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Reflecting on the Paris attacks: The Struggle to Divide and Rule

Reflecting on the Paris attacks: The Struggle to Divide and Rule

By Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
The Church Times
http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/
January 16, 2015

Acts of terror are all about consequences. Even if these are hard to predict in full, the broad outlines can be anticipated. They can therefore help to guide our understanding and response to the horrors unleashed in Paris and the true intent of those who planned them.

Counterintuitive though it may seem at first, we may be sure that the highly negative backlash upon Muslims and Islam was fully factored in and even welcomed by those behind the attacks. This is because they want to shatter the global status quo in quest of enhanced power for themselves and their brand of Islam. Fear and suspicion create exactly the environment they desire. Provoking Western nations into actions that can feed their narrative of a West laying siege to Islam ever since the Crusades can help
too. So it was to them well worth the suffering and bloodshed along the way.

In Western countries they hope that Muslims will come under growing suspicion of harbouring terror and so feel ever more alienated in turn. More widely, a global story of faiths and civilizations in conflict is exactly what the extremists want to hear and foment, at any cost to others. Yet the cost to them of these attacks --which terrorized an entire capital and nation, while commanding the whole world's attention for three days-- was simply a few guns and bullets, together with the lives of perpetrators only
too willing to expend them. They needed no planes or complex bombs or sophisticated apparatus. So, sadly, we can expect more of such marauding raids in the times ahead, as they offer very high impact and are hard to detect and prevent. All this will fuel insecurity and the demand for ever greater surveillance measures in the West to protect (ironically) our freedom and may even lead to military action oversees.

What all this can easily obscure is that the real conflict is not one with the West but between Muslims themselves. This is ultimately all about an intra-Muslim fight for domination of the Islamic world and who defines Islam. The West is being sucked into this as a means to change the balance. If Western nations can be provoked into more interventions in the Middle East this can be used to urge all Muslims to make common cause with extremists against the infidel invaders. While, if the West holds aloof, it looks morally compromised by permitting humanitarian catastrophes and new Islamist powerbases can arise in the vacuum of failed states such as Libya and Syria.

Either way, it is possible for the Islamists to play the West's role to advantage. Against this background, the precise issue of blasphemy and sacrilege against Islam and its Prophet Mohammed was deftly chosen to frame the initial attack in Paris. It is a hugely powerful wedge issue. Freedom of belief and expression are central to the self-understanding of Western democracies, but any kind of insult to the Prophet and Islam is hard to bear for Muslims, even though few would normally resort to violence.
This sharply real conflict of values can thus be used to open a much wider doubt as to whether it is possible to be a good Muslim in the West or to share Western values in the Islamic world. Then again, specifically religious beliefs about the guarantee of entry to an immediate eternal life of blessedness, for those willing to sacrifice their lives in fighting for Islam, helps very directly in securing the ultimate kind of human weapon.

So, despite all the dynamics of seeking worldly power that ultimately drive the architects of terror, there are truly religious aspects woven in to their strategy. This makes analysis and response for the West hard to get right, given that most of our experts and policy makers tend to view religion reductively as always in the end about something else, such as poverty, identity or alienation.

The intra-Muslim dynamic also poses a difficult challenge, in that it can only be for Muslims themselves to resolve the question of who defines Islam and what being an authentic Muslim entails. This is something, which, for Sunni Islam in particular, is proving hard to do, by virtue of its diffuse and largely personal structures of authority.

There have been historic initiatives but they lack traction. Thus there was that of Jordan and the Amman Message in 2005. This was hugely important because, for the first time ever, it convened 200 representatives of all eight Islamic Schools of jurisprudence, both Sunni and Shia, and set out authoritative guidance defining who is a Muslim, the impermissibility of denouncing a fellow Muslim as apostate, and the rigorous criteria to be met if a religious ruling (fatwah) is to be of standing. Yet sadly,
this vital work passed largely unnoticed. But it is exactly this kind of groundwork for defining authentic Islam that needs to be known and understood at the grass roots level and among young people. Ignorance of it enables false interpretations of Islam to seem legitimate and allows a ruthless quest for power by Al Quaeda and the Islamic State to grow unchecked while cloaked in an Islamic guise - a fundamental error.

It is understandable that when people in the West urge moderate Muslims to "tackle the extremists", many ordinary Muslims wonder what this has to do with them: since they would never dream of attacking anyone, so why should they be held responsible somehow for those who do? Yet, the extremists are a danger to all Muslims and moderate Muslims do need to come together and help to invalidate the extremist interpretation of Islam. Most especially, this is a task that those with religious
authority in mainstream Islam must be enabled to do and be seen to do definitively, for the wider good of all.

Had it been said a month ago, that three men with guns would bring over 3 million people onto the streets of France who would have believed it? Yet this has now happened. At one level it might be held to show the power of those guns and Jihadist terror. Yet that is not the reality. Instead, this was a vast declaration of shared resolve to uphold fundamental human values and freedom and it was a contest which the terrorists lost by over a million to one. We may be sure that this was one consequence of their actions they had not foreseen -- God is great indeed.

Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff is Senior Advisor - KAICIID Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue

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