Simon Jenkins
BY Simon Jenkins
A friend of mine once gazed at her wayward teenagers and told me she could handle the usual drugs. The one thing she couldn’t deal with was them “getting religion”. How awful must the agony be of parents who find their children vanished “to fight jihad” in the Middle East.
What could have induced two teenage boys from Cardiff and two 16-year-old Manchester girls to go to Syria? Young people have long felt the romance of distant wars – Spain in the 1930s or the French Foreign Legion – but surely not a Salafist dispute with the Alawite faction of Shiaism over the control of the caliphate.
Ten percent of British children under five are Muslims, and will one day be teenagers. Many attend mosques teaching the Quran and Shariah law. How many instruct in pluralism and tolerance is moot. When I used to visit Muslim countries such as Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Iraq, I was impressed at how far their secular regimes, however dictatorial, guarded religious tolerance. The Baathists and others might be politically brutal, but they were foes of religious extremism: from Ataturk and Nasser to Assad and Saddam, they held the fundamentalists at bay. The British author Ed Husain wrote movingly in his book The Islamist of the multi-faith liberalism he found in Damascus just a decade ago. Conventional wisdom then saw Islam as evolving, like Christianity, to respect a division between church and state. Scholars extolled the contemplative, pacifist passages in the Quran. To Husain London was far more dangerous than Damascus.
We now know better. Resurgent fundamentalism has proved cruelly intolerant on a medieval scale. Most Britons are quite unable to disentangle the divisions and chaos now enveloping much of the Muslim world. They see only the promise of an “Arab spring” dissipated, and a civilisation that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Pacific tearing itself apart. As for the disputes of Sunnis and Shias, Salafists and Wahhabis, they leave people baffled. There is no sign of the long-awaited “Muslim reformation”. Even in liberal Britain, many young people seem susceptible to the most authoritarian edicts of the Quran.
Those Westerners who exulted in the Arab spring now seem naive visionaries. The uprisings may have toppled some secular bullies, often with the aid of western arms, but the resulting chaos delivered fanatical authority as the only focus of order and intellectual coherence.
All that the west can sensibly now do is look on with pain and sympathy. We have no dogs in these fights. On Monday the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove ridiculed the idea that teenage jihadists pose an existential threat to Britain. The power of Isis and its rival Al Qaeda to harm Britain was wildly exaggerated. “Blood-curdling” invitations to young Britons to go out and fight should be down-played. As Dearlove implies, religious wars are always the worst, but they are also the hardest to end. Outsiders rarely make them better.
The people of the Muslim world clearly need the west’s humanitarian aid and sanctuary in distress. Britain must accept that there will be echoes of their conflicts in its domestic communities. But the glint in the eye of Washington and London that Islam’s tribal tribulations might be relieved with more guns, more missiles and more soldiers is cynical warmongering. We have done more damage to the Muslim world than it has ever done to us. We should leave it alone. We have weed enough in our own garden. THE GUARDIAN
BY Simon Jenkins
A friend of mine once gazed at her wayward teenagers and told me she could handle the usual drugs. The one thing she couldn’t deal with was them “getting religion”. How awful must the agony be of parents who find their children vanished “to fight jihad” in the Middle East.
What could have induced two teenage boys from Cardiff and two 16-year-old Manchester girls to go to Syria? Young people have long felt the romance of distant wars – Spain in the 1930s or the French Foreign Legion – but surely not a Salafist dispute with the Alawite faction of Shiaism over the control of the caliphate.
Ten percent of British children under five are Muslims, and will one day be teenagers. Many attend mosques teaching the Quran and Shariah law. How many instruct in pluralism and tolerance is moot. When I used to visit Muslim countries such as Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Iraq, I was impressed at how far their secular regimes, however dictatorial, guarded religious tolerance. The Baathists and others might be politically brutal, but they were foes of religious extremism: from Ataturk and Nasser to Assad and Saddam, they held the fundamentalists at bay. The British author Ed Husain wrote movingly in his book The Islamist of the multi-faith liberalism he found in Damascus just a decade ago. Conventional wisdom then saw Islam as evolving, like Christianity, to respect a division between church and state. Scholars extolled the contemplative, pacifist passages in the Quran. To Husain London was far more dangerous than Damascus.
We now know better. Resurgent fundamentalism has proved cruelly intolerant on a medieval scale. Most Britons are quite unable to disentangle the divisions and chaos now enveloping much of the Muslim world. They see only the promise of an “Arab spring” dissipated, and a civilisation that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Pacific tearing itself apart. As for the disputes of Sunnis and Shias, Salafists and Wahhabis, they leave people baffled. There is no sign of the long-awaited “Muslim reformation”. Even in liberal Britain, many young people seem susceptible to the most authoritarian edicts of the Quran.
Those Westerners who exulted in the Arab spring now seem naive visionaries. The uprisings may have toppled some secular bullies, often with the aid of western arms, but the resulting chaos delivered fanatical authority as the only focus of order and intellectual coherence.
All that the west can sensibly now do is look on with pain and sympathy. We have no dogs in these fights. On Monday the former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove ridiculed the idea that teenage jihadists pose an existential threat to Britain. The power of Isis and its rival Al Qaeda to harm Britain was wildly exaggerated. “Blood-curdling” invitations to young Britons to go out and fight should be down-played. As Dearlove implies, religious wars are always the worst, but they are also the hardest to end. Outsiders rarely make them better.
The people of the Muslim world clearly need the west’s humanitarian aid and sanctuary in distress. Britain must accept that there will be echoes of their conflicts in its domestic communities. But the glint in the eye of Washington and London that Islam’s tribal tribulations might be relieved with more guns, more missiles and more soldiers is cynical warmongering. We have done more damage to the Muslim world than it has ever done to us. We should leave it alone. We have weed enough in our own garden. THE GUARDIAN
