Nawaz:
To win against the jihadists, isolate them, undercut their appeal to Muslims and avoid a “clash of civilizations.”
Islam
is a religion, and like any other faith, it is internally diverse. Islamism, by
contrast, is the desire to impose a single version of Islam on an entire
society. Islamism is not Islam, but it is an offshoot of Islam. It is Muslim
theocracy.
In much
the same way, jihad is a traditional Muslim idea connoting struggle—sometimes a
personal spiritual struggle, sometimes a struggle against an external enemy.
Jihadism, however, is something else entirely: It is the doctrine of using
force to spread Islamism.
President
Barack Obama and many liberal-minded commentators have been hesitant to call
this Islamist ideology by its proper name. They seem to fear that both Muslim
communities and the religiously intolerant will hear the word “Islam” and
simply assume that all Muslims are being held responsible for the excesses of
the jihadist few.
I call
this the Voldemort effect, after the villain in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter
books. Many well-meaning people in Ms. Rowling’s fictional world are so
petrified of Voldemort’s evil that they do two things: They refuse to call
Voldemort by name, instead referring to “He Who Must Not Be Named,” and they
deny that he exists in the first place. Such dread only increases public
hysteria, thus magnifying the appeal of Voldemort’s power.
The
same hysteria about Islamism is unfolding before our eyes. But no strategy
intended to defeat Islamism can succeed if Islamism itself and its violent
expression in jihadism are not first named, isolated and understood. It is as
disingenuous to argue that Islamic State is entirely divorced from Islam as it
is to assert that it is synonymous with Islam. Islamic State does indeed have
something to do with Islam—not nothing, not everything, but something. That
something is the way in which all Islamists justify their arguments using
Islamic scripture and seek to recruit from Muslims.
The
urgency of making these distinctions should be apparent to everyone. The
attacks seem to be coming in swift succession now: Istanbul, Sinai, Beirut,
Paris, San Bernardino, London. What is the strategy behind this Islamic
State-inspired violence? Jihadists of all bents seek to create discord, pitting
Muslims against non-Muslims in the West and Sunni Muslims against Shiite
Muslims in the East. The theocratic ideology of Islamism thrives on division,
polarization and claims of Muslim victimhood.
Islamic
State’s leaders insist that the U.S. and the rest of the West are waging a
global war against all Islam and Muslims. This is obvious nonsense, but by a
combination of provocation and self-fulfilling prophecy, Islamic State is doing
everything possible to make it a reality—helped along, alas, by Donald Trump’s
call this week “for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the
United States.” Islamic State’s goal is to leave Sunni Muslims—in Europe,
America and the Middle East—with no refuge except the terrorist group’s own
self-declared caliphate in the lawless regions of Syria and Iraq.
As
Islamic State has outlined in its own magazine Dabiq, it aims to eliminate what it calls the “gray zone,” the
middle ground between Islamist theocrats and anti-Muslim bigots, so that
everyone is forced to pick sides. In this way, Islamic State hopes to turn
non-Muslims against Muslims and, once this process is complete—that is, once we
all begin to see each other primarily through narrow religious lenses—to set
off a global religious war.
I bear
some personal responsibility for this effort to eliminate the gray zone, to
promote the idea that Muslims have no home in the West. As a young Muslim
growing up in the U.K., I spent more than a decade as one of the leaders of a
global Islamist group that advocated the return of a caliphate, though not
through terrorism. My activities eventually led me to Egypt, where at 24 I was
jailed as a political prisoner and sentenced to five years in Mazra Tora
prison.
Only in
jail, after Amnesty International adopted my case, did I dedicate myself to
rereading, reviewing and reappraising my every thought. As I deradicalized
myself over the next five years, I eventually concluded that Islam, my faith,
was being exploited for a totalitarian political project and must be reclaimed
from the theocrats. I have spent the past eight years doing just that through a
counterextremism organization that I co-founded.
This
struggle can be won, but it will not be easy. Over the past few years, in
survey after survey, attitudes in the U.K. have reflected a worrisome trend. A
quarter of British Muslims sympathized with the Charlie Hebdo shootings in
Paris, according to a February poll by ComRes for the BBC. A 2008 YouGov poll
found that a third of Muslim students believe that killing for religion can be
justified, and 40% want the introduction of Shariah as law in the U.K. Another
poll, conducted in 2007 by Populus, reported that 36% of young British Muslims
thought apostates should be “punished by death.”
It
should come as no surprise that, from this milieu, up to 1,000 British Muslims
have joined Islamic State, which is more than have joined the British Army
reserves.
The
actual strength of Islamic State’s army probably lies somewhere between the
CIA’s estimate of about 32,000 and Kurdish estimates of some 200,000. According
to the Soufan Group, a New York-based private intelligence firm, the number of
foreigners streaming into Syria and Iraq to join Islamic State and other Islamist
groups has doubled over the past 18 months, despite the West’s best efforts,
and may now be as high as 31,000.
The
latest polling by Pew of 11 countries with large Muslim populations found
widespread disdain for Islamic State—but also troubling levels of support. Only
28% in Pakistan disapproved of the group, and 62% offered no opinion. In
Nigeria, 14% of respondents had a favorable view of Islamic State; in Malaysia
and Senegal, it was 11%; in Turkey, it was 8%; in the Palestinian territories,
it was 6%. There is, in short, nothing like majority support for Islamic State
among the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims, but such numbers are still worrisome.
After
the Paris attacks, Pope Francis declared that we are in the midst of a piecemeal World War III. It is more accurate to say that we face a global
jihadist insurgency. Islamic State is the latest incarnation of this
insurgency, but it has been brewing for decades, spurred on by Islamist social
movements that have filled the void left by the shortcomings of all too many
Muslim-majority governments. Characterizing Islamic State as part of an
insurgency is important because, as Vietnam taught us the hard way, defeating
an insurgency is different from winning a conventional war.
Counterinsurgency
rests on the assumption that the enemy has significant support in the
communities from which it recruits. The aim of counterinsurgency strategy is to
deny the enemy any propaganda victories that can further fuel its recruitment.
Insurgents must be isolated from their targeted host communities. This requires
a combination of psychological, physical and economic warfare, all with the aim
of undermining the insurgents’ ideological, operational and financial
capabilities.
The
most critical part of such a strategy must be messaging. In fighting Islamic
State, we must avoid the language that it uses to promote its worldview and, at
the same time, offer compelling alternative narratives. Only in this way can we
deny today’s Islamists and jihadists their ability to appeal to Muslim
audiences.
In this
effort, Muslims who deny that Islamist extremism is a real problem are as
counterproductive as Mr. Trump and his populist fear-mongering. Both serve to
increase the religious polarization and mistrust that the extremists relish.
Islamic State is out to provoke a “clash of civilizations.” We should not
oblige them.
What is
at stake in these failures and evasions? Absent an accurate language that
explains the difference between Islamist ideologues and the majority of
non-Islamist Muslims, anxious non-Muslims in the West can be more easily
alarmed by blaring media coverage and attention-seeking politicians. Some will
simply assume that the problem is Islam itself and all Muslims per se, which
helps to explain the rise of xenophobic politics in both Europe and the U.S.
As for
Muslim communities themselves, if they hold that Islamism has “nothing to do
with Islam,” then there is nothing to discuss, which is plainly not the case.
This position undermines brave Islamic reform theologians such as Britain’s
Usama Hasan, Pakistan’s Javed Ahmad Ghamidi and America’s Abdullahi Ahmed
An-Na’im, who are urgently trying to lay the foundations of a theology that
rejects Islamism and promotes freedom of speech and gender rights—thereby
undermining the insurgents’ message.
This
denialist position also betrays the many besieged ex-Muslim voices—such as the
Pakistani-Canadian writer Ali A. Rizvi—who struggle for the right to be fully
accepted by their own Muslim communities. These reformers all need a vocabulary
that distinguishes Islam from the politicized distortion of it peddled by
Islamists and jihadists.
Just as
one doesn’t need to be black to care about the struggle against racism and one
needn’t be gay to worry about homophobia, one needn’t be Muslim to speak out
against Muslim theocrats. Considering their founding history, Americans are
especially well placed to speak about why theocracies are never good for
humanity. They also can help Europeans deal with the challenges of creating
new, post-migration national identities.
Many of
my fellow Muslims have resisted the call to refute Islamism head-on. They ask
why they should apologize for something with which they have little or nothing
to do. But just as we Muslims expect solidarity from others against anti-Muslim
bigotry, such as Mr. Trump’s outlandish remarks, we have a duty to reciprocate
this solidarity by speaking out against the Islamists.
What
should a counterinsurgency strategy mean for the actual conduct of foreign
policy? President George W. Bush may have rushed headlong into the jihadist
snare by invading and occupying Iraq, but Mr. Obama and the international
community are now sleepwalking toward another precipice in Syria. Though it is
true that our intervention in Syria will be used by Islamic State to galvanize
more recruits, our failure to intervene has been used by them as evidence that
the world has forsaken Syrians, leaving them to face Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad’s barrel bombs alone.
My own
journey into radical groups began not when the world intervened in a foreign conflict
but when it failed to intervene in the Bosnian genocide. I opposed the U.S.
invasion of Iraq, but passivity can be just as dangerous as invasion. So long
as Islamists control the narrative among angry young Muslims, both our action
and our inaction can be used to radicalize them.
The
world is facing a global jihadist insurgency, working to advance a
well-thought-out operational strategy, fed by Islamist ideological convictions
that remain appealing to some Muslims. After Paris and San Bernardino, the
Obama administration’s policy toward Islamic State is unraveling. From likening
Islamic State to “a jayvee team” last January to saying one day before the
Paris attacks that Islamic State had been “contained,” Mr. Obama has remained
one step behind the group’s predictable rise.
A key
part of our counterinsurgency response should involve getting the Iraqi and
Syrian Kurds off the sidelines. Yes, this will be uncomfortable for our allies
in Turkey, and it will trouble Iraq’s rulers. But the Kurds have proven
themselves over and over again to be the only effective fighting force on the
ground against Islamic State.
If that
means a Kurdish state, so be it. Outside of the continuing experiment in
Tunisia in North Africa, a Kurdish state could become the only democratic,
secular Muslim-majority state in the Middle East. It could become a political
and religious beacon for the region. Our diplomacy until now has inexcusably
neglected the possibilities this presents.
Airstrikes
against Islamic State must also be supported by an international ground force,
a few thousand in number, and fronted by Sunni Arabs. These should be backed by
an international squad of special forces and support staff, all of whom are
focused on dislodging Islamic State from its strongholds of Mosul and Raqqa. As
for the question of Mr. Assad, as part of a deal with Russia and Iran, the
Syrian regime should be kept intact, but Mr. Assad must go.
Such
actions may weaken Islamic State’s operational capacity but will not defeat its
ideological appeal. The Islamist extremism that first inspired al Qaeda and
then Islamic State will continue to inspire others. Islamic State was not alone
in radicalizing the estimated 6,000 Europeans who have traveled to join them.
That many recruits couldn’t have emerged from a vacuum. Islamic State
propaganda is good, but not that good.
In
fact, decades of Islamist propaganda had already primed these young Muslims to
yearn for a theocracy. The same YouGov survey I cited above found that 33% of
young British Muslims expressed a desire to see the resurrection of a
world-wide caliphate. Islamic State has simply plucked the low-hanging fruit
seeded long ago by other Islamist groups operating across Europe.
Reversing
this campaign will require decades of work by Muslims and non-Muslims alike,
but the endgame must be to render the ideology of Islamism intellectually and
socially obsolete.
Mr. Nawaz is the founding chairman of Quilliam,
a London-based counterextremism organization, and the author of “Radical: My
Journey Out of Islamist Extremism.”
