We can't keep pretending that acts of terror are nothing to do with Islam

“Nothing to do with Islam.” These are words you can reliably expect to hear time and time again after every terrorist atrocity, be it in Paris, Brussels or Westminster. When the flurry of social media outrage dies down, we will look to understand and rationalise the situation, trying to work out what drove somebody like 52-year-old Khalid Masood to drive a car over a bridge, killing and wounding innocent people and causing devastation in a mere 82 seconds.


Understanding why it happened is, of course, the mature and sensible thing to do – far more worthy than the rush to gush one’s every emotion on social media, playing out a drama laden with hash tags and emojis in the hope that with enough likes, shares and retweets we can feel sufficiently part of the whole sorry episode. But there is a problem; an Islam-shaped elephant in the room as we try to explain how all this came to pass. No-one wants to admit a difficult truth: Islam has a problem, and a big one. We will be told that Masood was only a convert to Islam, and that he was a violent criminal long before his conversion. Baroness Warsi will pop up on the Andrew Marr show and insist that there are extremists in every religion, and that Masood could have been a Hindu or Buddhist and still carried out such a horrendous act of violence. Over and over again we will be told that none of this has anything whatsoever to do with Islam, with the highlighting of Islam as the common denominator greeted with howls of anguish about Islamophobia and the targeting of ‘ordinary Muslims.’

Whilst we continue to perpetuate this ridiculous denial of the nature of the problem we’re facing, we’re never going to get to grips with it. It is simply astonishing that intelligent people are unable to comprehend the fact that a phenomenon can have everything to do with a belief system, and nothing to do with how a vast majority interpret that belief system. Baroness Warsi and her like are allowed to get away with it by a media too cowed to really push them. Where is the Christian, Hindu or Atheist jihad taking place exactly? They are allowed to go unchallenged in making the argument that one can take any holy text and use it to perpetuate an extremist ideology, apparently without need to address the question of why that has only happened with one faith, one holy text.

The worst thing about all this is that it does the greatest disservice of all to Muslims themselves. It fuels anger towards them among a public that can clearly see the illogicality of the ‘not Islam narrative.’ The deniers take the focus away from those Muslims who are outspoken in their desire for peace and non-violence, and critical of radical elements. IT makes us look and sound like deluded fools – and that, frankly, is what we are. If we actually acknowledged that features of Islamic theology exist that can be manipulated to create narratives that justify such appalling acts of violence, we could then have a meaningful conversation about the different ways that theology could be interpreted, giving the more widely-held, non-violent interpretations a greater prominence in public discourse. The idea of a large number of good Muslims and a small number of bad ones makes for a much better starting point for sifting fact from fiction and challenging public prejudice, than the facile pretence that there are nice Muslims and then there are people who are Muslims but who actually aren’t Muslims but who call themselves Muslims and do nasty things. It is a truly absurd situation: an unholy alliance between too many Muslims well-meaningly trotting out the ‘not Islam’ line in order to personally distance themselves from the horrors of what has happened in the name of their faith, and bleeding heart liberals who find the fatuous denial of the link with Islam and the illusion that the violence is random make life so much easier. Why, after all, should they have to challenge that view and engage with complexity? The next time it happens they’ll be able to put the world right with another vacuous hash tag.