Clearly Islam is not incidental to the Islamic extremism of the perpetrators. It is not like blaming coffee because they all imbibed it. The jihadists make it explicit that they act in the name of Allah. They almost always invoke Allah’s name at the scene of the mass murder. They give their life in the professed conviction that they will be rewarded for doing Allah’s will. Nobody can be left in any doubt that the atrocities are carried out by Muslims in the name of Islam against everything the culprits regard as un-Islamic, which includes Christianity, Western culture, people in the wrong Islamic denomination, and those in the right denomination who aren’t Islamic enough.
The all-consuming question must be whether their religion is to blame for these crimes against humanity. I’m no expert on the socio-political backdrop for Islamic grievances, but I’m prepared to accept that Muslims have suffered much injustice in living memory, just as Jews have. And just as many continue to suffer in the US for the colour of their skin. It should be no surprise if some harbour hatred, as counterproductive as that is, and want to punish the perceived enemy. So that question boils down to whether Islam is the critical ingredient that turns hatred born of justifiable grievance, into monstrous attacks on civilization itself.
My answer is, “nearly right”. I don’t know if there is something singular to Islam that is more likely than other religions to cause grotesque hatred, likely to boil over into extreme violence. But one thing I am sure of: being religious itself is a significant risk factor in turning animosity into violent fanaticism.
Hold on, you say. Why then don’t we see atrocities committed by Jews? The answer can be found in Amnesty International’s 2016/17 report on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). It begins:
Israeli forces unlawfully killed Palestinian civilians, including children, in both Israel and the OPT, and detained thousands of Palestinians from the OPT who opposed Israel’s continuing military occupation, holding hundreds in administrative detention. Torture and other ill-treatment of detainees remained rife and was committed with impunity.
That’s right, the answer is that Jewish Israelis are regularly performing acts that in Northern Europe we find barbaric. And critically, it is religion that enables these outrages to be rationalized. Religion can act as a powerful catalyst to turn people who perceive injustice into hateful monsters.
Law-abiding Muslims and non-Muslims alike repeat ad-nauseam that the jihadists are not following Islam, but a distorted version of it. Well what do you expect? You teach people from birth that they don’t need to think rationally, but simply have faith in their beliefs. That they can’t go wrong if they believe in their God. That God is on their side. All religions teach young people these things. It is no surprise that some believers end up thinking that their faith justifies anything they do. It isn’t Islam that is the problem – it is religion in general. If there really is a sense in which Islamic adherents are more likely to become radicalized, then no doubt it is because they get indoctrinated more thoroughly in the idea of irrational belief. I don’t know if that is cultural or inherent in the faith.
It follows that the problem isn’t really which specific religious nonsense people believe, just that they get taught to believe. Nevertheless, I want to address another oft-repeated claim. Muslims often assert that jihadist’s actions are contrary to the Koran. The truth is that no major religions follow their holy book. The Christian Bible is an embarrassment to Protestants. They hardly read it at all, and are spoon-fed a very small carefully selected corpus of acceptable texts consistent with their modern reinterpretation. Jews don’t even try to claim the Torah as inviable, but base doctrine partly on religious philosophy. Catholics believe the Church if what it says is at odds with the Bible, as with the second of the Ten Commandments. Much Islamic practice is based in teaching and culture, not in the Koran. Just because someone does something contrary to the Koran, or fails to do something it prescribes, hardly makes them un-Islamic. There wouldn’t be many Muslims left by that filter.
It does seem as though being religious predisposes people to accept anything no matter how contrary to the evidence in front their eyes. Last night’s assault against peaceful innocent Muslims was absolutely appalling. The attack was declared a terrorist incident within eight minutes of the first emergency call and all the reports on BBC TV and on their website describe it as such. Yet I saw interviews with local Muslims complaining that the media coverage had downplayed the events and failed to call it terrorism. It is almost as though they wanted to believe that they were being unfairly treated by the establishment, and the truth wasn’t going to get in the way of that desire. Just like religious beliefs.
Let’s talk about Islamophobia. One bee in my bonnet is gender inequality. People often point to the restrictive way Muslim women are treated within UK communities compared to the relative freedom enjoyed by other women. It does anger me. But is Islam any more culpable than other religions? Hardly! The other major religions have been just as bad, and continue to practise and espouse inequality. Women’s limited emancipation in the UK has been opposed at every turn by the established Church and is still resisted by many devotees. All the gains have been made through a secular liberal consensus. The reason many Muslim women are yet to benefit is cultural. Most UK Muslim communities are relatively new to the country. Census data shows their population increasing fiftyfold in fifty years, and they come from cultures that have seen little change in the position of women. It isn’t acceptable, but blaming Islam lacks perspective.
Incidentally, I often hear Muslims claiming that Muslim women are treated equally. I could just repeat what I said earlier about religion predisposing people to nonsense, but let me give just one example. If you heard about a group of people hanging around after celebrating Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, you would be very surprised if they were all men. But as far as I could make out, there were no women hanging around when Muslims were viciously mown down in London after evening prayers at the end of their Ramadan fast. None of the people I saw in any of the reports were Muslim women, neither during the attack nor afterwards. None of the Muslims interviewed near the scene was a woman. None of the community leaders nor representatives interviewed later were women. Even worse, we are so inured to the invisibility of Muslim women that we don’t notice it and nobody bothers to mention it.
Here is another worrying aspect. We are often told there is no significant support for jihadist extremism within Muslim communities. That although the perpetrators of the awful acts do come from these communities, extremism has no foothold. We want to believe it, because we hope that people are basically decent. We are also told that although some of the terrorists were reported to the authorities by their own communities, the intelligence could not be processed because of the sheer volume of people reported. I’m sorry, but those two things don’t add up. Either the security services are telling porkies, or there is significant support for holy war.
In the US it is a constitutional right to believe your own brand of unjustifiable gibberish. Surely humanity can move away from that. Can’t we start by agreeing to ban religious indoctrinate of children and allow people to take up religion as adults if they want?