Making sense of madness

The news that the July 7 bombers were British highlights a wide range of issues: too many to adequately address here.

The media, it seems, is struggling to find the right tone and language. There is a desire to preserve the liberal consensus and to highlight the exceptional and unrepresentative nature of the acts and the perpetrators. Yet repeatedly muslims are described in the language of the other. The muslim communities (I would contend that there is no single muslim community) are questioned in terms of their failure; as if these communities remain loosely appended additions to British society rather than an integral part, tightly enmeshed with its fabric.

Let us not be naive: there is a large element of truth, not because muslims exclude themselves but because it is from jobs, welfare provision, education and many other facets of British life that they are excluded. These cannot be ignored as contributory factors explaining (though, of course not justifying) the actions of these isolated, hitherto unknown, invisible individuals.

Communities are both defined and self-defining. Benedict Anderson described nations as Imagined Communities. Similarly, the borders of ethnic and religious communities have borders that have an element of the imaginary, whether than delineation happens within the minds of the majority population or those of the minority.

An interesting dimension of the nature of the the muslim community is the way that both leaders within the community, certain elements within it, and external commentators seek to define muslims as exclusively religious rather than culturally muslim. This highlights the limitations of our common understanding and a constraint and distorting factor upon dialogue and debate.

Of course, like Christians, Jews, Hindus or, for that matter, Zoarastrians there are those who are orthodox and observant, those who are moderately religious, and those who have little or no interest in the religion into which they were born, other than to make occasional observances once or twice a year. Some may have total belief, others will display none.

This latter group, larger than many in the media or the broad community would acknowledge, is largely overlooked. I highlight it for a number of reasons. First of all, because it highlights the reductive nature of the debate and of making judgements regarding a diverse group of British people.

To hear commentators speak or to read many blogs one would think that young British muslims all live in enclosed communities, are homophobic, discriminatory and their lives are determined entirely by religion. Unfortunately, this is the view of many who would see themselves on the revolutionary left. They would ignore the fact that many have extremely liberal views, have diverse friends, gay and straight, have varying strengths of religious commitment, go clubbing and with varying frequency to the mosque and feel nothing but revulsion at religiously or politically inspired violence. How do I know this? Because they are my children and their friends? I am fortunate to live in a mixed family.

My step-daughter, in the course of lively, stimulating and humerous discussions, often teases her godless atheist step-father. I sometimes do the same back but she knows I support and respect her in all she does, and that includes the practice of her faith, something she does lightly but with real seriousness. Young women like her are off the radar of the pro-war 'left' - let alone the right.

I am not saying this to contrast a more 'liberal' Islam with more traditional forms. I highlight my step-daughters case because one of the things that unites her and her more religious sisters is that the media and others will ask her to comment on or condemn the bombers, as if they had some responsibility for them and their actions, simply because they are co-religionists.

No one makes these demands of C of E parisioners because ant-abortionists bomb clinics, of catholics because of the Real IRA, or of hindus because of JVP-led violence. Nor should they.

However, for the pro-War left, Islam is all of a piece. One should not work with muslims in organisations like Respect. For these groups most politically active muslims are Islamists.

There is of course a political phenomenon called Islamism and it does have a violent wing. Moreover, there is undeniably support for the actions of resistance movements and varying degrees of support for the various forms that violence takes. Yet for many on the left there is no differentiation between those whose Islam is an inspiration for general political action and the motivations of the suicide bomber.

The morality and political consequences of terrorist practice is an issue that merits independent analysis. Yet it is worth asking the question of why young men should turn to such actions and examining the nature of the relationship between such individuals and wider Islamic political movements.

The term chosen by many bloggers and columnists is that of Islamofascism. Hitchens, Aaronovitch and Cohen have all adopted this term. Lenin examines this usage in a characteristically useful contribution. Tariq Ali, a critic of the war and of imperialist activities, suggests that Islamo-Anarchism is a more appropriate descriptor.

This is unfair to most anarchists who would see the state but not ordinary working people as a target for different forms of direct action.

But in another sense Ali seems to be on the right track. Perhaps a better analogy is the terrorist groups of the 1970s such as Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army Faction, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weathermen. These, it is undeniable, grew out of the left and the Movement of the Sixties. The participants in such groups were frequently middle class, isolated, demoralised, pessimistic of the possibility of mass action or social transformation. Substituting themselves for a working class for which they had contempt such organisations frequently became solopsistic death cults, unable to see beyond their own limited experience and disappointments.

If anything that is where the parallels and lessons are to be learned. Not asking questions of innocent members of communities and groups who bear no responsibility for the actions of a small number of disaffected young men.