After the London Attack: We Need to Talk About Islamism

Of course we need to condemn every form of racist backlash and seek unity between Muslims and non-Muslims against extremism of all kinds. And much of the response, beginning with those truly heroic women who risked their lives to protect that young man’s body from further mutilation, has shown the best of us, just as our reaction to 7/7 did. But it isn’t enough. We need to discuss the elephant in the room – the radical and sectarian, often violent, and sometimes fascistic political ideology and global movement of Islamism.

Why? Because we are fighting against a religiously inspired ideology, jihadism, but we don’t want to talk about religion. There are many reasons for our reticence but here are three for starters: two are unattractive, while one is laudable, if misplaced.

First, we are frightened to talk freely.

Not, hitherto, because we fear that our throats will be slit, although since the Rushdie Affair that fear has produced much artistic self-censorship, as the artist Grayson Perry once had the courage to admit. No, intellectual self-censorship begins elsewhere, in the fear of losing one’s place in the warmth of the tribe, huddled together by the fire. We fear that if we look too closely or think too clearly, or talk too much about the problem of Islamism, and the connections as well as the separations between it and Islam, then we will be sent into the cold – shunned by colleagues, not invited to this dinner party, or that conference. We may even face social death itself by being called “Islamophobic”. The university today is a stultifyingly conformist institution, reminiscent of those old Soviet-era “cultural associations”. The standard version, the line, is policed rigorously. And the only accredited language in which people are allowed to speak is full of well-rehearsed evasions and apologias and exculpatory frameworks.

Second, we are ignorant of what to talk about.

In our intellectual culture religion is a mystery. That’s why the commentators mostly refuse to believe religion, any religion, can have anything to do with terrorism. So they either translate terrorists screaming “Allahu Akbar!” into something they can understand – economics, foreign policy, identity – or just change the subject altogether, writing instead (not as well) about the dangers of a racist backlash, the threat of the loss of civil liberties, and so on.

In the last 24 hours I’ve read again and again about the need not to talk about Islam. “All religions are the same,” say the commentators and politicians. Well, are they? Is anything? Yes and no. Try sentences that begin “all political parties are…” Or “all governments are…” “All sports are…” “All art is…” In every case you can say some sensible things in the rest of the sentence but you have walled yourself from most things, and most of the things that matter most, about any particular political party, government, sport, or art form. The fact is that there are all sorts of differences between religions and they matter. For example: the character and reception of the founding revelation, not least whether it is understood as mediated or not (and therefore open to reform or not). Or the content of the revelation, including the very understanding of God. Other differences include the relation to other religions, to the secular world, to human-made power and law (e.g. “Rome”). Does the religion view the very idea of a separate political realm as a kind of impiety, an affront to God? Was the prophet his own Constantine or not? The answers diverge and radically. Religions, in other words, can’t just be analysed as barely distinguishable forms of the same impulse, as if we were all in an A Level Religion class. They have radically specific contents, unique and conditioning histories, and those differences matter profoundly when they bump up against the secular world.

Third, we want to protect a vulnerable minority.

The last reason for our reticence about talking about Islam and Islamism is the best one. We are frightened of giving comfort to those who would exploit the actions of radical Islamists to attack ordinary Muslims. We worry that if we link this terrorist murder to big words like Islam and Islamism then we will unleash reaction, encourage the EDL and BNP (British National Party), and the victims will be ordinary Muslims. And that is a good impulse, which should condition how we talk about Islam and Islamism. But it should no longer determine whether we talk about Islam and Islamism. It’s all too late for that.

Muslims like the Canadian writer Irshad Manji will tell us that the people who would benefit most from a free-wheeling conversation would be ordinary Muslims who are perplexed by our society’s pussy-footing indulgence of the extremism which has taken root in some places and would feel licensed to speak out. We can defend religious freedom and defend Muslim reformers, but what we can’t do anymore is just change the subject.

Anyway, it’s too late, for another reason. One of the fruits of globalisation is that the walls separating what concerns “us” from what concerns “them” have tumbled down. We are all “us”, now. The global is local. Woolwich made plain that the fear and the violence and the grieving that has spilled over from what the Muslim political scientist Bassam Tibi calls “Islam’s predicament with modernity” are now also ours to bear, and they will borne also by our children and our grandchildren. No more changing the subject.

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Alan Johnson is the Editor of Fathom: for a deeper understanding of Israel and the region and Senior Research Fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM). A professor of democratic theory and practice, he is an editorial board member of Dissent magazine, and a Senior Research Associate at The Foreign Policy Centre. The Telegraph