David Kilcullen
Addresses the 2014 John Bonython Lecture
Click here to download or view the PDF file
I want first to thank the Centre for Independent Studies for the
opportunity to be part of this event, with its rich tradition of
provocative debate. I want to thank the team for organising
this, and for your wonderful welcome. Most importantly, I want to
thank all of you for coming out to be part of this discussion.
My topic is ‘What are we fighting for? Islamism and the threat to
liberal values’. I’m going to approach it through three questions that
are simple to ask, but extraordinarily complex to answer:
• What’s the ideology that drives groups like al Qaeda or the
Islamic State?
• Where did ISIS come from?
• What should we be doing about it?
First, though, let me define my terms. By Islamic State, I mean
the organisation whose Arabic name is ad-Dawla al-Islamiyah fi ‘
Iraq wal Sham (now becoming widely referred to in the West as
da’ish, or Daesh), led by Abubakr al Baghdadi, now calling itself
ad-Dawla al-Islamiyah or al-Khilafa, the Caliphate. I’ll use the
What are we fighting for? Islamism and the threat to liberal values
acronym ISIS for this group, which fields more than 30,000 fighters.
It controls a network of a dozen cities, populations and territory
across about a third each of Iraq and Syria, owns economic assets
that make it the richest terrorist group on the planet, and is
expanding into the wider region, reinvigorating Islamist terrorism
worldwide and radicalising fringe members of our own societies,
of whom thousands are fighting alongside the group.
When I use the word Islam, I mean the second largest religion
in the world, with 1.6 billion followers, founded by the prophet
Muhammad. ‘Islamic’ refers to characteristics of that religion, and a
‘Muslim’ is someone who follows it. Islamism, on the other hand,
is a political ideology that seeks to propagate a particular form of
the religion, shape society around it, and (often) use violence to force
it on others.
Two other terms I’ll use are salafi-jihadist and takfir. A salafi
is someone who emulates early Muslims, as-salaf as-salih, the
righteous ancestors, hence ‘salafi’. The salafi movement arose in the
19th century as an effort to reassert a strict interpretation of Islam
in the face of colonialism, and experienced a revival—which some
call neo-salafism—in the 1960 after the failure of Arab nationalism
and socialism in the post-colonial Middle East. There are millions
of Salafis, most of whom don’t personally use violence, but some do
use violence to spread their beliefs within the framework of a global
religious war—a jihad—and we call that subgroup salafi-jihadist.
When I talk about liberal values, I’m not speaking of what people
in the United States call ‘Progressive’ politics, but about something
older, more basic, namely the tenets of 19th and 20th century classical
liberalism that shaped the societies we live in—individual freedom
and accountability, civil liberties, limited government, the rule
of law, free-market economics tempered by regulation, equality
of opportunity, religious toleration, the removal of violence from
politics. We differ about how to apply these ideas—how limited
should government be, how much regulation is appropriate, what
safety net should the state provide, how should we balance economic
opportunity with social justice—but these surface differences obscure
a fundamental consensus in our societies around these values.
Addresses the 2014 John Bonython Lecture
Click here to download or view the PDF file
 |
| Click image to view the Document |
I want first to thank the Centre for Independent Studies for the
opportunity to be part of this event, with its rich tradition of
provocative debate. I want to thank the team for organising
this, and for your wonderful welcome. Most importantly, I want to
thank all of you for coming out to be part of this discussion.
My topic is ‘What are we fighting for? Islamism and the threat to
liberal values’. I’m going to approach it through three questions that
are simple to ask, but extraordinarily complex to answer:
• What’s the ideology that drives groups like al Qaeda or the
Islamic State?
• Where did ISIS come from?
• What should we be doing about it?
First, though, let me define my terms. By Islamic State, I mean
the organisation whose Arabic name is ad-Dawla al-Islamiyah fi ‘
Iraq wal Sham (now becoming widely referred to in the West as
da’ish, or Daesh), led by Abubakr al Baghdadi, now calling itself
ad-Dawla al-Islamiyah or al-Khilafa, the Caliphate. I’ll use the
What are we fighting for? Islamism and the threat to liberal values
acronym ISIS for this group, which fields more than 30,000 fighters.
It controls a network of a dozen cities, populations and territory
across about a third each of Iraq and Syria, owns economic assets
that make it the richest terrorist group on the planet, and is
expanding into the wider region, reinvigorating Islamist terrorism
worldwide and radicalising fringe members of our own societies,
of whom thousands are fighting alongside the group.
When I use the word Islam, I mean the second largest religion
in the world, with 1.6 billion followers, founded by the prophet
Muhammad. ‘Islamic’ refers to characteristics of that religion, and a
‘Muslim’ is someone who follows it. Islamism, on the other hand,
is a political ideology that seeks to propagate a particular form of
the religion, shape society around it, and (often) use violence to force
it on others.
Two other terms I’ll use are salafi-jihadist and takfir. A salafi
is someone who emulates early Muslims, as-salaf as-salih, the
righteous ancestors, hence ‘salafi’. The salafi movement arose in the
19th century as an effort to reassert a strict interpretation of Islam
in the face of colonialism, and experienced a revival—which some
call neo-salafism—in the 1960 after the failure of Arab nationalism
and socialism in the post-colonial Middle East. There are millions
of Salafis, most of whom don’t personally use violence, but some do
use violence to spread their beliefs within the framework of a global
religious war—a jihad—and we call that subgroup salafi-jihadist.
When I talk about liberal values, I’m not speaking of what people
in the United States call ‘Progressive’ politics, but about something
older, more basic, namely the tenets of 19th and 20th century classical
liberalism that shaped the societies we live in—individual freedom
and accountability, civil liberties, limited government, the rule
of law, free-market economics tempered by regulation, equality
of opportunity, religious toleration, the removal of violence from
politics. We differ about how to apply these ideas—how limited
should government be, how much regulation is appropriate, what
safety net should the state provide, how should we balance economic
opportunity with social justice—but these surface differences obscure
a fundamental consensus in our societies around these values.
No comments:
Post a Comment