The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  Clever use of the West’s soft power could tilt the balance.

  This struggle for Muslim hearts and minds should be decided by Muslims arguing among themselves, but we non-Muslims undoubtedly shape the context—and control many of the media—in which it is conducted.84

  Speaking at the launch of a new antiextremist think tank in London in 2008, Garton Ash said he hoped Islamism could be undermined in the same way that communism was with the publication of The God That Failed in the 1950s.85 As we shall see in later chapters, the belief that huge swathes of Muslim populations were “not yet fanatical”—supposedly on the verge of becoming extremists—fed programs of mass surveillance reminiscent of the operations of the East German Stasi that Garton Ash had famously documented.

  In France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, and Germany the search was on for suitably moderate Muslim leaders who were both credible within Muslim communities and reliably loyal to Western states. If, as the reformists argued, the problem of extremism lay in a misreading of Islam’s core teachings, then a state-sponsored Islamic leadership could play an important role in promoting the correct way to interpret theological terms like “jihad” and “shari’a.” To enable such a leadership to emerge, a form of multicultural recognition was granted to new religious identities rather than just the ethnic identities that had been central to earlier multicultural policies. The development of this “multi-faith-ism” had already begun in a piecemeal fashion in some contexts, but now its creation was embarked upon more systematically. Paradoxically, this led liberal states, which otherwise proclaimed a secular separation of religion and politics, to, in effect, endorse an official version of Islam. Government officials became de facto theologians who implicitly approved particular interpretations of the religion over others.86

  The second part of the reformist argument claimed that while offering recognition to a mainstream Islam, European governments also needed to curtail the circulation of Islamist ideology, which was for them the key driver of Muslim violence. Clear limits needed to be set on the expression of extremist forms of Islam. In Britain, the new crime of glorifying terrorism, introduced in the Terrorism Act 2006, was not about preventing incitement to violence, which was already covered under legislation dating from the nineteenth century, but about criminalizing a wider set of Islamist ideological messages. Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair tabled a call for such legislation to be introduced globally and made clear at the UN Security Council meeting on September 14, 2005, that what was to be criminalized was “a movement with an ideology and a strategy,” which would only be defeated when

  the [Security] Council united … in fighting the poisonous propaganda that the root cause of terrorism lay with [us] and not them. [That] root cause … was not a decision on foreign policy, however contentious, but was a doctrine of fanaticism.87

  A similar law was proposed by the European Union the following year, to prevent “public provocation to commit a terrorist offence,” which was defined as the expression of messages that could “cause a danger” of terrorism, whether or not terrorism was directly advocated.88 For non–European Union citizens residing in Britain, or for those with dual nationality, the grounds on which residence rights or citizenship could be removed were widened to include such vague violations as “distributing material, speaking publicly or running a website which fosters hatred which might lead to inter-community violence.”89 This opened the possibility of Home Office ministers stripping British citizens of their citizenship for no other reason than the opinions they expressed.

  As the British civil rights lawyer Gareth Peirce noted, more and more young men and occasionally women were imprisoned in the UK based on their possession of pamphlets or videos or on the records of their Internet use, any of which could be cited as evidence of encouraging or glorifying terrorism. “Previously accepted boundaries of freedom of expression and thought have been redefined and are now in effect being prosecuted retrospectively.”90 In March 2012, for example, Azhar Ahmed, a nineteen-year-old from Dewsbury, Yorkshire, posted a comment on his Facebook page bemoaning the level of media attention British soldiers killed in Afghanistan received in comparison to civilian victims of the conflict. In concluding his posting, he expressed himself without restraint: “All soldiers should die and go to hell! The lowlife fokkin scum!” He was labeled an “Islamist extremist,” charged with sending a grossly offensive communication, and ordered to do 240 hours of community service. A police spokesperson said: “He didn’t make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother.”91 Meanwhile, safeguards on not removing foreign nationals if they would be at risk of cruel and inhuman treatment in the receiving country were eroded. Reformist writers who saw the war on terror as an ideological battle to defend liberal values against a new totalitarian enemy were often less than liberal in applying those values to the treatment of extremists. Nick Cohen, for example, argued that extremists should be deported from Britain even if it led to their being tortured.92 Ed Husain called for membership in the group Hizb ut-Tahrir to be a criminal offense, despite there being no evidence of the group’s involvement in terrorism.93 This points to the second contradiction within the reformists’ agenda: in the name of defending liberal values, the liberal freedom to express an Islamist ideology or identity is curtailed. If Islamist ideology is a totalitarian threat to liberal society, then placing limits on the freedom to express that ideology is seen as the lesser evil.94

  The third aspect of the reformists’ program was a call for a public campaign to celebrate and promote the liberal values upon which they saw Western society resting. A positive defense of such values was regarded as a necessary part of the battle of ideas against extremism in Europe. Governments could play a role in this campaign. For example, they could introduce a requirement that new citizens declare an oath of allegiance to those values or require that immigrants pass tests of their values before being admitted. But more generally, this was an appeal to commentators, journalists, academics, and the general public to become more forceful in defending Western liberal democracy and in criticizing the new Muslim totalitarianism the reformists thought they had identified. National security demanded a change in public attitudes, argued the reformists. The chief barrier to such a change was the European doctrine of multiculturalism, which they claimed discouraged forceful criticism of aspects of other cultures. Such attitudes of tolerance had to be swept aside. This was an argument that had been made repeatedly in Britain since the mid-1990s, but the war on terror boosted its appeal, particularly after the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London. A widely publicized essay pleading for national leadership in the face of multicultural weakness—penned in 2008 by a group of British former generals, senior diplomats, and intelligence services officers—was typical of a genre of hardened multiculturalism-bashing.

  The United Kingdom presents itself as a target, as a fragmenting, post-Christian society, increasingly divided about interpretations of its history, about its national aims, its values and in its political identity. That fragmentation is worsened by the firm self-image of those elements within it who refuse to integrate. This is a problem worsened by the lack of leadership from the majority which in misplaced deference to “multiculturalism” failed to lay down the line to immigrant communities, thus undercutting those within them trying to fight extremism. The country’s lack of self-confidence is in stark contrast to the implacability of its Islamist terrorist enemy, within and without.95

  Throughout the first decade of the war on terror, Britain’s politicians repeatedly announced to the public that multiculturalism had gone too far and now needed limits set on it. What Timothy Garton Ash called “a more demanding civic-national identity” was needed.96 That identity was increasingly defined less through conservative notions of England’s ancient inheritance and more in terms of post-1960s liberal values of gender equality, freedom of expression, sexual equality, and secularism. Presumed lack of allegiance to these values became one of the ways
in which liberals identified who was to be considered a Muslim extremist. Hence the third tension within the reformists’ project: they need some form of multiculturalism to recognize and incorporate mainstream Islam, but they also denounce multiculturalism as an enabler of extremist ideas and identities, and as a danger to liberal values. While liberals try various formulae to reconcile these two imperatives, it is no wonder that across Europe, multiculturalism is said to be in crisis.

  Through these techniques, the reformist approach to tackling homegrown Muslim extremism aims at a cultural transformation in which the identity of European Muslims is reshaped in a pro-Western mold. For policy makers, the reformists’ distinction between Islam as a religious identity, to be granted multicultural recognition, and Islamism, a totalitarian ideology to be fought, provides a more productive grid for thinking about Muslims domestically and internationally than that offered by the anti-Muslim generalizations of culturalism. It allows governments to avoid confrontational language that overtly demonizes huge numbers of people and to engage instead in a process of identifying allies in Muslim communities who can assist with programs designed to tackle extremism. The language of diversity, reform, and partnership can plausibly be deployed to win support for this approach from across the political spectrum. Those defined as moderate Muslims can have their religious traditions valued within the parameters of Western tolerance, while the state focuses its powers of surveillance, coercion, and violence on those categorized as extremist. Yet the reformists’ progressive rhetoric masks a vast, ambitious program of intervention. They seek to use both hard and soft power to “battle for the soul” of Muslim communities, domestically and internationally, and to redraw the contours of Muslim identity in Europe.97 The state wants to create a new kind of more palatable Muslim to be integrated through cultural respect and tolerance while those who mount a political refusal see their civil rights disintegrate.

  Until 2009, most reformists thought the US largely immune from domestic Muslim radicalization. Analysts like Marc Sageman believed America’s free-market society had been better at integrating Muslim immigrants than the European welfare-state model, which he thought fostered dependency and indolence.98 Similarly, the US government’s 2007 National Strategy for Homeland Security claimed:

  The fact that our country has not experienced the level of homegrown violent Islamic extremism that has begun to plague other Western democracies is, in large measure, a tribute to American society, which values free expression and encourages all to engage politically and economically.99

  The picture was one in which Muslims in the US were smoothly assimilated by a successful melting pot, while in Europe they were left angry and violent. In fact, comparing the number of terrorist offenses in the US and Europe is difficult, due to differing definitions, legal and policing practices, and time periods in the published data. Moreover, the numbers on both sides of the Atlantic are too small and too distorted by law enforcement biases (as we shall see in Chapter 6) to allow for comparative conclusions about Muslim behavior, let alone to ascribe any differences to European welfarism.100

  In any case, a number of events in 2009 undermined the perception that the attractions of the American Dream made the US immune. In June, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, an African American from Memphis who had converted to Islam, shot at US soldiers outside an army recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing one and wounding another. In September, Najibullah Zazi, a Pakistani-born permanent US resident, was arrested and later pleaded guilty to planning to bomb the New York City subway system. It emerged that he had acquired the ingredients to make an explosive device.101 Colleen R. LaRose, known in the media as “Jihad Jane” and described as having an “all-American appearance,” was arrested the following month and accused of supporting terrorism online from her home in suburban Pennsylvania and plotting to murder a Swedish artist.102 On November 5, 2009, Palestinian-American army major Nidal Hasan entered the military base at Fort Hood, Texas, shot thirteen people dead, and wounded another thirty-two. Hasan was a US citizen and an army psychiatrist. The following May, Faisal Shahzad’s attempt to detonate a car bomb in New York’s Times Square was intercepted at the last minute by a vigilant street vendor who happened to be a Muslim from Senegal.103 The Pakistan-born Shahzad had become a US citizen a year earlier.104

  In September 2010, the influential Bipartisan Policy Center published a report by two leading US-based terrorism experts, Peter Bergen and Bruce Hoffman, which claimed:

  Al-Qaeda and its allies arguably have been able to establish at least an embryonic terrorist recruitment, radicalization, and operational infrastructure in the United States.

  The report went on to warn:

  The American “melting pot” has not provided a firewall against the radicalization and recruitment of American citizens and residents … By stubbornly wrapping itself in [a] … false security blanket, the U.S. lost five years to learn from the British experience.

  Finally, the report concluded:

  It is fundamentally troubling … that there remains no federal government agency or department specifically charged with identifying radicalization and interdicting the recruitment of U.S. citizens or residents for terrorism.105

  Calls for such a policy of counterradicalization were forcefully advanced by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an influential part of the pro-Israel lobby and, according to an Israeli newspaper report, an organization with a secure phone line linking it to Obama’s White House.106 WINEP argued that “Islamism—a radical political ideology separate from Islam as a religion—[be] recognized internally within the US government as the key ideological driver of the violent extremist threat posed by al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups.” Domestically, the US government should “identify, connect, and empower local Muslim opinion leaders to compete with the message of radical extremists within the United States.”107 Then-senator Joseph Lieberman, as chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, repeatedly called for a comprehensive plan to combat homegrown Islamist radicalization, and Congressman Peter King’s hearings on Muslim radicalization in 2011 further raised the issue’s prominence.

  Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano agreed that radicalization in the US needed addressing, stating: “Home-based terrorism is here. And like violent extremism abroad, it is now part of the threat picture that we must confront.”108 Her department organized meetings with some of the large private philanthropic foundations to suggest they fund community-based initiatives to counter radicalization in American Muslim communities.109 A Countering Violent Extremism Working Group was established at the department to coordinate efforts by local, state, and federal agencies to confront this emerging domestic theat. US policy makers began to import modes of thinking from the UK on how to tackle homegrown Muslim terrorism. Much of the agenda that had emerged in Britain—official recognition of a moderate Islam and curtailing the civil rights of those who dissented—took hold in the US, albeit in different forms. There was growing attention paid to developing partnerships between government agencies and moderate Muslim community leaders, in an effort to prevent extremism. Officials of the Department of Homeland Security toured America’s Muslim communities, holding meetings with community representatives. Farah Pandith, the State Department’s special representative to Muslim communities, engaged not only internationally but with those in the US as well. And FBI special agents working on counterterrorism investigations made appearances at specially organized outreach events in Muslim communities. A White House paper published in August 2011 held up such initiatives as central to the US strategy: “Mainstream Islam” was to be officially recognized by the government, the better to counter “extremism.”110 Speaking about this new strategy in an interview with NPR radio, Denis McDonough, then deputy national security adviser to the White House, highlighted the extent to which a range of public authorities were to play a role—even schools, which were to monitor communities for si
gns of radicalization: “Well, I think it’s not just local law enforcement, although local law enforcement is addressing this issue and is ready. It’s also local community leaders. It’s teachers. It’s principals. It’s coaches.”111 The strategy thus envisaged a web of surveillance and engagement by a range of professions that might interact with young Muslims and spot signs of radicalization.

  Government representatives came close to speaking of a “true” meaning of Islam that should be officially recognized as the acceptable way to be a Muslim in America. Rashad Hussain, President Obama’s most senior Muslim adviser and a special envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, spoke about the meaning of Islam as a bulwark against violence: “I am of the opinion that one of the strongest tools that you can use to counter radicalization and violent extremism is Islam itself, because Islam rejects violent extremism.”112 A year before his first appointment to the Obama White House, Hussain had coauthored a paper for the well-connected Brookings Institution, arguing that “in order to win the ‘battle of ideas,’ the United States government must carefully reformulate its strategy and work with the Muslim world to promote mainstream Islam over terrorist ideology.”113 What is striking about those taking such a position of multicultural recognition is that they were often the very same officials involved in the most repressive counterterrorism measures. Take, for example, the current CIA director, John Brennan. In February 2010, as a top adviser to President Obama on counterterrorism, he gave a speech to Muslim students at New York University in which he offered the audience an official position on what jihad does and does not mean—“Jihad is a holy struggle, an effort to purify for a legitimate purpose”—and offered his “respect for a faith that has helped to shape my own worldview.”114 At the time he said these words he was at the helm of the government’s drone program that was carrying out extrajudicial killings of Muslims in at least three different countries. He had earlier been a senior counterterrorism official at the CIA when it was involved in torturing terrorist suspects. Such contradictions run through Obama’s war on terror: hunger-striking Guantánamo prisoners are brutally force-fed, but at night, to comply with fasting during Ramadan; bin Laden was buried at sea—but according to what officials called “traditional procedures for Islamic burial.”115 The point here is not one of hypocrisy but of the way in which a paternalist multicultural respect for Islam is central to a counterextremism strategy that seeks to reshape Muslim politics by both hard and soft power.