Chapter 2. Islam and the Politics of Terrorism: Aspects of the British Experience

The debate about the relationship between Islam and terrorism is at a critical stage. While crass Orientalist arguments^[1] that Islam is essentially violent have been largely removed from the agenda, the attempt to construct a distinction between moderate and extremist Islam has been revealed as overly simplistic. Since 11 September 2001 (9/11) most governments have attempted to distinguish between Islam as a religion practised by millions and the tiny minority of Muslims who subscribe to an interpretation of Islam that authorises the use of violence against its enemies.^[2] However, this approach fails to engage with the complexities of Islam as a social category, which has a long and varied history.

Moreover, Islamic history is one of disputation. There is not one Islamic category, but many ‘Islams’. As a result there are trends within Islam that have an ambiguous relationship to violence and offer justifications for its use or even extol it. There is in fact an intense conflict within Islamic discourse over the issue, which since the late nineteenth century has been connected to the position of Muslims in a world that has been perceived to be dominated by colonialism and since 1945 increasingly by the ‘West’. In this discourse Muslims as a community are portrayed as marginalised and humiliated by a materialist powerful West.^[3] In this chapter I want to suggest that making the distinction between Islam and terrorism requires an active engagement in an ideological battle rather than a passive identification of a neat sociological distinction between moderates and extremists. There is a genuine terrorist threat and it is nourished by an international political current, which while it has roots in Islam, is aggressively opposed to the great contribution of Muslim civilisation to law, philosophy and the arts. Its strategy to acquire legitimacy is based thus not on the defence of this rich Islamic heritage but through an essentialist campaign against ‘the West’, which is portrayed as anti‑Muslim. The challenge, I will argue, is to engage in an ethical political campaign that eschews the West’s past stereotypes of Muslims and Islam and yet offers a robust alternative to the legitimisation of violence. Policy‑makers in Britain, however, have constructed a model of the issue that is highly problematic.