Extremism’s little helpers

THE global jihadism that confronts Western liberal democracies in the shape of al-Qa'ida and its affiliates is above all a war of perception and propaganda.

That our universities may be sustaining the ideology that supports global jihadism, this Islamist revolt against the West, should therefore be a concern.

Not only does the prevailing academic anti-Western thought form the background to jihadism's thinking about the international order, it also undermines our political democratic self-understanding. Yet the argument and style that characterise the more sophisticated jihadist texts reflect supposedly cutting-edge thinking in new, academically fashionable fields such as critical terror studies: critical of the West, that is.

By a curious and little explored irony, the thinking that supports jihadism has been dreamed up in university departments funded by Western governments and finds its way into the reports of the jihadist equivalent of think tanks.

Clearly, home-grown Islamist radicalisation is a threat to the way of life of open, liberal Western societies such as ours. This has been recognised since the terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2003 and London in 2005, and the discovery of similar alleged plots in Toronto, New York, Sydney, Melbourne, Copenhagen and Frankfurt.

We face a form of Islamist ideology that deliberately exploits the anxieties of second-generation Muslims of immigrant parents. These younger Muslims are confronted by the conflicting demands of a modern lifestyle and a traditional family structure, and this tension is crucial to the recruitment and radicalisation process.

Although the ideology is nominally related to Islam, it assumes a particularly Western style of thought and practice in order to resolve a specifically modern dilemma: the discomfort of Muslims who are, or whose families are, relatively recent arrivals in Western countries.

Central to the articulation and promotion of this ideology is the London-based Party of Liberation, Hizb ut-Tahrir. Although the movement derived its inspiration from the thinking of the 20th century anti-colonial and anti-Israel theologian and judge Taqiuddin al-Nabhani and the Islamic liberation struggle in Jordan and Palestine in the 1950s, it was the radical cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed who effectively reorganised the party in London in the '90s to promote the Islamist international.

Recruiting high-quality graduates from London universities, Hizb ut-Tahrir quickly established itself as a new and excitingly alternative, cool Britannic, radical voice. As former member Ed Hussein explains in The Islamist, Hizb ut-Tahrir exploited any issue that might demonstrate the decadence of the non-believing West and the moral superiority of the alternative presented by what Hizb ut-Tahrir terms the Islamic system.

In the course of the '90s and especially after 2001, British Islamists exploited issues ranging from the tolerance of homosexuality and drugs to Western foreign policy in order to reinforce the perception of irresoluble differences between Islamic and liberal democratic values.

Ironically, it was the multicultural policies promoted by successive British governments, together with the politically correct nature of British university politics, that enabled the party to evolve its ideology and elaborate its Manichean distinction between Islamism and secularism in a persuasive manner that recruited educated middle-class British Muslims to its cause.

This essentially post-Cold War creation, which for the best part of two decades produced a cohort of tertiary-educated British Islamists, also actively exported its ideology. Hizb ut-Tahrir now has more than 40 branches, including one in Sydney, and produces high-quality Islamist material in various languages for global consumption.

Officially non-violent, as a number of former adherents such as Hussein and Hassan Butt have shown, it is nonetheless the ideological motor driving what Butt terms the British "jihadi network".

Hizb ut-Tahrir's ambition is to build a postmodern caliphate that transcends the decadent secular state, whether in Britain, Indonesia (where it was responsible for organising a recent conference on rebuilding the caliphate) or Australia. This anti-liberal vision is promoted through a global network of websites, chat rooms and videos.

At the core of the system is the promotion of the caliphate, a seventh-century Muslim ideal that it is claimed would, if adapted to contemporary life, restore the moral and political authority of Islam. As a recent Hizb ut-Tahrir publication, Iraq: The Way Forward, shows, the caliphate, unlike a liberal democracy, constitutes the regime most appropriate for an integrated Islamic life and the solution to political and economic uncertainty in the Middle East and South Asia.

The caliphate represents a political system derived from the ideology of Islam that transcends ethnic and religious differences. It would "usher in a new era of stability for the Muslim world".

Evidently influenced by Western models, the Islamist ideal promotes "the rule of law and accountability by the people through an independent judiciary". The law, however, is Koranic law and the teachings of the prophet Mohammed, while religious scholars preside over the Islamic system's judiciary.

Thus, despite superficial similarities, the Islamic system vigorously opposes the promotion of secular liberal democracy. Its thinking and practice, however, also draws selectively on non-liberal tendencies in the Western ideological canon. In particular, Hizb ut-Tahrir derives its ideological momentum from understandings of a radical Marxist provenance along with a deeply illiberal and relativist strain in contemporary Western thought. It followed and developed the strategies pioneered by groups such as the Socialist Workers Party in Britain. As Hussein points out: "We borrowed, as we did much else, from radical socialists."

Likewise, its hostile understanding of the liberal democratic state's conduct of foreign policy derives its inspiration from the international idealism that prevails in British and, more recently, Australian schools of political science and international studies. This dominant scholarly orthodoxy of constructivism (the belief that knowledge is socially determined and subjective) and pacifism views the international order as a self-serving construct of the US and its allies. It seeks an ethical transformation and has, by an interesting process, come to permeate Hizb ut-Tahrir's analysis of world politics and pervade its rhetoric.

The Hizb ut-Tahrir propagandists who wrote Iraq: The Way Forward and Radicalisation, Extremism and Islamism: Realities and Myths in the War on Terror imbibed their ideas, in part, from the state-transcending ethicism of the English school of international relations. This ethical approach to international relations seeks what two of its leading proponents, Andrew Linklater and Hidemi Suganami, term a solidarist world informed by global ethics. Thus, a Hizb ut-Tahrir report such as Radicalisation, Extremism and Islamism reads like a masters thesis in international relations in the style of the English school, complete with methodological framework and footnotes. In fact, one would not be entirely surprised if it began life as an honours thesis at a British university.

Thus, in keeping with this prevailing critical scholarship, Hizb ut-Tahrir considers the war on terror just a narrative told by Western governments. Islamist terrorism is, therefore, simply a distorted Western construct. Ultimately, for this group, the West's "orientalist discourse" regarding Islam and the caliphate compounded Muslim alienation. Therefore, orientalism (the Western scholarly study of eastern societies) and its ideological cousin colonialism constitute the root causes of Muslim oppression and the subsequent Islamist response that has dialectically evolved since the late 19th century.

According to this perspective, "the West's foreign policy has illustrated not just the unacceptable face of Western imperialism but the true face of Western states with the indomitable pursuit of profits, raw materials and cheap labour".

Not only does Hizb ut-Tahrir's methodology reflect contemporary critical social-science theory, the policy solutions to counter US imperialism are remarkably similar. As Iraq: The Way Forward argues, stability in the Middle East requires the immediate withdrawal of all US and allied forces from the Gulf region.

This would facilitate the rebuilding of the caliphate and enable the Muslim world, funded by the Gulf and Iraq's oil resources, to determine its own destiny.

This destiny would, of course, reject the false Western ideal of liberal democratic universalism and the destabilising economics of the free market. It would also see an Islamist solution to the Palestine question that would necessarily involve the dissolution of the "illegal" Zionist state of Israel and its incorporation into the caliphate. Under the caliph, Jews, Sunnis and Shias, Kurds, Lebanese, Persians and Arabs would all transcend their false consciousness and unite through Islam's undoubtedly global ethic.

Such a radical solution to the Middle East is, of course, contemplated with equanimity by critical international relations theorists and the exciting new discipline of critical terror studies.

Thus, Cambridge University lecturer Tarak Barkawi requires us to empathise with radical Islamist thought and practice while Manchester University's Richard Jackson tells us in the Chatham House journal International Affairs that jihadist texts reveal a "nuanced political analysis" and a "clear set of political goals". Indeed, Jackson maintains, Islamist parties, when afforded "mainstream political influence", have often followed "moderate and pragmatic directions". Presumably, he has in mind groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

Critical international relations courses taught at leading British and Australian universities advocate a similarly nuanced approach to jihadism at home and abroad.

Immediate withdrawal from Iraq and a greater awareness of the Muslim other, it is alleged, will dilute Islamist rage, whether home-grown or externally generated.

So, for senior academics such as one at the University of NSW, the violence in Palestine cannot be resolved without "the call to ethics and the love of the other".

For this academic, the solution to the West's "perverse perseverance of sovereignty" is "deconstructive and reproductive".

British and Australian global ethicists should reflect, however, on former Hizb ut-Tahrir activist Butt's observation in the wake of the London and Glasgow bombings in June this year: "I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy. By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology."

In the face of such evidence, you would expect that Western governments would be more acutely attuned to the inherent dangers of fuelling Islamist propaganda. But rather than funding projects that examine all phases of counter-terrorism, successive Australian education ministers have allowed the critical terror studies agenda to obtain research funding through the Australian Research Council.

Critical theorists regularly receive significant doles of public money to discourse on "the politics and ethics of force" or "ethical and conceptual approaches to counter-terrorism". We're not sure what value this adds to our understanding of failed and failing states. But the conclusion is already known. It's all our fault. As Ruth Blakeley of the University of Kent tells it, "the northern democracies have been responsible for widespread terrorism".

In this curious world of international ethicist thinking, the present system of states is the problem and demands "an imperative to change the world" as we know it. Therefore, it is not surprising to learn that the policy solution is to "resist and transform", an idea endorsed not only by Hizb ut-Tahrir but international terror groups of all stripes.

As US political philosopher Leo Strauss observed presciently in a different ideological context, "the crisis of the West consists in the West having become uncertain of its purpose. The West was once certain of its purpose, of a purpose in which all men could be united and hence it had a clear vision of its future...

"We no longer have that certainty and that clarity. Some among us even despair of the future, and this despair explains many forms of Western degradation."

A society accustomed to understanding itself in terms of a universal and progressive purpose cannot lose faith in that purpose without becoming utterly bewildered.

The relativist and critical approaches that have come to dominate the academic social sciences since the '90s are a reflection of that bewilderment, give comfort and coherence to our enemies, reinforce our bewildering loss of purpose and receive state-funded research grants to promote it.

David Martin Jones and Carl Ungerer teach political science at the University of Queensland. Ungerer has edited the book Australian Foreign Policy in the Age of Terror (UNSW Press, $49.95), to which he and Martin Jones have contributed some chapters.