Christian Responses to Islamism and Violence in the Name of Islam

Introduction: Asking the Right Questions

Max Warren, General Secretary of the Church Mission Society from 1942 to 1963, used to tell a story from his time in hospital after returning from service in Nigeria with a serious illness. One day he was examined by a medical student in front of his professor, as part of his final examinations. After the examination, the student gave his diagnosis of Warren’s illness to the professor. Warren knew that the diagnosis was wrong, so when he saw the professor the following day, he said to him, ‘I suppose that student failed because he got the diagnosis wrong.’ ‘Oh no!’ replied the professor. ‘The diagnosis was wrong. But he would have got there in the end because he asked all the right questions.’

While we have been living with Islamism for some years, the creation of the so-called ‘Islamic State’ in June 2014 no doubt took all of us by surprise. There has been a variety of responses among national governments, academics and journalists, as well as among Christians. While none of us can give a definitive answer to the question of how Christians should respond to Islamism and ISIS, can we at least attempt to ask some of the right questions? The following are 10 questions that I would want to ask, and my own answers to them. ¹

What do we Mean by ‘Islamism’ and How does it Differ from Other Kinds of Islam?

I hope we are past the stage of speaking about ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ and are starting to use terms like ‘Islamism’, ‘political Islam’ or ‘radical Islam’. I am not talking about ordinary Muslims who may have a political agenda of one kind or another, but Muslims who have a clear agenda about creating some kind of Islamic polity. It is important to recognise, however, that Islamists are not all the same. Some believe in democracy, pluralism and human rights, while others do not. Some believe that violence is sometimes justified in pursuing an Islamic agenda, while others reject it. They all want to see Islamic principles applied in the public sphere, but recognise the huge differences in the political make-up of states all over the world and have different ideas about how a particular nation could be more Islamic.

Political Islam is therefore different from what we might call ‘Traditionalist’ or ‘Orthodox Islam’ where Muslims want to conserve Islam as far as possible as it has been practised for centuries. They want to grant a minimum of concessions to modernity, and have little desire to change the political status quo in the countries where they are living.

Political Islam is different from the Folk Islam or Popular Islam which is practised all over the world. Paul Hiebert and Bill Musk have explained how Islam is often mixed up with primal religion which includes a great deal of magic and superstition. These Muslims are generally not so interested in politics, and their main concern is finding a source of power to deal with the evil forces in the spiritual world around us and with the problems of daily life.

Political Islam also differs from Liberal or Modernist Islam. These Muslims believe that Islam can and must change as society changes. They want greater freedom in their interpretation of the Qur’an and Islamic tradition and greater flexibility in the way they interpret Islamic law in the modern world.

When we speak of political Islam, therefore, we are thinking about Muslims who want to change the world by making their communities and their countries more Islamic and by ordering them more consistently in accordance with divinely revealed law. Some consider it appropriate to use forms of coercion if necessary.

Is Islam Essentially More Political than Christianity?

This is a difficult question. Before I give my own answer, I want to point out the danger of ‘essentialism’, the idea that we can easily describe the essence or the essential nature of something. We may make generalisations like ‘Islam is essentially this or that’ and ‘Islam is by its very nature like this’. It is tempting for non-Muslims – and especially Christians – looking in from outside and from what we think is a neutral, objective vantage point, to believe that we know better than Muslims what Islam really is.

I am hesitant therefore to use words like ‘essentially’ and have become more cautious about sweeping generalisations and sentences that begin ‘Islam is …’. I find myself speaking more about Muslims in all their variety and diversity than about Islam as something monolithic and unchanging. I believe that there are several reasons why Muslims tend to be more politically-minded than Christians. A statement like this, however, needs several qualifications.

We would have to begin by pointing out one major difference between the lives of Jesus and Muhammad: Jesus died on a cross, while Muhammad in the Hijra moved from being the persecuted prophet in Mecca to becoming (using the title of Montgomery Watt’s (1975) classic) both ‘prophet and statesman’. When Muhammad received the invitation from the Muslim converts in Medina to become the leader of the whole city, he probably saw it as an opportunity to establish a truly Islamic community living under the law of God. This is why Abdulaziz and Sachedina (1986: 116) write: ‘The basic emphasis of Islamic salvation lies … in … the establishment of the ideal religio-political order with a worldwide membership of all those who believe in God and His revelation through Muhammad …’

By AD 732, a hundred years after the death of the Prophet, a vast Islamic empire stretched from Morocco and Spain in the West to the borders of China and India in the East. Because of the example of the Prophet and centuries of Islamic history, and in spite of what has been said about the danger of generalisations, I believe Kenneth Cragg (1978: 78) summed up a very fundamental conviction in the mind of most well-taught Muslims in this memorable sentence: ‘Islam must rule.’ A few thousand Muslim Arabs were ruling over a population which for about three centuries was largely Christian. The first three hundred years of Islamic history stand in sharp contrast to the first three hundred years of Christian history in which Christians were a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire.

There are, therefore, some very strong historical and theological reasons why many Muslims have been concerned about politics. Several qualifications are still necessary.

Firstly, there have been several examples of political Christianity in the past. Three centuries before the birth of Muhammad, Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman state. The capital of the empire moved to Byzantium in 324 and Muhammad must have been aware of this powerful Christian empire to the north-west of Arabia. The popes filled the power vacuum after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. The crowning of Charlemagne by the Pope in 800 was a significant date in the development of Christendom. At one point, Charlemagne offered baptism or death to the people he conquered. John Calvin wanted to make Geneva a thoroughly Christian city. In South America, Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors enforced Christianity with the sword. The other articles in this issue address warfare, killing and coercion by those who claimed to follow Christ.

Secondly, Muslims believe that they can see examples of political Christianity at the present time. Islamists frequently claim that the world of Islam is under attack from ‘the Zionist-Crusader alliance’ of the West. While we can challenge this kind of rhetoric, we must recognise that this is how we are perceived. Muslims might be justified in seeing the alliance between evangelical Christianity and the political right in the USA as an example of political Christianity. And they would certainly be justified in seeing Christian Zionism as a very obvious kind of political Christianity, because it uses Christian beliefs to support a very clear political agenda related to the state of Israel.

Thirdly, about a third of Muslims all over the world live in minority situations where they are not in a position of political power. They do not all look back to the first Islamic state in Medina as a Golden Age that they want to recreate where they live today. Some of them compare their situation to that of the first group of Muslims in Mecca, while others see themselves as being in a similar situation to the Muslims sent by Muhammad from Mecca to seek asylum in the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia. So we can never say that all Muslims are likely to have a political agenda.

In answer to this question, therefore, we can never get away from the contrast between the lives of Jesus and Muhammad. One of the temptations during the 40 days in the wilderness may have been the temptation to seek political power. As Matthew 4:8–9 shows, Jesus was offered ‘all the kingdoms of the world in their glory … if you will only fall down and do me homage’ (Revised English Bible). Jesus said to Pilate, ‘My kingdom does not belong to this world’ (John 18:30). But if the kingdom of God, the kingly rule of God, means anything, it cannot simply be about ‘me and my relationship with God’. If his followers are called to be salt and light in the world, how are the values of the kingdom to be expressed in communities and in society as a whole? If we are critical of the political agendas of some Muslims, we dare not abandon the public sphere to secularists and Muslims. Christians must have a clear vision of the kind of just and caring society that we want to live in. And this must have something to do with public life and politics. If most Christians and Muslims are concerned about the transformation of their societies, they will inevitably have some interest in politics.

Why has Islamism Become So Significant in Recent Years?

The rapid spread of ISIS in Iraq and the capture of Mosul in June 2014 made the world sit up and take notice. We might not have been so surprised, however, if we knew the history of the last 150 years (the last 40 in particular) and the many variations of political Islam.

Ayatollah Khomeini created the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. Hizbullah was created in 1986 as a resistance movement against Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon, and Hamas came into existence in 1986 as a response to 40 years of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. In 1989 the Algerian army seized power after FIS, the Islamist party, had won a democratic election. In 1997 fifty-eight tourists were gunned down at Luxor in Upper Egypt. Muhammad Mursi attempted to impose the Muslim Brotherhood’s agenda on Egypt while in power from 2012 to 2013. Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist AKP have turned the tide after decades of secularism imposed by Ataturk in the 1920s and brought Islam back into public life. If we go back further to the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, we find that Hassan al-Banna was driven by two clear goals: the revival of Islam and the ending of the British occupation of Egypt. If we go back further still, we find that in India Muslims played a significant role in opposing the British Raj in the 19th century (Allen, 2007).

In all these different expressions of political Islam there are two common factors: the desire to see the public sphere ordered by Islamic principles and the refusal to be ruled by foreigners. As we shall see shortly, context is all-important. In every case there has been something contextually specific – a perceived injustice – which has driven Muslims to take action and often to resort to violence.

We could argue, for example, that if Israel had complied with UN Security Resolution 242 in 1967 and withdrawn from the territories it had occupied in the Six Day War, Hamas might never have come into existence. If Israel had not invaded Lebanon in 1982 and stayed on as an occupying power in the South for 28 years, there might have been no Hizbullah. If the US and its allies had not invaded Iraq in 2003, there probably would be no ISIS.

In all these expressions of political Islam there is a real zeal for God, a passion to ‘strive in the way of God’, to use a common Qur’anic expression. As is well known, the basic meaning of the word jihad is ‘to strive’, and has little to do with the idea of ‘holy war’. However, it is not just a passion to fight injustice and to create a just society that has motivated Muslims. There is also the conviction, as summed up by Kenneth Cragg, that ‘Islam must rule’. Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential Islamist ideologues who was imprisoned and tortured by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government, summed up this Islamist conviction in the sentence la budda li-’l-islam an yahkum (‘Inevitably Islam shall rule’) (Qutb, 1980: 55, quoted in Jansen 1997: 5).

In the light of the example of the Prophet and in the context of many centuries of Islamic history, it has probably seemed very natural for Muslims to be ruling over non-Muslims – and especially over Christians and Jews who were treated as dhimmis (protected communities living under Islamic rule). It is much more difficult for Muslims to accept being ruled by non-Muslims. I suspect that there is something uniquely Islamic about this, because I doubt if Hindus, Buddhists or Confucianists can find in their scriptures and history the same kind of clear and strong motivation to engage in political activity and seek to rule.

Once again, however, I would point out the danger of generalisation. The vast majority of Muslims in Britain and Europe would probably be shocked if you said to them, ‘We know that in your heart of hearts you Muslims want to rule the world.’ Islam is a missionary religion just as much as Christianity is, and for some Muslims, jihad is the sixth pillar of Islam, but it is not true that all Muslims all over the world have a clear political agenda and want the world to come under Islamic rule.

So why has political Islam become so significant in recent years? It is partly because Muslims have faced what they perceive to be injustice and oppression and so many situations in which they feel that their own Muslim rulers are not running their countries in accordance with Islamic principles.

Where has ISIS Come From?

Patrick Cockburn of the Independent is notable for his analysis of the origins of ISIS (Cockburn 2014, 2015). In March 2015 Der Spiegel published some highly significant documents that had been captured from ISIS (Reuter, 2015). These articles have shown that the 2003 war in Iraq and the 2011 civil war in Syria created a vacuum that allowed ISIS to rise in power. After bringing down Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath regime, the Americans disbanded the whole army, leaving 350,000 angry men without work or pay. Many of these soldiers, along with officials from the government and the secret services who had previously been running Hussein’s police state, joined forces with al-Qa’ida in Iraq in a kind of unholy alliance between Islamists and Ba’athists. They brought with them many skills (such as running a state, and in finance and digital media) that were then used in creating the new Islamic State.

The other important factor is that the Sunnis in Iraq – about 20% of the population – were always resentful that they had been excluded from power by Saddam Hussein. They were again marginalised after his downfall in 2003 as the new government was dominated by the Shi’ite majority. Many Iraqi Sunnis feared and hated Shi’ites and would rather be ruled by ISIS than by the Shi’ites.

It was in this political context that al-Qa’ida in Iraq developed into IS or ISIS. If Iraqi and other Arab Sunnis provided the main leadership and the tactical skills, it was the Wahhabi beliefs of al-Qa’ida that provided the ideological basis for ISIS, including four important Wahhabi convictions:

When trying to understand ISIS, therefore, context and ideology are equally important (Cockburn, 2015: 8–9):

ISIS is the child of war … Its members seek to reshape the world around them by acts of violence. The movement’s toxic mix of extreme religious beliefs and military skill is the outcome of the war in Iraq since the US 2003 invasion and the war in Syria since 2011 … It was the US, Europe, and their regional allies in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates that created the conditions for the rise of ISIS.

Can One Say that ‘ISIS has Nothing to Do with Islam’ or ‘ISIS is Nearer to Real Islam that Moderate Islam’?

In recent years, there have been two main responses to ISIS. It is easy to understand why so many Muslims – especially in western contexts – dissociate themselves from ISIS. They are thoroughly embarrassed to think that non-Muslims around them might assume that, because they are Muslims, they must have some sympathy with ISIS’ beliefs and actions. Therefore they argue that many of the practices of ISIS are completely un-Islamic, and cannot be justified by the legal traditions that have developed over many centuries. A very thoughtful Muslim leader in Cambridge said to me recently, ‘They’re just a bunch of Marxists.’ In an article in The Times with the heading ‘ISIS owes more to the Kremlin than the Koran,’ Ben Macintyre (2015) has argued that, ‘Stalin is the godfather of Islamic State.’ Many politicians have been naively repeating the mantra ‘Islam is a religion of peace’, and I still remember hearing an Anglican bishop saying on a BBC Radio programme a few days after 9/11, ‘This has nothing to do with Islam.’ Although the claim is often repeated, it was particularly significant to hear a leading churchman saying this so soon after 9/11.

When the ideologues of ISIS spell out in great detail where in their scriptures, tradition and history they find the Islamic justification for what they are doing, it becomes untenable to assert that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam. ISIS members believe their actions are closely related to Islam. It would be more accurate to say that ISIS has a lot to do with Islam, but is an extreme expression of one particular kind of Islamism. The rank and file of ISIS fighters from all over the world have joined the movement with a variety of motives, related to idealism and the search for identity, meaning and adventure. It is also likely that many have a minimal understanding of Islam. ISIS’ leadership, however, claims to be imitating some of the practices of the first generation of Muslims who fought alongside the Prophet and continued his struggle after his death. In interpreting the Qur’an, they use the principle of abrogation which enables them to say that later verses calling Muslims to wage war on unbelievers cancel out earlier verses advocating patient endurance of opposition. An important ISIS document, called ‘The Management of Savagery’, explains in some detail how their strategies and tactics are modelled on some of the practices of the first Muslims (Naji, 2004; see also Atwan, 2015, chapter 8: 153–164). Instead of saying that the warriors of ISIS are not real or faithful Muslims, other Muslims, therefore, need to explain why they believe ISIS is completely wrong in its interpretation and application of Islamic sources.

At the other extreme there are many Christians – and especially evangelicals – who believe that ISIS is much nearer to the spirit and practice of early Islam than moderate Muslims of today. As evidence, they point to particular verses in the Qur’an (e.g. about beheading, crucifixion and slavery) and passages in Hadith literature, the biographies of Muhammad and legal texts to show the connections between the brutalities of ISIS and early Islamic texts.

I believe it is appropriate to draw attention to the precedents from the early years of Islam – especially since ISIS is using these to justify their actions. However, there are two serious weaknesses in an approach which sees ISIS as faithful practitioners of early Islam. Firstly, there are mainstream Muslim scholars who believe they can demonstrate why ISIS is a clear departure from Islamic tradition. The main argument of scholars like Tim Winter, current dean of The Cambridge Muslim College, is that Islamist interpretations generally ignore the consensus in the Islamic legal tradition which developed over many centuries. They insist on going directly back to the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet. Winter believes that the legal traditions of the four main schools (the madhhabs) are like a telescope that enables us to see the stars clearly; the Islamists, who ignore the tradition and make their own interpretations of the sources, are like people who refuse to use the telescope and insist on looking at the stars with the naked eye (Murad, 1999).

Secondly, those who say ISIS is a faithful expression of real Islam assume that non-Muslims are in a better position than Muslims to determine what is ‘true’ or ‘real Islam’. We must surely allow Muslims to speak for and define themselves and their faith and not imagine that our understanding is better.

Is the Root of the Problem Scriptural and Dogmatic or Historical and Political?

Many writers today seem to want to minimise the importance of history and politics and put all the emphasis on scripture and dogma. For example, in the book Islam in Conflict: Past, Present and Future, two well-known Christian scholars of Islam, Peter Riddell and Peter Cotterell (2003: 7–8) write:

In our view it is not the non-Muslim world that stands at the cross-roads, but the Muslim world. Islam has, throughout its history, contained within itself a channel of violence, legitimized by certain passages of the Qur’an, though put in question by other passages … Ultimately it is only the Muslim world that can deal with the roots of the problem, which, in our view, do not lie in Western materialism or nineteenth-century colonialism or American imperialism, but in Islam’s own history, both distant and recent.

There are two main reasons why I feel deeply uneasy about this position. In the first place, it seems to assume that everything that Muslims do can be explained by referring to texts, and that history and politics have little or no relevance. This approach is described by John Azumah (2014) as ‘textualism’. Human behaviour, and especially the relationship between a text and any particular action, is far more complex.

The second weakness is that it effectively absolves westerners of all responsibility for the mess that has been unfolding in the Middle East in the last hundred years. It is as if they are saying: ‘We haven’t done anything wrong. What we in the West have been doing to the world of Islam for centuries is hardly relevant. The root of the problem is their scriptures and tradition. It’s their problem; and they are the ones who have to change.’

Many Muslims and Arabs, likewise, are adept at the blame game – blaming everyone but themselves for all their problems. Having lived for 18 years in the Middle East and tried to see the West as Arabs and Muslims see it, I believe that they have some good reasons to be angry. When I think of Israel and Palestine in particular, how can we possibly argue that the West is innocent and that the root of the problem is in Islamic scripture and dogma?

Emphasising non-textual factors does not imply that texts are unimportant. I am simply arguing that history and politics are just as important as texts and dogma in understanding political Islam in general and ISIS in particular. We need to know how to challenge Muslims over their interpretation of their texts. But we also need to understand the historical and political contexts in which political Islam has developed in recent years.

Is Political Islam Always Likely to Tend Towards Violence?

The answer to this question must be an emphatic NO! There are plenty of situations where Islamists do not resort to violence. At the same time, they face a real dilemma. They want their societies to be more consistently Islamic, but how are they to achieve this goal? Are they to work for a gradual and peaceful Islamisation of the country, or are they justified in using force to win power? And what happens when violence is done to them?

These dilemmas can be illustrated from the history of one particular Islamist movement – the Muslim Brotherhood. From its beginnings in 1928, the vision of its founder, Hassan al-Banna, was for a genuine Islamic revival which would transform the social and spiritual life of the nation and bring British rule to an end. At an early stage some of its members formed a secret military organisation, ‘the Special Apparatus’, which targeted British occupation troops and Egyptians who collaborated with the British. When they engaged in violence, they were always condemned by the Muslim Brotherhood leadership. The activities of the Brotherhood led to opposition from the British and the Egyptian government, and Hassan al-Banna was assassinated in 1949.

Gamal Abdel Nasser, former president of Egypt, had been a member of the Brotherhood since 1941. The coup that he led in 1952 had the approval of the leadership. Before long, however, friction developed between Nasser and the Brotherhood and after a year he dissolved the organisation. Many of its leaders were imprisoned and tortured. After Nasser’s death in 1971, Anwar Sadat released Muslim Brotherhood members from prison, hoping to enlist their support for his government. His toleration of the movement enabled it to regain power and influence. By the mid-1970s they had split into three groups. The Muslim Brotherhood continued to believe in peaceful reform through the Islamisation of the individual, the family and society. This, they hoped, would lead to the establishment of an Islamic state. The two other groups, the Gamaa Islamiyya of Egypt and al-Jihad, condoned the use of violence. Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem and his signing of the Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1979 led to his assassination by members of these last two groups. Many were put in prison, while others fled the country, and some who went to Afghanistan later created al-Qa’ida. Members of the Brotherhood were regularly put on trial. Others started working with political parties. Because the party itself was still officially banned, they stood as independents.

When the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, was brought down in January 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood held back for a short period, then seized the opportunity to join in the revolution and effectively hi-jacked it. Then, largely as a result of the goodwill they had built up through their networks and social work all over the country, they were able to get their Muslim Brotherhood candidate Muhammad Mursi elected as President. He lost no time in attempting to impose an Islamist agenda on the country. This led to a popular revolt in June 2013, when around 33 million people took to the streets to depose him. While some would say that Abdel Wahab el-Sisi used this as an opportunity for the army to seize power, others would say that he was forced to step in and take control in order to save the country from chaos. The Brotherhood was furious that its democratically elected president had been ousted by this coup. There were violent clashes with the police and the army and arson attacks on around 70 churches.

While the majority of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, therefore, have genuinely wanted to bring about the Islamisation of society by peaceful and democratic means, the leadership has not always been able to control those who wanted to engage in violence to achieve their political ends. Their activities have provoked strong opposition from successive governments, which have regularly used force to suppress them. While the Brotherhood has at times engaged in violence, a great deal has also been done to it, and many outside observers have been extremely critical of the way Sisi has set out to destroy the movement – ensuring that it can never seize power again.

The foregoing discussion has illustrated an ambiguity at the heart of the Brotherhood from the beginning, which Alison Pargeter (2010: 182–183) sums up:

Whilst the Ikhwan (MB) is keen to present itself as a peaceful organisation and has proven itself to be largely pacific, it does have a history of getting involved in violence when the opportunity has presented itself. Right from the outset the concept of violence was enshrined in its famous motto, which remains the maxim today: ‘Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.’ At its inception, the Ikhwan attached a far greater importance to the concept of jihad in both its violent and non-violent sense than was the tradition of the Islamic circles of the day. This differentiated it from other Islamic societies and organisations …

… the Brotherhood has a complex ideological relationship to the use of violence. Whilst its members broadly reject the idea of fighting against their own regimes, they do not entirely disown scholars such as Sayyid Qutb who was one of the early proponents of violent struggle against un-Islamic Muslim governments in the contemporary context and whose ideas radicalised a generation and more. They might refute some of Qutb’s ideas but there is still a certain pride in him and they consider him as one of their most important martyrs. This gives the impression that there is still an ambiguity in their discourse on violence and that they do not come down on one side or the other.

We must acknowledge that political Islam does not necessarily sanction violence. At the same time it is not hard to understand how some Islamists, frustrated at slow progress in creating a more Islamic society or suffering extreme violence from their opponents, can conclude – from their scriptures, dogma and history – that they have adequate justification for turning to violence.

What are the Other Faces of Political Islam Today?

Two years ago I had a long email correspondence with a Messianic Jewish leader in Israel who was convinced that Hamas, Hizbullah, ISIS and Iran are all basically the same. In my responses I tried to explain why I believe that this attitude is in danger of breaking the fourth commandment, because it comes close to bearing false witness against our neighbour.

To develop this point I want to commend a book edited by Asef Bayat. The title suggests the basic point: Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam. He defines Islamism as follows (Bayat, 2013: 4–5):

I take Islamism to refer to those ideologies and movements that strive to establish some kind of an ‘Islamic order’ – a religious state, shari’a law, and moral codes in Muslim societies and communities. Association with the state is a key feature of Islamist politics … The primary concern of Islamism is to forge an ideological community; concerns such as establishing social justice and improving the lives of the poor are to follow only from this strategic objective.

He defines post-Islamism as follows (Bayat, 2013: 8–9):

It represents an endeavor to fuse religiosity and rights, faith and freedom, Islam and liberty. It is an attempt to turn the underlying principles of Islamism on their head by emphasizing rights instead of duties, plurality in place of a singular authoritative voice, historicity rather than fixed scriptures, and the future instead of the past. It wants to marry Islam with individual choice and freedom …, with democracy and modernity, to achieve what some have termed an ‘alternative modernity’ … Whereas Islamism is defined by the fusion of religion and responsibility, post-Islamism emphasizes religiosity and rights. Yet, while it favors a civil and nonreligious state, it accords an active role for religion in the public sphere.

Notice especially this last sentence (my italics).

All the contributors to the book describe the unique ways in which Islamist and post-Islamist movements have developed side by side in 10 different contexts: Iran, Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia, Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Syria. Bayat (2013: 25–26) concludes:

The narratives … show that the forms, depth, and spread of post-Islamist experiences may vary. Yet they all point to some shift in vision. In each of these cases, post-Islamism denotes a critical discursive departure or pragmatic exit … from an Islamist ideological package characterized broadly by monopoly of religious truth, exclusivism, and emphasis on obligations, towards acknowledging ambiguity, multiplicity, inclusion, and flexibility in principles and practice …

Clearly, then, post-Islamism represents a discursive and/or pragmatic break, a break from an Islamist paradigm. But the direction is not ‘post-Islamic’, as some erroneously call it; it is post-Islamist. In other words, I am not speaking about a shift away from Islamic faith toward secularism, even though post-Islamism does denote a process of secularization in the sense of favoring the separation of religious affairs from the affairs of the state. Rather, I am speaking about post-Islamization as a complex process of breaking from an Islamist ideological package by adhering to a different, more inclusive, kind of religious project in which Islam nevertheless continues to remain important both as faith and as a player in the public sphere.

The problem for many of us who are outside observers is that, while we have been slowly coming to terms with the rise of political Islam, we have failed to notice significant development within Islamism and therefore to recognise significant differences among Islamists.

I would also commend another book, edited by Khaled Hroub, with the insightful title Political Islam: Context Versus Ideology. In looking at many different situations in the Muslim world, Hroub (2010: 9–10) writes: ‘The persistent question … remains whether, in dealing with the world around them Islamist movements are led by their context or their ideology.’ He explains the tension between context and ideology:

Facing endless specific and pragmatic situations, a process of immediate and ongoing negotiations continues to take place between the contextual pressures and the underpinning ideology, producing particular responses. My argument … is that what appear to be similar movements often show different responses to the immediate, and sometimes similar, practical pressures around them. These responses are shaped mostly, if not completely, by the nature of these pressures, not by a supposedly common theology. The ideology of these movements remains significant, but mainly at a theoretical level, thinly concealing politics and responses that are formed by the contextual reality.

I conclude therefore that there are huge differences between Hamas, Hizbullah, ISIS and Iran, even while they certainly share a hard core of Islamist conviction. A ‘battle for the soul of Islam’ is being waged at the present time – not only between moderates and Islamists, but also between Islamists and post-Islamists.

What are the Most Appropriate Responses to Islamism?

Instead of attempting to spell out a strategy for defeating ISIS, which according to Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA, is likely to involve a 30-year war (quoted in Atwan, 2015: 231), I want to make some general points about the way we might respond to all kinds of political Islam.

What are the Most Appropriate Christian Responses to Political Islam?

Alongside what we have said generally, I would suggest the following as seven distinctive Christian responses:

Conclusion

It should be clear that the ideology and brutality of ISIS require condemnation in the strongest possible terms from people of all faiths and of none. I have argued that the creation of the so-called Islamic State needs to be understood in the wider context of the development of political Islam and what has happened in the Middle East in the last century. We should not be surprised when Islamists have political agendas of different kinds, and there are very understandable reasons why in recent decades – and recent centuries – Muslims have been politically engaged. History and politics are therefore just as important as Islamic scripture and dogma in understanding the motivation of Islamists. Moreover, there are many different kinds of Islamists, and while some resort to violence, others emphatically renounce it.

As we watch events unfolding in the Middle East at the present time, therefore, Christians ought to be able to make a distinctive contribution to the public debates about how to respond to Islamism and violence in the name of Islam. I am well aware that in developing this kind of approach, I will be accused by some of ‘going soft on Islam’. Even if readers disagree with my general approach, however, I hope I have at least asked some of the right questions.