While the West’s history and current policies have played a role in the rise of Islamism, it would be an error to assume that it is the main factor in its formation or influence. The idea that the current incarnation of terrorism is mainly the result of Western policies in Afghanistan or Iraq, for example, is erroneous.^[57] The emergence of Al Qa’ida and like organisations is a political phenomenon that predates these policies. The political ideas that sustain these organisations have been in circulation for many decades and sometimes, as with the Wahabis, for centuries.^[58] The lazy politics that have laid the blame for the emergence of Islamist terrorism on ‘justified anger’ at Western policies are merely a form of Orientalist re‑inscription of Western centrality in international politics. In particular, such politics draw on the stereotype of Islam as a violent religion. It is one thing to be critical of Western policies in relation to the Middle East and quite another to kill civilians on trains and buses in London or Madrid. Furthermore, it needs to be stressed that the main victims of Islamist terrorism have been Muslims, not in Europe, but in Iraq itself. In Iraq, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians are not the result of United States or United Kingdom military action, but of the calculated decision by Al Qa’ida in Mesopotamia and by like‑minded organisations that bombing mosques, markets, hospitals, universities and other civilian targets will bring them political advantage. Yet these actions have been reconstructed as a form of ‘resistance to occupation’ not just by Islamist organisations, but also by segments of the Western left. This further complicates the delineation of the divide between ideas and violence.

Responding to Islamist terrorism involves grasping that Islamism is a major factor in international relations. Islamism has become the fastest growing movement in the Middle East. As soon as free elections took place in Iraq, Islamic‑based parties won the lion’s share of the Arab vote. As we have noted, in the past two years, Islamist political parties have won the Palestinian legislative elections and have polled well in Egypt and Bahrain. If free elections were to be held in all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa, Islamist parties would probably be the largest groups in most legislatures.^[59] Islamism and the parties themselves are composed of many trends and factions. Many are opposed to violence. Nonetheless, the categorical politics that the movement espouses create a space that too often legitimises violent acts. In this space notions of resistance to oppression, martyrdom and God’s immutable law play a key role. The politics of Islamism thus provide the space in which toleration of violence becomes acceptable. The problem for governments in their attempt to combat violent extremism is that they have to deal with not just tiny groups of radicalised individuals, but with a major political movement that is well rooted and which circulates through mosques, schools and above all the media and the internet. The battle of ideas is not therefore engaged with tiny unrepresentative groups, but rather with a broad and influential current, which takes different political colourations. It has spawned groupings that are mobilised as supporters of different centres; the Wahabi leadership in Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Sudanese Government, Hamas in Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Jamaat‑e‑Islami in South Asia. It is within these movements that the possibility of terrorism can be debated as a policy option. If, as Al‑Qaradawi suggests, the killing of Israeli civilians in Israel is justified, then perhaps it would be equally justifiable to kill Israelis abroad, or indeed, to kill supporters of Israel anywhere. It is a short step from this to argue that the suffering of the Palestinians is the result of the policies of the West and that therefore all people in the West are implicated and thus potential targets. The British Government’s attempt to focus on isolated violent extremism as a distinct phenomenon underestimates the forces that produce it.

Terrorism involves relatively few people, and, within the West, terrorist acts cause terrible suffering to their victims, but they do not threaten governments or the political system. This is not true in some parts of the Islamic world where the alliance between terrorism and powerful Islamist political organisations does pose a serious threat to the existing political regimes. Western countries and governments in the Islamic world do have a common interest in developing a coherent response to these threats.

Islamist‑based terrorism does not, however, mean that the threat we face is Islam itself.^[60] Indeed it is Islamic civilisation that is perhaps the main resource that can be mobilised against terrorism and extremism. Islamist movements were not created as a reaction to Western power, but rather a response to the perception of corruption within Islam. Nonetheless, they have become adept at using the West’s (often inept) policies opportunistically to mobilise their supporters. The old Orientalist images that portrayed Islam as backward, incapable of change, if exotic, play into the hands of the Islamists whose reverse discourse categorises Islam as a fixed tradition with stable values. Its attempt to appropriate the Prophetic period as an essentialist mimetic moment is an interesting re‑inscription of the Orientalist account. Like Orientalism, however, it deadens Islam and reduces this critical period to a reified mythic trope.^[61]

Islamic civilisation with its great contributions to theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, science, architecture and literature is itself under attack from such movements. Islamic civilisation’s great dynamism and energy is in stark contrast to the narrow restrictions of the Islamist perspective. The West and the Islamic world both have an interest in investing in a major intellectual effort to overcome the effects of colonialism and Orientalism as a contribution to restoring the critical role that Islam has played within world civilisation. The intellectual project to overcome the Orientalist prism offers more than just an end to the exclusion of Islam, as Said seductively wrote:

For the Islamic world and the West this has a special significance. It also demonstrates that colonialism and its consequences are equally problematic for the former Imperial powers as for the former colonised peoples.

The British Government, in common with most other Western powers, faced terrorism ‘in the name of Islam’ within a dominant intellectual environment connected to Orientalism. Despite this it was important to note the efforts that were made after 9/11 to avoid connecting terrorism to Islam in a crass way. However, the problem came as these governments attempted to identify the root problem of terrorism while at the same time ‘engaging’ with Muslim communities and seeking their genuine representatives. At this point, there was a relapse to an essentialist view that there was a core Islam and that terrorist extremism could be isolated as if it were a virus. The recognition within British Government documents that ‘Islamism’ and ‘Islamist terrorism’ are the threat should alert us that a political battle on an international scale is now required. Bio‑security is not a model for human security.

Marginalising the Islamist current and narrowing the intellectual space for terrorism should be the aim of this political campaign. The importance of Islamic civilisation should be its core message.