Blaming the west misses the main culprits

Predictable as clockwork, in the wake of Friday's carnage at a mosque in Kuwait and on a beach in Tunisia, the Guardian came up with an article headed "It’s not the religion that creates terrorists, it’s the politics".

Considering that the article's author, Giles Fraser, is a former canon chancellor of St Paul's cathedral in London it's not altogether surprising that he is eager to minimise religion's role in terrorism and ends up pointing an accusing finger at politics – especially "the long history of disastrous western interventions in the Middle East".

"The language of violent jihad," Fraser writes, "may borrow its vocabulary from Islamic theology – it’s a useful marker of shared identity – but root motivation is as it always is: politics". He adds:

"The IRA weren’t Bible-believing Catholics, they were mostly staunch atheists. Catholicism was simply a marker of who counted as 'one of us'. And the same is true of Islamic terrorism."

Fraser doesn't seem to be suggesting IS fighters are a bunch of atheists but he does say: "Many of the young people who have been persuaded to go off and fight in Syria and Iraq have hardly got past the first chapter of Islam for Dummies." 

That may well be true but you don't have to be a Qur'anic scholar in order to believe in Islam or go out and fight for it. It takes only a cursory knowledge of Islamic history (in fact, the more cursory the better) to be persuaded that IS's attempt to re-create the Caliphate is an inspirational event of enormous significance to Islam. And if you have qualms over the sadism of IS, a few carefully selected verses from the Qur'an about divine retribution may even persuade you that its violent behaviour is almost God-like.

Debating whether religion or politics is more to blame for jihadism is actually rather pointless. It's a European – and to some extent Christian – way of looking at the problem. In Europe (fortunately) we are accustomed to a fairly clear-cut division between the two but in the Middle East the line between religion and politics is very blurred and there are plenty of forces at work trying to blur it even more. 

Some of these east-west differences may also be traced to the early histories of Islam and Christianity. Jesus in the New Testament appears basically apolitical: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's". His only recorded act of violence was knocking over tables and driving money-changers from the temple in Jerusalem. It was only later that Christianity became institutionalised politically and militarised. Muhammad, however, was a very different character. Besides his role as the last of God's prophets he was also, in modern parlance, a statesman and a general. In Islam, therefore, politics and religion were closely inter-twined from the very beginning.

Today, virtually all Arab regimes – including the supposedly more secular ones like the Sisi regime in Egypt and the Assad regime in Syria – use and manipulate religion unscrupulously for political purposes, fuelling sectarianism whenever they imagine it serves their interests.

In doing so they also reinforce the principle of religious compulsion – the idea that everyone should comply with religious rules, and that both state and society have a duty to enforce them. Imposing religion by force is, of course, a basic principle of the Islamic State and jihadist groups more generally. Until Arab governments dissociate themselves from that, stop legitimising compulsory religion and start to accept that everyone should be allowed to think and believe as they see fit (so long as they don't interfere with anyone else's right to do the same) Islamic terrorism can only get worse.

Fraser's effort to shift the blame away from religion and more towards politics naturally opens the door to blaming the west and its history of interventions in the Middle East – especially the military kind. While it's important to consider the effects of western policies, this shouldn't obscure the fact that the roots of the problem lie primarily in the Middle East and the way it has been governed over many years.

Critical self-examination is desirable and necessary but it needs to be done carefully and judiciously. Arab regimes and their supporters like nothing better than to hear westerners blaming the west because it removes the need for any self-examination of their own.

While asserting that western intervention is "a part of the cause of the horror that continues to unfold" Fraser doesn't provide a supporting argument. He doesn't say how big a part he thinks intervention has played, or in what ways it has contributed.

Although there is probably some truth in Fraser's assertion it is not self-evidently true and, if we look at specific cases, it's often difficult to see a direct causal link between western policies/interventions and events on the ground. The recent suicide bombings at mosques in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen are one example.

The chaos in Libya is often blamed on western military intervention but the same cannot be said of Syria, where many people now blame non-intervention instead. Iraq might seem a more persuasive case but even there it's arguable that the current turmoil is due more to Saddam Hussein's removal than the fact that he was removed by Americans.

Saddam, Gaddafi and the Assads all constructed their regimes on the "aprés moi le déluge" principle as a survival strategy: attempt to overthrow them and mayhem would be sure to follow. What we see now in Libya, Syria and Iraq is mainly a result of that. Regardless of who is actually involved in toppling these regimes, the outcome is likely to be the same.

There is, however, a general problem with Fraser's article and others like it. Constantly returning to the perils of military intervention highlights the inadequacy of much leftist thinking about the Middle East and obstructs the development of a more rounded analysis of western policy and the other ways it causes damage in the region.

What needs to be challenged above all else is the idea – much cherished by western governments – that maintaining stability should be their most important policy goal in the Middle East. In practice this actually leads to instability by creating political and social stagnation. Maintaining stability, as conceived by western governments, also means getting into bed with Gulf monarchies which are the region’s main counter-revolutionary forces and, of course, the main purveyors of religious bigotry. In the long run this can only make things worse – both for the west and the Middle East.