The Islamist narrative By Maajid Nawaz Monday, 21 Jun, 2010 http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/thenewspaper/editorial/the-islamist-narrative-160 IDEAS matter.

But what matter more than ideas are narratives. Ideas without narratives are like food without spice. To successfully capture the imagination of the masses, ideologies require symbols, icons, writings and leaders. Importantly they also require narratives; and it is in providing this last part that Islamist extremists have been particularly adept. One of the most powerful pieces of propaganda used by Islamist extremists today is the view that there is a global war by all non-Muslims against Islam and Muslims. This narrative has spread so far, and grown so deep, that some of the Islamists most vocal opponents have also subscribed to it; an indication, if ever there was one, of an ideas success. Being someone with a long history inside Islamist groups, I remember spreading this narrative many years ago and I remember being met with laughter when I did. I remember trying to convince people that the UN is against Islam, and I remember being laughed at. That isuntil Srebrenica. I remember trying to convince people that Yasser Arafat and the PLO would betray the Muslims of Palestine because they were not Islamic. I remember being laughed at. That isuntil Oslo. I remember arguing that Muslims would never be tolerated in Europe, and Bosnia would spread everywhere. I remember being laughed at. That isuntil Chechnya. I remember arguing that western freedoms are tools for colonialism. I remember being laughed at. That isuntil the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I remember arguing that human rights are used to keep us weak whilst our enemy grows strong. I remember being laughed at. That isuntil Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. People eventually stopped laughing. The really sad part to this is, by the time everyone had stopped laughing at me, I had stopped believing in this false narrative. Now they laugh when I tell them the opposite: there is no global war against Islam and Muslims. Yes, there are very unjust and unfortunate wars, but these are motivated less by religion and more by geo-political considerations. One of the greatest dangers of this false narrative spreading is that it feeds directly into Islamist propaganda. If the kuffar are attacking us because, and only because, we are Muslims, we must respond as an ummah and repel the enemies of God...sound familiar?

Strangely though, it does not take much to pick holes in this simplistic, pseudointellectual and paranoid perspective. The truth is that it is selfish geo-political reasons that motivate any nation to act on the world stage, nothing more and nothing less. It is certainly not a hatred of Islam, and far less is it hatred of religion. There is indeed a growing level of ignorance about Islam in certain western countries. Minarets and hijab have been banned in places. Religious sloganeering sometimes infects public discourse and the anti-Muslim far-right is on the rise. However, can we honestly say that minorities are treated any better in Muslim-majority countries? How is it that the lives of a handful of people on the Gaza flotilla, killed by non-Muslims, were mourned far more than the lives of hundreds of Ahmadis killed during the same week inside Pakistan? And can we honestly claim that we too dont allow sectarian sloganeering to infect our legal and political discourse? All societies, not just non-Muslims, must be judged by their treatment of their weakest members. Do Christian-majority countries not also fight each other in addition to fighting Muslims? Were the two largest wars of the last century, the two World Wars, not between and among western countries themselves? Did the Cold War not emerge off the back of the Second World War and involve two Christian-majority nations: the USSR and the US? Was Britain not, until recently, locked in a protracted conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland? Do Muslim-majority nations also not fight between themselves when their interests are at stake? Was the Iran-Iraq war not one of the longest and bloodiest the region has seen till date? Were Arab Muslims not killing black Muslims in Darfur? Do not Pakistans ethnic communities, many of them hostile towards each other, constitute Muslims? In fact, when it suited their geo-political interests, have so-called kafir nations not helped Muslims against other non-Muslims? During the 1980s did the US not encourage the spread and growth of Islamist movements as a means to counter the USSR? In recent times, did the US not strike the Christian Serbs in defence of Kosovar Muslims? Is the strictest Muslim-majority nation in the world, Saudi Arabia, not also one of Americas strongest allies? Rather than being motivated by some form of desire to destroy Islam, western nations, like all nations, are driven only by their national security interests and domestic insecurities. This weak, feeble and shallow analysis that there is somehow a global war against Islam simply does not stand up. There is no need to fight the kuffar because the kuffar are not fighting Islam. Instead, there is a need for Pakistan to better defend its own national interests, like all nations inevitably do. This is not possible if we remain locked in an internal struggle over the future direction of this nation, with competing narratives jousting for the attention of our youth. Strength on the world stage can only come from stability on the domestic stage. That can only be arrived at through developing a consensus on the internal direction the

nation should take, and by clarifying and adopting the principles we wish our citizens to live by in public life. This false narrative may have captured the imagination of Muslims in the East, but its exact reverse is being spread by the far-right in the Europe. And just as Pakistanis know that we do not make decisions as a nation on the basis of some profound hatred for nonMuslims, the opposite would sound just as absurd to them. The writer is director of the Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank based in the UK