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In his autobiography, the much-maligned Tony Blair wrote that after 9/11 he thought the problem was only with a small number of crazies who had nothing to do with real Islam. But over time he came to understand that he was mistaken. He realised that the terrorist threat had the deepest roots in the most profound crisis of the Islamic world, which was in turn producing the most terrible fruits in ours.
And since 9/11 (before actually, but we were not looking) it has only taken a cursory glance at the daily news from the Islamic world, story after story, relentless and appalling, to confirm Blair's argument; each new and shocking low has proven to be only another bloody station on the way to behaviour that has frankly departed from any human norms.
Yet the 'small number of crazies' idea just will not die. 'There are a handful of wicked fanatics against the rest of us,' argued Jonathan Freedland, in an otherwise astute piece of writing in the Guardian after the murder last week of 17 people in Paris.
I can see how Jonathan's story about Paris is reassuring. The problem is, it isn't true. We are not dealing with a 'handful of fanatics' trying to latch on to a religion and culture to which they are wholly alien. Would that life was that simple. Sadly, it isn't. Islamist terrorists have emerged from, and are one expression of, what the Muslim German scholar Bassam Tibi has called the Islamic world's 'civilisational predicament with modernity.' He means the chronic failure of the Islamic world to come to terms with the defining features of the modern world: secularism, pluralism, and human rights, and a failure to embrace the religious reform and cultural change that would resolve that predicament.
Of course we must take our distance from every kind of bigoted voice. But the veil of euphemism that hangs over the entire debate about Islam in this country must be lifted. There can be no more embarrassed silence about the multiple footholds there are in Islamic sacred texts to justify terror and the rest of it; or about the long-running and murderous civil war within Islam that spilled over to the West when some Islamists, spearheaded by Bin Laden, decided to pursue the 'far enemy (i.e.: us) and – again, we have to be able to say these truths – when governments decided on a policy of mass and largely uncontrolled immigration.
This is not about a handful of fanatics but a battle of ideas
Jonathan's story about a 'handful of fanatics' stops us seeing plain that Islamism is a global ideology with powerful state sponsors, a deep well of petro-dollars, supported by a global socio-religious movement with huge resources, élan, and enough of a claim to canonical authority to make it hard to dismiss as blasphemous.
We are petrified of speaking obvious truths. When Lord Pearson recently dared to invite Muslim leaders to address – just address! – the violence in some verses of the Koran, he was condemned as a racist. And yet, as the Canadian Muslim Irshad Manji says, it is ordinary Muslims who would benefit most from a free-wheeling conversation about those verses, as they are the main victims of the Islamists.
We must be able to talk about the significance of the Islamic revelation being interpreted as unmediated and how that obstacle to reform can be overcome; about the consequences of Muhammad being his own Constantine, a warrior-prophet, for the religion and culture of Islam; and about Islam's hitherto unresolved struggle with the distinction between Church and State that underpins the modern world's notion of the sovereignty of the people and of a political space from which the clerics power is banished.
Ironically, there is much blunter truth-telling about the crisis of Islam in the Muslim world. Egypt's President Sisi made a historic speech in Cairo in December to the top religious authorities from the Awqaf Ministry (religious endowments) and Al Azhar University. No glib talk of "a few fanatics" for Sisi. "Let me say it again, we need to revolutionise our religion!" he thundered. "It's inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!" That thinking, he warned the clerics, "that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralised over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It's antagonizing the entire world!"
If Jonathan is right, we need only a police response to defeat the threat we face: arrest the handful of fanatics. If he is wrong, then policing will not be enough. Not by a long chalk. We will also need a generational battle of ideas to support Muslim reformers through thick and thin.
We should be confident about our ability to do just that. In this country, to steal the words of James Connolly, the Islamists are only strong because we are on our knees. Talk of Europe turning into 'Eurabia' is nonsense. A major report published by the Institute for Social and Economic Research in 2012 concluded that British Muslims feel more strongly about their British identities than their non-Muslim counterparts. New ways of being Muslim are emerging from the Majjid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation to Tehmina Kazi and British Muslims for Secular Democracy, from Sara Khan's increasingly important organisation Inspire to the Armed Forces Muslim Association (AFMA), and Sisters Against Violent Extremism-Women Without Borders to the hundreds of thousands of British Muslims that are engaged in a quiet revolution of integration and contribution. Drawing on equally canonical Islamic notions of Muslims as a 'middle community', these new actors are comfortable with modernity, and in time they can gather forces to end the 'predicament.'
But first we have to face reality.
When I researched the journeys taken by young British Muslims into and out of extremism, travelling the country listening to their stories, I heard again and again frustration with those, within and outside the Muslim community who were in denial. As one former extremist said to me, 'We have to accept here is a problem with extremism in the Muslim community. If we keep saying 'no, no, there isn't,' then it is just silly. If you go to an Alcoholics Anonymous club the first thing you have to declare is "I am an alcoholic." If you don't ...how are you going to fight your problem?'
