RELIGION-BRITAIN: In the Name of Islam

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Nov 22 2002 (IPS) - Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic terrorists, militant Islamists…the very language used to describe political violence with Islam links is becoming contentious. The British government has now set out to find alternatives.

"We need a new vocabulary to discuss the terrorism of Al Qaeda," minister in the Foreign Office Mike O’Brien told a meeting on ‘Militant Islam in Asia: The Challenges’ in London Thursday. The minister did not suggest alternative language. But it was immediately obvious that agreed alternatives will not be easy to find, just as there is considerable disagreement on present language.

Critics immediately pointed out that any new language could also divert attention from the heart of the problem.

There is a need to find new language because "violence and terrorism are not solely Islamic phenomena" but there is also a need to "address the fact that some terrorists dress their violence up in that religion," O’Brien said at the meeting organised by the independent Asia Pacific Foundation at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies (RUSI). "All of us, Muslims and non-Muslims, need to find a way of getting these differences across."

Present language suggests that militancy is integral to Islam, but new language can help separate the two, O’Brien suggested. "And when we consider the issue of suicide bombers, remember the Kamikaze were not Muslim, the Freetown suicide cult claimed to be Christian, as did the (American religious movement) Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993," he said. "Modern suicide terrorism arguably originated among the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka – Hindus."

A new language that ends the overlap of Islam and militancy would also help win Muslim support to fight terrorism because "confronting this violent extremism is a job for all of us, together: Muslims and non-Muslims," O’Brien said.

O’Brien dug up the example of Muslims who fought off the Kharijites, which he called an Al Qaeda soon after the days of Prophet Mohammed.

Literally meaning ‘those who go out’, the Kharijites are an Islamic religious group that began as an ultraconservative religious and political movement in 7th-century Syria and spread to much of the Muslim world. It is said to survive in a more moderate form mainly in North Africa.

"The Kharijites assassinated the fourth Caliph Ali, the Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law," O’Brien said. "The Kharijites were politically extremist, intolerant of others, living on the outside of civilisation, using terrorism against their enemies and regarded as heretics by the vast majority of Muslims.

"They were murderers on a large scale for political objectives, claiming Islam as their cause. The similarities with modern Al Qaeda are striking. Both groups exist on the fringes of Islam, misappropriating and misrepresenting its doctrine and bending it to the cause of violence. The Kharijites had to be isolated and defeated in order to allow mainstream Islam to survive. So too today must Al Qaeda be isolated and defeated."

But the distance between the minister’s aims and other perceptions surfaced soon in the face of difficulties posed by Paul Swallow, the Detective Chief Superintendent of New Scotland Yard (the headquarters of the London Metropolitan police), with charge for countering terrorism. Terrorism is a "relatively recent phenomenon, and it is enormously difficult to define," he said. He pointed out that 103 different definitions of terrorism in use in legal documents have been noted since the 1930s.

Swallow made no reference to anything like "Islamic" terrorism, but New Scotland Yard’s new intelligence efforts are all focussed on Islamic groups and on infiltration of potentially disruptive Muslim youth groups, senior officials say. The focus is on Islamic groups, even if New Scotland Yard does not bring Islam into its vocabulary.

But there is such a thing as Islamic terrorism, and it cannot be separated from Islam, said Xavier Raufer, Research Director at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Paris. The militancy of "Islamic fanatics" cannot be understood if the language to describe them is separated from Islamic links.

"Identifying and understanding the rationale and inner logic of the Islamic radicals, comprehending the core of their aims and motivations is an absolute necessity if you want to figure out, early enough, their choice of tactics and targets," he said at the meeting.

To collect information on Osama bin Laden, on his financial resources and his organisational skills and methods is not enough, he said. "And as a vision, reflexes, come from the subtle interaction of an individual psychology with a very specific culture, they cannot be easily programmed, neither captured and wrapped up in a computer’s hard disk."

Raufer says all the Islamic fanatics he has met are "absolute literalists, obsessed by the Koran’s literal meaning, by the Prophet’s actual deeds." He said 90 per cent of their exchanges that have been monitored are about what is "licit or illicit" in the Koran. Their actions cannot be understood except through the Islamic path, he said.

These differences of view on the language of terrorism arose in one morning at one meeting. The Foreign Office in London has a long way to go before it can find a language and a view that can be agreed globally.

RELIGION-BRITAIN: In the Name of Islam

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Nov 22 2002 (IPS) - Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic terrorists, militant Islamists…the very language used to describe political violence with Islam links is becoming contentious. The British government has now set out to find alternatives.
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