Treating religion as a primary identifier unwittingly reinforces Islamist aims to promote religious identity above all others
Part of our failure to prevent radicalisation stems from the lack of political or civic engagement among our target audience, those vulnerable to radicalisation and those showing signs of sympathy or support for extremism.
Effective primary prevention must include increasing engagement with communities and more accessible education about democracy, the rule of law, human rights and civic responsibility.
By teaching young people about alternatives to extremism, or more assertively about British values, democracy, the rule of law and human rights, we can build their resilience and improve integration. Our school system has begun to do this.
If we promote ‘positive’ liberty to equip citizens to enjoy their freedom and combine this with the established ‘negative’ freedom from discrimination, we achieve active citizenship, a natural grassroots antidote to extremism. This is valuable for all young people, not just those in the target audience mentioned above – see it as a vaccination rather than a medicine.
The negative perception of preventative counter-extremism work is a real problem. Incomparable to any other policy area, the perception of counter-extremism work among the target audience seems crucial to its effectiveness.
This is because, correctly, it is not a security issue, but rather a community cohesion and a counter-messaging issue – a battle for hearts and minds – that requires grassroots engagement instead of top-down impositions.
This is even more important when perception of counter-extremism is itself listed as a grievance, manipulated in the radicalisation process. When our target audience, those vulnerable to radicalisation, is often more influenced by those sympathetic to or supportive of extremism, than it is by those doing counter-extremism, failure to address this perception deficit could neuter a strategy before it gets off the ground.
In recent years, the Preventing Prevent lobby has deemed it prudent to aggrandise counter-extremism work as a grievance among the target audience, worsening its perception through spreading of conspiracy theory, myopically questioning its academic credibility and ad hominem attacks against practitioners.
This group provides neither constructive nor progressive alternative solutions to the problems they set out. I daresay that some opponents of Prevent see it as a threat to their continued extremism, some are fundamentally opposed to the human rights norms it seeks to preserve, and some have themselves been manipulated by others.
To more effectively challenge extremist narratives, the government has recognised that community engagement is essential to build a strong civil society coalition. Increased duties for frontline workers, better communication of government policy, a focus on other kinds of extremism like anti-Muslim hatred, and the empowerment of new voices are all great ways to do this. So too, this coalition can start to challenge the negative perception of counter-extremism.
However, we must avoid the primary political engagement with a disenfranchised audience being clumsily centred around a policy area that is perceived as controversial. Instead, let’s engage with Muslim communities like any other part of our society that are traditionally disenfranchised.
Engaging Muslims communities solely through a security lens will neither improve community cohesion nor will it improve the perception of counter-extremism, in turn reducing its effectiveness.
So too, let’s not view Muslims solely through the lens of their religious identity and understand that they may also be butchers, bakers or candlestick-makers. Moreover, treating religion as a primary identifier unwittingly reinforces Islamist aims to promote religious identity above all others and will mean that grievances can be manipulated into an extremist narrative much easier, rather than progressively addressed through a liberal, democratic lens.
As for the broader strategic response, we should push for liberalism not just as an antidote to extremism itself but rather a necessary lens for this policy area. This means a consistently-applied human rights threshold, more checks and balances, policy improvements based on a robust evidence base, greater transparency, further desecuritisation, an internationalist outlook that sees global solutions to global problems.
At the same time we need decentralisation so that the policy is delivered by those as close to the target audience as possible. If we get this approach right, then we will be able to address the perception deficit without tackling it head on.
Lastly, let us understand that counter-extremism, if a battle for hearts and minds, is all about messaging. The counter-extremism strategy will empower society to challenge extremist propaganda, even if it is non-violent, when it promotes an ideology that is antithetical to human rights and normalises a narrative based on conspiracy theory and grievance culture that prevents integration.
Part of this is being confident that a newly liberalised counter-extremism strategy is part of the solution not part of the problem, and communicating this effectively so that civil society is empowered to deliver it.
Jonathan Russell is political liaison officer at Quilliam
50 Responses to “Comment: We need to stop defining Muslims only by their religion”
Alex McLeish
“One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory.” — Houari Boumédienne, President of Algeria, in a 1974 speech to the UN.
Mike Stallard
Can you please name me just one person who is a terrorist who is driven by poverty?
Bin Laden, for example, comes from the richest family in the Middle East. al Baghdadi was a very highly educated Imam. al Zawahiri was “upper middle class”.
I think this is an appeal to save Islam and the Muslim way of life.
Ringstone
All good stuff, but if the muslim community “we” want to engage with is more connected to family and clan back in Pakistan than the khaffirs in the estate round the corner, and to be honest has no interest in engaging, what then? That is where we are, with self ghettoised communities living unassimilated in parallel isolation both socially and economically, in language and culture; a voluntary apartheid – the downsides of which are then used as a grievance.
As host society we seem unwilling or unable to challenge this state of affairs for fear of the ultimate whitch word, racist. The fact remains that what cannot be coopted must be controlled, likely a much uglier process than Prevent.
Eoireitum
I don’t see Maajid as a Muslim. I might define him by his ethnicity (broad brush useless shorthand term that it is), his dress sense, his organisation, his role or simply by his name or what he does. Even by what he is “against” (sometimes a more telling approach). The problem is indeed labels. Stop defining yourself by a religion and maybe others will.
The trouble is that this is clearly a “hard ask”!
Active citizenship isn’t a panacea either and it’s naive not to conclude that the final message and the belief system on which the desert cult seems so anxious to define itself is anathema to many progressive or enlightenment principles which for me at least – influence my politics.
Mike Stallard
I think I am giving the wrong impression here. I am a practising Catholic. This week, my (Muslim) daughter in law and her son (my grandson) came to stay and we spent the time learning the Arabic Alphabet together. I am in no way anti Muslim – just not one!
Can we agree that Muslims do rather tend to clump? That they are, in effect, an exclusive group? That they do have a way of life which is not at all the same as the traditional British one? I say this as someone who has studied the British Empire.
If that is so – and in Singapore is actually isn’t because the government makes damned sure it doesn’t happen anywhere we really do run the risk of urban ghettoes and this is happening in my own home town of Peterborough and where I worked in the 1990s in Bradford.