemned all forms of suicide bombing anywhere in the world, including Palestine, which is further than the Muslim Council of Britain will go. On Sunday he rightly observed that targeting people like him would convince other moderates of the intolerance of the West. Similarly, we need to listen to the likes of Prince Hassan of Jordan (who says in The Spectator this week that ‘[w]e must acknowledge that the terrorists are products of Islamic history. Only by recognising this brutal fact will we realise that the fight against terrorism is also an internal Muslim struggle’). But if the battle lines get drawn, important debates will go by the wayside. Don’t be fooled: we are in this for the long haul. But it is a struggle, not a war.