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54April 2015
their lifestyles with the norms of their
societies, albeit they may be highly criti-
cal of the foreign and domestic policies
of their governments.
Muslims may embrace the uniquely
dangerous doctrine of Jihad the place
of which in Islam is mysterious to
heathens.
Care is needed as the term Jihad for
some refers to spiritual as well as mil-
itary conflict and where military it
implies defence not attack. Nevertheless
again, some of those hostile to Islamists
have cynically used the term to their
advantage.
There are also various views as to
whether Sunnis and Shias differ on the
concept. In Shia Islam, Jihad is one of the
ten Practices of the Religion, (though not
one of the Angel-Gabriel-revealed man-
datory Five Pillars).
With the Islamic revival in the
eighteenth century a fundamentalist
movement preaching Jihad was perpe-
trated by the Wahhabi movement which
spread across the Arabian peninsula
starting in the th century, empha-
sising Jihad as armed struggle. Wars
against Western colonial forces were
often declared Jihad. For example the
Mahdi in the Sudan declared Jihad
against the British and the Egyptians
in .
In the twentieth century, one of
the first Islamist groups, the Muslim
Brotherhood, emphasised physical
struggle and martyrdom in its credo:
“God is our objective; the Quran is our
constitution; the Prophet is our leader;
struggle (Jihad) is our way; and death
for the sake of God is the highest of our
aspirations”.
The group called for Jihad against the
new Jewish state of Israel in the s,
T
HE Charlie Hebdo attacks
by individuals purporting to
represent Islam once again
linked that religion to violent
behaviour anathema to West-
ern, liberal values. From stoning of
adulterers to beheadings and burnings
alive of infidels, flogging bloggers and
even female genital mutilation, a pic-
ture registers of a religion stubbornly
rooted in a barbaric past, even if those
practices have little or no real justifica-
tion in Islam, and are abhorrent to most
Muslims.
What we generalise as ‘Islam’ is a con-
stantly evolving and diverse set of beliefs
influenced by the varying settings of
its over one billion global adherents. A
range of interpretations of Islam can be
found, many of course self-consciously
malign. Nevertheless most Muslims in
the West find little difficulty reconciling
Driven like much colonisers’ violence by culture and religion. By Frank Armstrong
and Michael Smith
‘Islamist’ violence
CULTURE Islam
ISIS beheading, 2015
April 2015 55
and its Palestinian branch, Hamas,
called for Jihad against Israel when the
First Intifada started in .
In the s the Muslim Brother-
hood cleric Abdullah Azzam, sometimes
called ‘the father of the modern global
Jihad’, opened the possibility of imme-
diate Jihad against unbelievers. Azzam
issued a fatwa calling for Jihad against
the Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. In
, al-Qaeda announced its Jihad to
expel foreign troops and interests from
what they considered Islamic lands.
Osama Bin Laden issued a Fatwa (com-
pulsory religious edict), calling for war
against the US and its allies.
Before rising to indignation about this
it is instructive to recall Christianity’s
history of justifying the Crusades, the
Inquisition and oppression of minori-
ties. The Bible was even used to justify
slavery before the American Civil War.
The corpora of works that constitute
both Christianity and Islam contain a
wide range of possible interpretations,
though the era and ethos of crusading
are now remote.
So what at a minimum does religion
mean for violence?
Sociologist Emile Durkheim claimed
that religions are: “a system of ideas
with which the individual represent to
themselves the society of which they
are members”. This follows Aristotle’s
dictum that: “men create the gods after
their own image”.
A contrasting view, articulated by
another sociologist, Max Weber, is that
religions of themselves generate socio-
economic conditions: most famously he
argued that the Protestant work ethic
led to modern capitalism.
This brings us to the important ques-
tion of whether religious violence is a
product of the religion itself or emanates
from the wider society.
The Christian Philosophical Anthro-
pologist, René Girard, identified a
universal tendency towards what he
termed “acquisitive mimesis”. By this
he meant that humans copy each oth-
er’s consumption (a version of monkey
see, monkey do) which naturally leads
to rivalry over scarce resources.
Unlike other animals, from quite early
in our evolution we developed a capac-
ity to employ weapons, beginning with
stone projectiles. With this capacity for
wreaking destruction early humans
found it necessary to resolve potentially
fatal conflicts brought about by compe-
tition for resources.
Girard identified the mechanism of
the scapegoat across a whole range of
cultural contexts. It serves to pacify the
violent tendencies that bedevil human
societies. Jesus Christ’s crucifixion is
an obvious example, but he found this
to be a near-universal feature of tribal
societies.
Religions play a prominent role in
scapegoating. According to Girard:
“The sacred is violence, but if religious
man worships violence it is only insofar
as the worship of violence is supposed
to bring peace; religion is entirely con-
cerned with peace, but the means it has
of bringing it about are never free of sac-
rificial violence”.
With this apparent paradox in mind
we may explore the origins of violence in
Islam in its socio-cultural context.
The harsh desert environment of post-
nomadic Saudi Arabia where literacy
was rare and violence endemic pre-
served religious practices that we in the
West consider barbarous. The discov-
ery of enormous oil reserves after World
War I thrust unimaginable wealth into
the hands of the new state, and the fun-
damentalist Wahhabi form of Islam has
been used by the ruling Al-Saud family
to legitimise its rule.
Weber’s view of religion resonates
here. The often intolerant Wahhabi
teachings emanating from Saudi Arabia
over the last decades have had a strong
and worrying influence on many of the
global Islamic community and on Al-
Qaeda and ISIS. The values of a violent,
desert society remain influential.
Reflecting on the nature of, and dif-
ferences between, global religions is
instructive. One distinguishing feature
of the monotheistic faiths of Christi-
anity, Islam and Judaism is they firmly
place man at the centre of the universe
with dominion over all life.
This anthropocentrisim drives how
they consume food - a fundamental part
of their relationship with the earth. It
allows or mandates carnivorousness.
Rene Girard observed: “Man is not
naturally a carnivore; human hunting
should not be thought of in terms of
animal predation”. He argues that ani-
mals were first domesticated for their
use in sacrifice, not for their value as
food, and believes that: “What impelled
men to hunt was the search for a recon-
ciliatory victim”. And he concludes: “The
common denominator is the collective
murder, whether attributed to animals
or men, rather than the hunted species
or various techniques employed.”
In contrast most forms of Buddhism
and other Eastern traditions see humans
as one among other animals and advo-
cate restraint on the unnecessary killing
of other animals for food.
Of course, Buddhism is not universally
pacifist. Buddhist institutions supported
Japanese militarism in their Russian war
and World War II. Buddhist monks were
involved in the killing of Muslims
in Myanmar in .
At face value prohibitions on meat-eat-
ing may seem irrelevant to inter-human
violence, but if a religion restrains all
intentional killing the culture of inter-
human violence in that society may not
develop. Prohibiting violence towards
animals may remove the need to scape-
goat other humans. We might even begin
to reverse the acquisitive mimesis that
brings humanity to the brink of self-
destruction.
We might expect to find that violence
is pervasive in meat-eating societies (ie
all those active in violence in the Middle
East and other places where Jihad and
colonialism reign) but that where reli-
gion is more central to people’s lives
there might be a greater prevalence of
sacrificial violence.
The twentieth century witnessed the
emergence of a form of politics divorced
entirely from violence. This is the great
achievement of Gandhi who guided
Indians to throw off the shackles of the
British Empire in India with non-violent
resistance.
Pacifism and vegetarianism often
go hand in hand. Leo Tolstoy was
another who recognised the need to
reverse the acquisitive streak in human
nature claiming that: “as long as there
are slaughterhouses there will be
In Shia the
focus for
Jihad is the
immediate
geography
and it can only
be carried
out under
the leader of
Shiite Islam.
Sunnis on the
other hand
will heed a
proclamation
to wage Jihad
even from an
unjust ruler
“
CULTURE Islam
US-funded
Israeli bombing
of Gaza, 2014
56April 2015
battlefields”. The cycle of violence could
begin at the dinner table.
Gandhi explicitly connected his politi-
cal philosophy with how other animals
were treated when he said: “The great-
ness of a nation and its moral progress
can be judged by the way its animals are
treated”. This moral progress we assume
involves the development of a society
where other human beings are valued
and not seen in competitive terms: a
curbing of the tendency towards acquisi-
tive mimesis.
Of course religion is not the only
driver of violence in the Middle East or
the other flash-points of violence at the
nexus of the Western and Islamic worlds.
In terms that progressives in the West
identify with more readily it is cer-
tainly the case that would-be-terrorists
observe a global environment where dis-
proportionate wealth, power and indeed
weaponry lie in the hands of Western
states whose foreign policies have often
been directed against Muslim countries.
Jihad is tailored to suit these conditions:
extreme and seemingly gratuitous vio-
lence balances the wealth and power
differential between Western powers
and Jihadists.
Many in the West affect understand-
ing and liberal stances. For example,
even Marie Harf, spokesperson for the
US State Department, proclaimed in
February: “we cannot win this war by
killing them. We cannot kill our way out
of this war. We need to go after the root
causes that leads people to join these
groups. We can help countries work at
the root causes of this – what makes
these -year-old kids pick up an AK-
instead of trying to start a business”.
Of course such rationalisation does
not provide an explanation for the
atrocities committed in the name of for
example Osama bin Laden, who hails
from one of the wealthiest families in
Saudi Arabia.
Australian conservative blogger
Andrew Bolt, a former associate editor
of the Herald Sun, disdains the very
idea of addressing “root causes” of
Islamists’ “insatiable anger”: “Islamic
State releases a video showing how
gleefully it slaughters unarmed civil-
ians and demonstrating that there is no
root cause that can be addressed that
doesn’t involve Jews and other unbeliev-
ers dying. There is nothing to talk about
with such people, and the only rational
response is to shoot them before they
shoot you”.
Irish journalist Kevin Myers sim-
plistically distinguishes followers of
Chomsky who think that evil deeds must
stem from some logical cause or griev-
ance from those of Edmund Burke who
know evil when they see it:
“On the one hand, there were the
Chomskyites, henceforth the chumps,
who felt that there was an underlying
‘reason’ for /, which had been ‘cre-
ated’ by US policies. And there were
the others, the Burkians, who felt that
/ represented yet another occasion
when evil had captured the souls of
men”. He also believes that “within, it
seems, all ‘moderate’ Muslim commu-
nities are some fundamentalists who
hold the local franchise for the global
grievance of Islam. And no one really
knows what such Islamic fundamental-
ists want, because the demands change
according to whatever market the local
Islamic franchisee is operating in. ...
somewhere inside the greater Islamic
mind is an absurd sense of victimhood:
and where there is no local grievance,
why then there is always ‘Palestine’, as
if those few disputed acres in the vast
Islamic landmass of Afro-Asia merited
the unanimous and indignant global
furies of all Muslims”. Of course this
logic fails to explain why the sense of
victimhood is absurd.
Effectively corroborating the Myers’
line, Philip Bobbitt, a law professor and
nephew of President Lyndon Johnson
wonders why, if terrorism is rooted in
events-driven Muslim grievances about
western support for Israel or engage-
ment in Afghanistan and Iraq, so few of
those apprehended in the West for ter-
rorist crimes are Palestinians, Afghans
or Iraqis.
The reaction may not be sophisticated
at all. For example, a report from
the International Council on Security
and Development showed that per-
cent of the Afghanis surveyed had never
heard of /. It also showed that four in
Afghans believed the US was on their
soil in order to “destroy Islam or occupy
Afghanistan”. The survey admittedly
only canvassed men, and relied prima-
rily on respondents from Helmand and
Kandahar, the two most war-torn prov-
inces in the country.
Nevertheless lack of sophistication is
not needed in order to drive anti-colo-
nialism or even anti-Zionism. There is
coloniser-imposed injustice, enough to
enrage a saint. The illegality of much of
Israel’s settlement, the dubious ethics of
the secret Sykes-Picot agreement
which divided up spheres of influence in
the Middle East among western colonis-
ers and the Balfour Declaration ()
transmitted from the British foreign
secretary to Baron Rothschild impos-
ing a new Israeli state in Palestine. And
the barbarity of escapades like Israel’s
assault last year on Gaza, justify anger
and, for any thinking from a rational
person inevitable rage.
There are cultural and religious rea-
sons, rational and irrational motivations,
driving antipathy to Western adven-
tures in the Islamist world. Violence
characterises much of contemporary
‘civilisation’ not just the Middle East or
Jihadists. Beyond containment there are
better ways to defuse violence and even
some ethoses and religions, like Vegan-
ism, Buddhism and Humanism that
enshrine them better than others. •
In 1996,
al-Qaeda
announced its
Jihad to expel
foreign troops
and interests
from what they
considered
Islamic lands
“
CULTURE Islam
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April 2015 57
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