Extremism : a qualified defence

As before, this is a long post. See here for context.

“If we want to defeat the extremism, we have got to defeat its ideas and we have got to address the completely false sense of grievance against the West.”

Tony Blair, speaking in 2006

206,000 – Iraq Body Count's figure for total violent deaths in Iraq since the invasion, supported by the Blair government.

On 22^nd May 2013 in Woolwich, south London, Fusilier Lee Rigby, a British soldier, was murdered in the street by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale. In an attack of harrowing brutality, Adebolajo and Adebowale, attempted to behead the 25 year-old drummer with a cleaver. They subsequently charged at police with this weapon and a revolver and were shot, in both cases non-fatally. They were both convincted of murder, and received long jail sentences.

It transpired that Adebolajo and Adebowale were converts to Islam from Christianity. There followed a good deal of soul searching in parliament and in the press about 'extremism'. Following the Rigby killing, David Cameron announced the formation of a task force on extremism, chaired by himself and including other ministers and security chiefsⁱ. This produced a report in December 2013, 'Tackling Extremism in the UK', which borrowed the understanding of extremism used in the Prevent strategyⁱⁱ:

Vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. We also include in our definition of extremism calls for the death of members of our armed forces, whether in this country or overseas.

It shouldn't need spelling out that this definition is not only slippery, but could easily be used to justify counting as extremist, and therefore the legitimate object of state censure, a dazzling variety of political creeds. Revolutionary socialism and anarchism are not safe, being opposed to 'democracy' in the sense in which the report's authors intend that word, although certainly not in a more expansive sense. Proponents of non-violent direct action could fall foul of the stipulation that opposition to the 'rule of law' is extremist. 'Individual liberty' is such an ill-defined notion that it is hazardous to even speculate how wide the net could fall here. Meanwhile, unless one is prepared to rule out a priori that the UK could be involved in an unjust war – to put it mildly, a morally questionable position – it is difficult to see how one could avoid the belief that it some circumstances calling for the defeat of its armed forces is fully justified. None of these positions lead inexorably to the bombing of underground trains or the murder of soldiers in the street. The liberality with which British police forces have labelled political activists as 'domestic extremists', and monitored them accordingly, shows that these are not merely abstract worriesⁱⁱⁱ. One might be led to conclude that the problem with Adebolajo and Adebowale was not that they were extremists, but that they were cold-blooded killers. One of the problems, in fact, with the current obsession with the language of extremism is that it makes such commonplace ethical judgements sound exceptional.

The tendency of anti-terror legislation to be subject to mission creep should make us wary here; there is a history of measures first justified in terms of preventing bombings ending up being used against protestors and other activists^iv. For the time being, however, the government have clear targets in their sights. These are primarily certain Muslims. Thus,

There is a range of extremist individuals and organisations, including Islamists,

the far right and others. As the greatest risk to our security comes from Al Qa’ida and like minded groups, and terrorist ideologies draw on and make use of extremist ideas, we believe it is also necessary to define the ideology of Islamist extremism.^v

There follows what, one assumes, the report's authors suppose to be just such a definition of this ideology,

This is a distinct ideology which should not be confused with traditional religious practice.

It is an ideology which is based on a distorted interpretation of Islam, which betrays Islam’s peaceful principles, and draws on the teachings of the likes of Sayyid Qutb. Islamist extremists deem Western intervention in Muslim-majority countries as a ‘war on Islam’, creating a narrative of ‘them’ and ‘us’. They seek to impose a global Islamic state governed by their interpretation of Shari’ah as state law, rejecting liberal values such as democracy, the rule of law and equality. Their ideology also includes the uncompromising belief that people cannot be Muslim and British, and insists that those who do not agree with them are not true Muslims.^vi

This passage is notable for reasons other than the curious suggestion that the language of 'them' and 'us' around Western intervention in the Middle East is the preserve of Islamist extremists; those with long enough memories will recall George W. Bush's declaration to the US Congress, “Either you are with us or you're with the terrorists”^vii. More generally, there is a long history of Occidental construction of the Islamic 'east' as 'other', and in as much as the hateful followers of Qutb do indeed demonise the West, they are occupying a political dualism with a rich imperial history^viii. Of deeper interest is the succinct statement of the problem state power has with those it describes as Islamic extremists, their creed is incompatible with 'liberal values such as democracy, the rule, of law and equality', that is it is incompatible with citizenship, with the commitments necessary for consent to the liberal state. Moreover, it cannot cohabit with the state's main ideological self-justification, nationalism: 'people cannot be Muslim and British'. The state, as we will see, is a jealous god, admitting rivals no more than does the God of the decalogue^ix. There are many excellent reasons for despising the reactionary butchers of Al Qa’ida; that they do not go along with the self-justification of a Western order responsible for several orders of magnitude more deaths than the amateur terrorists is not one of them.

Then there is the focus on Islam. In spite of the politically correct insistence that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims^x, the latter being signed up to an Islamism that 'is based on a distorted interpretation of Islam, which betrays Islam’s peaceful principles', the report goes on to advocate community-level measures to tackle extremism and encourage 'integration' which can only serve to point to finger of suspicion at Muslims in general. 'Integration' is a polite racist trope; appeals to the need for integration are routinely framed so as to place the burden of integration on minority ethnic and religious groups^xi. It does not occur for one moment that, say, relatively well-off white East Londoners moving to Essex citing as justification that 'the area changed' might represent a failure to integrate.

Taking Islam to Extremes

What though is extremism? This naively simple, yet contextually vital, question rarely gets posed, still less answered. Extremism, one supposes, is reckoned to be much like evil or a bad karaoke performance, in that failure to recognise a case casts doubt on the judgement, perhaps even the character, of the observer. Some concepts, it might be insisted, are so basic that it is fruitless to seek definitions or explications. Their possession is part of the basic cognitive equipment we need to function as thinkers, or as moral agents. Only sceptics or trouble-makers would be impious enough to try their analytical luck here. This might well be true; it is, meanwhile, certainly true that behind many such supposedly basic concepts lurks ideology. This is undoubtedly the case with 'extremism'.

As it happens, a plausible definition of extremism is not hard to think up. An extremist, surely, is just someone who does something in an extreme fashion – taking it supremely seriously, allowing it to take precedence over all other considerations, brooking no moderation, making no allowances for the sensibilities of those who do not share their passion. An extreme fan might name her firstborn son after the entire Celtic squad. An extreme campanologist spends every moment of their leisure time seeking out new towers in which to ring. Similarly an extreme socialist wants socialism, proper socialism, as soon as possible, and cuts no deals with reformists. An extremist about anything is basically a super-charged practitioner of that thing, distinguishable from the more louche non-extremists in virtue solely of zeal and single-mindedness.

But then again 'extremism' seems sometimes to be a matter of belief rather than practice, to return once more to that deeply problematic opposition. An extreme believer believes everything offered for her assent by some belief system – a theory, a religion, or a political creed. She does not water the system down in order to accommodate herself to intellectual fashion. If there is a conflict between the system and widely accepted ideas, the system wins. Moreover, in as much as her beliefs have implications for her actions, she tries her utmost to follow through these implications. She is systematic, coherent, and integrated, a living insult to those who believe that the truth always lies midway between two extremes, that compromise is desirable, and that there is a danger in taking things too far. What I have just described as the extremist's opposite is, very arguably, the explicit ideology of a good proportion of the English ruling class; moderate, pragmatic, and dull, it was at times nonetheless the creed of an Empire whose bloodshed makes al Qaeda look like an irrelevance.

What then about the extremist Muslims by whom, politicians and media alike would have us believe, we are so desperately threatened? They are, if what I've said above is along the right lines, Muslims who take Islamic practice and belief to extremes. But now we are off on a train of thought whose conclusion is alarming: for if the extremists who are rampaging across Syria and Iraq, or who plot the slaughter of commuters, are to be understood as simply Muslims who take their Islam more seriously than most, it follows that the potential for all this carnage was always-already there in Islam. It is, in other words, Islam itself that is the problem. This line of argument finds enthusiastic champtions. Sam Harris, in a lecture given at a Congregational Church at Berkley (not, it has to be said, an obvious platform for the most hyperactive of the New Atheists) said this,

"Religion" is a nearly useless term. It's a term like "sports". Now there are sports like Badminton and sports like Thai Boxing, and they have almost nothing in common apart from breathing. There are sports that are just synonymous with the risk of physical injury or even death … There is, I'm happy to say, a religion of peace in this world, but it's not Islam. The claim that Islam is a religion of peace that we hear ceaselessly reiterated is completely delusional. Now Jainism actually is a religion of peace. The core principle of Jainism is non-violence. Gandhi got his non-violence from the Jains. The crazier you get as a Jain, the less we have to worry about you. Jain extremists are paralysed by their pacifism. Jain extremists can't take their eyes off the ground when they walk lest they step on an ant... Needless to say they are vegetarian. So the problem is not religious extremism, because extremism is not a problem if your core beliefs are truly non-violent. The problem isn't fundamentalism. We often hear this said; these are euphemisms... The only problem with Islamic fundamentalism are the fundamentals of Islam.^xii

It might be remarked that the man who is supposed to be one of America's foremost public intellectuals could have spared himself some confusion over the usefulness of the word 'religion' by reading Wittgenstein's well-known reflections on the word 'game'^xiii. But Harris' disingenuous shift in focus from religion, which in other contexts he is quite happy to hammer uniformly, to Islam serves a reprehensible dual purpose. On the one hand, it points the finger of suspicion at each Muslim woman, man, and child on the planet. Like dangerous psychopaths, we are to suppose, every single one of these nurses a murderous potential in their heart. Who knows when it could manifest its true nature? Perhaps we'd be better off without them; certainly we don't want any more of them. It's a surprisingly short step from the reflections of Harris and his ilk to the genocidal logic of street fascists. On the other hand, the idea that there is a problem with Islam that threatens peace, and therefore global security, which gets support from the thought that extreme Islam is proper Islam, accrues credibility for the clash of civilisations narrative which still informs US foreign policy^xiv. Whatever debate there might be about the relationship of Islam to peace, I suggest the situation is clearer in the case of the Pentagon. Sam Harris stands to the movement for global peace much as does Tony Blair to the cause of modesty.

There will be more to be said in a later chapter about the prevalent suspicion of Islam, as well as about the claim, sometimes issuing from within Islam itself, that the religion is in need of a reformation. For the present, another aspect of the discourse around extremism deserves attention. As this has been described up to this point, extremism is a state of religious belief or practice. The adjective 'extreme' serves to modify a term for a practice or belief-system, as in 'extreme Islam'. But notice how static and given the practice of Islam is taken to be in the dominant discourse about Islamic extremism. There just is this thing, Islam, which has a transhistorical essence, given in advance of human agency, socio-political context, or the interplay of ideas: the only question remains whether this essence will manifest itself in a moderate or an extreme fashion. The burden of the state and the liberal intelligentsia is that of attempting to stop Islam from manifesting its immutable nature.

This is a travesty of the truth about religions and how they are manifest in history and society. Religions are human practices. They are therefore, by their very nature located in history, and do not exist apart from their particular instances. It's not as though there's something called 'Judaism', and then there's this people doing these things with this history. No, Judaism is these people doing these things with this history. There is no Platonic Form of Judaism, or Christianity, or Islam, standing over and against the world of human beings, their thoughts, their prayers, their feasts and their fasts^xv. As human practices they interact with, are conditioned by, and themselves condition the structures and struggles, ideas and ideologies of human societies as these develop, and are revolutionised, historically. There is also, of course, continuity through change. To be sure the Islam of 21^st century Brick Lane looks very different from that of 7^th century Mecca. But then the motor car looks very different from the horse-drawn cart. The kind of religion opinion-formers are fond of calling 'extreme' is not, so to speak, an ahistorical essence played at maximum volume; instead it is the working out of a particular history in a particular context.

Can any sense at all be made of the concept of extremism, then, or should it be given up as irreducibly ideological, if not straightforwardly nonsensical, as unhelpful and inapplicable a concept as 'discerning Coldplay enthusiast'? I think some sense can be salvaged on the basis of the reflection that religious practices exist in societies structured by class, overseen by state power, and infused with ideology. There is, therefore, a status quo, even if – as at present – it is the contradiction-ridden status quo of restless capital accumulation, upon which the state struggles to impose the necessary social order like an owner straining to control a vicious dog. Religion must position itself with respect to this status quo; to borrow Sartre's phrase 'not to choose is to choose'^xvi. The religious organisation or individual that makes no conscious political decision sides with the world as it is^xvii. But to the extent that religion opposes itself to the world as it is, it is extreme^xviii. By the very fact of its very existence in modern society, religion is thrown into a state of conflict readiness with regard to that society. If it follows through on this, even to the minimal extent of calling into question aspects of existing society, it is in due measure extreme, in terms of our first pass at a definition of extremism. Religion becomes a tribunal over and above society, its concerns take precedence over those of the moderate world in general. This is, of course, perfectly compatible with that world itself having given rise to this extremism by way of reaction. Ian Paisley, denouncing Pope John Paull II (a man who himself had extremist moments) as the Antichrist in the European parliament, was undoubtedly an extremist^xix. There is, however, a tragic and bloodstained social history behind this extremism – one notable feature of which is that the hateful brand of religion Paisley dispensed was socially dominant, and therefore not extreme in my terms, in parts of Ireland during the 20^th century, and served the purposes of the eminently reasonable and moderate British state all the while^xx.

It would be an injustice to extremists everywhere to close this section in a manner that allowed Ian Paisley to function as the archetype of the genre. To gesture towards the fundamental political ambiguity of religious extremism, then (a topic to which we'll return at the end of this chapter), I propose some words from a letter Martin Luther King Jr wrote from Birmingham Jail, Alabama. They deserve quotation at length^xxi.

But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus and extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like am ever-flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus."... So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvery's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime -- the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth, and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation, and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

They were, and they still are.

Radicalisation – the root of terror?

In tandem with the frequent outings the word 'extremism' has enjoyed in recent years, its partner 'radicalisation' has often been wheeled out for added effect. Consider the case of Mohammed Emwazi, a young man who grew up in West London and worked for a while in the IT industry^xxii. Emwazi is better known by his tabloid nickname 'Jihadi John', given to him initially by some of his hostages, before his true identity was generally known^xxiii. A fighter with ISIS, Emwazi has appeared in a number of the harrowing beheading videos which have become that group's best known form of propaganda. He is implicated in the murders of numerous people. Once his identity and background were revealed, there was an astonishing level of collective soul-searching over how it was that such an ordinary-sounding early life had led up to such horror (the suppressed premise here, that ordinary people don't do grotesque things, deserves a good deal more interrogation than it has had).

One option when seeking explanations of individual evil is to suggest that the snake was always in the garden, that contrary to appearances there was always some demonic urge to destroy hidden away in that person's soul. As we've already seen, a name some contemporary liberals give to this is 'Islam'. Freud, on the other hand, thought the phenomenon was rather more general than we might care to imagine, as arguably did St Augustine. Be that as it may, there is something quite comforting for the status quo in the supposition that Emwazi and his brutal ilk were rotten from the word go. We, whether 'we' are policymakers, generals, intelligence bosses, capitalists, educators, or society in general, are thereby absolved from any sins of omission. There is nothing we could have done to halt an evil that is as without cause as God himself^xxiv. That his observation that Emwazi had been a 'beautiful young man' driven into the arms of ISIS by the actions of the security services shattered this comforting illusion of radical evil, explains the outrage directed at Asim Qureshi of the campaigning group Cage^xxv.

This outrage went right to the top of parliamentary politics. Commenting on Qureshi's remarks, David Cameron said,

It is completely reprehensible to suggest that anyone who carries out such brutal murders – they are the ones responsible and we should not be seeking to put blame on other people, particularly those who are working to keep British citizens safe^xxvi.

The fallacious assertion that explaining behaviour involves excusing that behaviour is a familiar conservative response to the proposal that social accounts of individual wrongdoing are available, as we've already seen. Yet official ideology is not consistent at this point, for at the very same time politicians and opinion columnists were castigating Cage's account of the birth of Emwazi's violence, they were scrabbling around in the known fragments of his biography, desperately trying to devise a story of their own. The question which haunted these attempts was 'when was Emwazi radicalised?', the hope being that an answer to this might point the way to preventing future radicalisations.

Educational institutions became the objects of intense scrutiny. Emwazi's former headteacher was dragged out to reassure us that, he 'showed no signs of radicalisation' whilst at school^xxvii. His university received far more attention. The Daily Mail carried reports of gender segregated meetings and support for the 9/11 attacks at the University of Westminster – although their source was professional anti-extremist, UKIP election strategist and founder of the Student Rights group, Raheem Kassan^xxviii. Others claimed discrimination against LGBT people at Westminster by Islamic extremists and described being made to feel 'uncomfortable' by 'pro-politically Islamist (sic) views'^xxix.

Universities have been the focus of a good amount of the discussion about prevention of radicalisation. This antedates the rise of ISIS by many years and has its immediate origins in the response to 9/11 and the July 2005 London bombings ; witness the 2005 release of the Social Affairs Unit's so-called Glees Report, which suggested that twenty three UK educational institutions were at particular risk of nurturing terrorists^xxx. The target has proved a slippery one, and a lot of attention has been given to, for example, gender segregation at meetings, the connection of which to political violence, it is fair to say, has not been established. Even less concrete are accusations that 'extreme' Muslims make others – lesbian, gay, and transgender people – feel uncomfortable^xxxi. This network of insinuation, fear, and the need to defend 'our' (liberal, pluralist, sexually open) values against 'them' looks like nothing more than racism. And that is exactly what it is, as the next chapter will suggest. In the meanwhile, I do not want to be misunderstood: it is vital that the gains of feminism and LGBT liberation be defended. That is not to be done, however, through bans on opponents, still less by throwing accusations at an already discriminated against religious minority. It is scarcely ever registered that there are Muslims, visible Muslims, whom a primed observer might think 'radical' or 'extreme', who are also women or gay. Still less frequently is it considered that these people might have voices of their own. There are lesbians who wear the hijab^xxxii. There are lesbian and gay Palestinian Muslims who object to the pinkwashing tactic of portaying the state of Israel as a vanguard of liberal freedom^xxxiii.The concept of intersectionality has yet to arrive in the anti-radicalisation camp. In any case, whatever the weavers of moral panic about radicalisation might have us believe, the freedoms gained since the 1960s have white-skinned opponents in the Conservative Party, UKIP, the media, and, for that matter, the Established Church with far more power to effect reaction than a speaker at a university Islamic society. It is the Bullingdon Club at the University of Oxford, not the Islamic Society at the University of Westminster which poses the greater threat to our future happiness.

The focus on universities gets official sanction from the Home Office Prevent strategy. Called in full 'Preventing Violent Extremism', although in fact explicitly encompassing in its remit 'non-violent extremists', Prevent is the UK government's post-9/11 strategy for combatting radicalisation. 'Further and higher education institutions' are a key area of its operations^xxxiv. A report by the Association of Chief Police Officers explains the rationale for the attention to universities,

The UK has experienced a number of terrorist incidents since 2001, some of which had a great impact or had the potential for a great impact. They affect the lives of those involved, those who view them through the media and they also affect the economy significantly. Analysis of the perpetrators indicates that the average age at the time of their arrest was 25; most were educated in British schools and colleges and many had studied at British universities. Most exhibited degrees of vulnerability, prior to being radicalised^xxxv.

The report also factors in opposition from academics and students to the operation of Prevent at universities. In order to understand this, it is important to understand that levels of suspicion of the police were already high at British universities in 2012, the year of the report's publication, owing to the actions of police around the wave of action against fees and cuts that had taken place in 2011^xxxvi. Students had been arrested, searched, kettled, and battered; widespread police surveillance, often by plain clothes officers, had taken place, and much of this had happened under the remit of countering extremism (even to the extent that counter-terrorism officers had been involved^xxxvii). The discourse of countering religious radicalisation does not occur in a political vacuum. Specific concerns about Prevent clustered around the stigmatising of Muslims; there were reports of university staff being asked to inform on 'depressed or isolated' Muslim students^xxxviii. The present author spent much of his university career feeling depressed and isolated – hardly an uncommon condition amongst young adults – but that was a while ago, and anyway skin colour and creed ^xxxix would probably have kept me from the state's no doubt laudible concern for students' mental well-being.

I was, however, radicalised at university, politically and religiously. Politically, I had absorbed a general left-wing outlook from my family, and turned up at university having read a bit of Marx and rather more Tony Benn. In the subsequent years, I went on demonstrations, discussed political theory with reformists and revolutionaries alike, encountered levels of poverty and racism from which I'd been sheltered in childhood, and in many other ways was formed into the kind of person who writes a book like the present one. Then again, I began to think about religious ideas, and their relationship to the political, in new ways^xl. This is what happens at universities: people meet ideas, have new experiences, are changed, and, sometimes, radicalised. I certainly don't regret my own radicalisation for one moment; the existence of social spaces which permit radicalisation is precious, and we should defend it against both the neoliberal vision of universities as training schemes for middle managers and the Prevent vision of them as places where unwelcome questioning is curtailed.

But what is it to be radicalised anyway? The word 'radical' derives from the Latin radix, meaning 'root'. But the root of what? To become a radical, that is to be radicalising, might be thought to involve coming to believe that the world, or a certain society, or a certain religious organisation needs to change at the root, that the fundamentals need to change. On the other hand, a religious radical could be imagined to be someone who advocates a return to the roots of a religion – renewed attention to foundational texts, or figures, or traditions. Typically, in fact, the religious radical is a radical in both senses. On the basis of a re-reading of the relevant religious tradition, she advocates wide-ranging changes to the world about her. That is true of those pioneers of civil rights in the US who appropriated the Exodus narrative in the light of their own experience; it is also true of the likes of Emwazi (even if, given the aforementioned Quranic ignorance of many young reactionary Muslims, it is probably more honest to speak of a reading of the Quran, rather than a re-reading in most cases). As always, however, reading is socially located. That a reader views a text as liberating, or oppressive, as validating politics of the left, or of the right, is conditioned by any number of contextual factors, and cannot be simplistically attributed to the text considered in abstraction from society. There are of course limits, whatever those drunk on the sillier excesses of postmodernism might think. Someone who reads Mein Kampf as an anti-racist tract is just wrong, not a creative interpreter. Not least amongst our current problems is some that opinion formers, on the basis of a heady mix of barely repressed racism and philistinism about religious texts, think that the Quran belongs in a similar category to that evil book.

The radical, much like the extremist, thinks that the world is in need of fundamental change, that mere reformist tinkering around at the edges won't suffice. She is correct. The devil is where he always lurks, in the detail. But the fact that the deluded reactionary Mohammed Emwazi and those brave Christian anarchists who seek to decommission military hardware are both religious radicals is no more a reason to reject all religious radicalism than the fact that Jane Austen and Piers Morgan are both writers is a reason to stop reading books^xli.

The Violence of Moderation

It is not, in any case, as though moderation wasn't complicit in a violence of its own. The extremist challenges an order characterised by capitalist economic relations and the modern state, typically justified in terms of the standard liberal bullet-points 'freedom', 'democarcy', 'enterprise', 'pluralism', and so on. In so doing, she opposes a set-up which, for all its undoubted benefits, is integrally tied up with routinised violence on a scale without rival anywhere in human history. Modern society was born out of bloodshed, of religious reformation backed by force of arms, of revolution, terror, and the forcible creation of a propertyless class (the standard Marxian term for which, 'primitive accumulation', does little to convey the human suffering involved^xlii). It is sustained through force: think of the frequent wars, ever more technologised, that characterise our existence; and then think of the common, unremarkable, violence by means of which property relations are policed. The half-starved homeless person being bundled into a police van for taking food from a supermarket whose annual profits run into the millions is an icon of the true nature of 'moderate', 'non-violent', everyday life. When profit-as-normal is threatened, by the inept counter-violence of riots or insurrection, still more by the threat of revolution, then out come the water cannon, tear gas, and plastic bullets; out come the 'real' bullets, the states-of-emergency, and the internment. Out comes, in the last resort, fascism, a phenomenon which cannot be adequately understood until it is realised that, contrary to its own official ideology, its function is to preserve capitalist social relations^xliii. Ordinary life is founded on violence, and moderation, in that it tailors thought and practice for ordinary life, serves to legitimate that violence.

It is important to think through the ensnarement of moderation by violence, since there is a good deal of conceptual slippage from extremism to violence, to the extent that the 'violent' in 'violent extremism' can sound like tautologous excess. Once the violent nature of actuality is unmasked, new extremist options become available. It is true, of course, that some extremists end up in nihilistically kicking against an order they cannot escape in their own terms, reflecting back that order's intrinsic violence in a concentrated form – thus ISIS, for whom no amount of condemnation is too harsh. Yet, there is always the possibility that a form of extremist opposition to life-as-normal could have as one of its ends the cessation of the mundane violence capitalism requires for its reproduction – thus one kind of socialist tradtion.

Rethinking moderation requires also that we rethink moderate religion. Remember that, for the standard liberal account this is the good sort of religion, less damaging to human beings than the extreme variety. In the story of Margaret Clitherow, we saw how the birth of what would now be considered paradigmatically moderate religion was violent to an extent that would give the most depraved jihadi a run for his money. Moderate religion is, in the main, religion that has repressed its violent origins, much as liberalism is that political ideology that, whilst justifying itself by its capacity to sustain social peace, is premised on the systematic forgetting of the bloody birth of that 'peace'. The ascendence of bourgeois rule typically involved religious violence: whether that was the violence of reformation, or violence against religion as such, as in the French Terror.

Isn't this too hasty, though? A familiar liberal creation myth for the modern state has it that our present political arrangements arose in response to religious violence, and serve to protect us against the return of that violence. As Judith Shklar, quoted by William Cavanaugh has it,

liberalism... was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties. If the faith was to survive at all, it would do so privately. The alternative then set, and still before us, is not one between classical virtue and liberal self-indulgence, but between cruel military and moral repression and violence, and a self-restraining tolerance that fences in the poewrful to protect the freedom and safety of every citizen^xliv.

One doubts that those on the receiving end of drone attacks or truncheon blows dealt by modern states are quite as convinced of the absence of 'cruel military and moral repression' as Shklar seems to imply they should be. It is only from a certain perspective that the move from the Inquisition to Hiroshima is any kind of progress at all^xlv. Cavanaugh himself makes a powerful case, albeit one which in the details doesn't entirely escape the romantic medievalism of the Radical Orthodoxy school, that not only does the liberal myth of origin downplay economic and political factors (one wouldn't, from reading Shklar, think that liberalism had anything to do with middle class ascendancy, which – in its own perception – it doesn't) but also anachronistically imputes a modern concept of religion^xlvi. Rather, the so-called Wars of Religion were not so much caused by 'religion' as they were the birth of religion, understood as a particular part of life, within the modern division of reality described in the previous chapter.

So much for the birth of modern moderate religion. What about the present? So much as it fails to subject existing violence to criticism, allowing perhaps for the occasional expression of concern for 'the poor', moderate religion is complicit in that violence. 'Moderate religion' here denotes not only the typical stance of churches in modernity; it also covers the approved varieties of Islam, eager to 'integrate', and rightly viewed with suspicion by those young Muslims who quite rightly question the value of integrating into a society that offers them the prospect of an uninteresting nine-to-five job by way of compensation for the daily experience of racism, and similar forms of Judaism. Perhaps the darkest complicity of moderate religion in violence lies in its widespread preparedness to countenance war. It was the assent of the Kulturprotestantismus of the early 20^th century to the First World War that caused that century's greatest Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, to reject liberal theology^xlvii; much as the support of the SDF for the same war caused Rosa Luxemberg and Karl Liebnicht to break with that party. The annual display of religious solemnity alongside regimental colours at cenotaphs ought to remind us just how little opposition socially acceptable religion has made to mass slaughter^xlviii. The Dominican friar, Herbert McCabe, defending his support for revolutionary politics against the objection that violence is antithetical to Christian theology writes,

[I]n this matter we should not lose our sense of humour. There is something especially ludicrous about Christian churchmen coming round to the belief that violence is wrong. There is probably no sound on earth so bizarre as the noise of clergymen bleating about terrorism and revolutionary violence while their cathedrals are stuffed with regimental flags and monuments to colonial wars. The Christian Church, with minor exceptions, has been solidly on the side of violence for centuries, but normally it has only been the violence of soldiers and policemen. It is only when the poor catch on to violence that it suddenly turns out to be against the gospel.^xlix

Moderate religion blesses bombs, yet we are told that religion must be moderate to keep us safe from extremist violence.

There is no alternative?

Writing about the politics of anti-extremism in the context of the post-9/11 'war on terror', Arun Kundnami observes,

Extremism is a term particularly amenable to naturalising the status quo. Since at least the French Revolution, politicians have used the accusation of extremism to denounce enemies on their flanks, and to present themselves as occupying a moderate center.^l

To be an extremist is to be opposed, in some way, to things as they are. Yet the word 'extremist' is loaded with normative force. To call someone an extremist is both to identify their position as lying beyond the bounds of the customarily accepted and to offer a rebuke. When the present becomes unpalletable for large numbers of people, a first recourse of those with a vested interest in it is to label anyone who proposes even reforms an 'extremist'. One of the things I recall from the Tony Benn diaries mentioned above is an incident in a train buffet car. Some drunk 'business executives' were there with Benn: 'I queued up... and they were saying 'There's that fucking extremist, Mr Benn'... and kept up an absolute barrage of insulting remarks'^li. It wasn't simply the drink talking; the men were articulating a view common enough in the tabloid press, and for that matter in the higher eschelons of the Labour Party.

These days we're scared not with the thought of pipe-smoking socialists, but of suicide bombers. The alarming associations of the word 'extremist' have been ratcheded up several notches. Yet it remains a warning to those who stray too far from the centre, too far from safety. The left needs to be aware of the ideological work done by this most treacherous of words, to stop adding to its reservoir of force by deploying it against our own enemies – far too often, for instance, anti-fascist groups will describe the BNP and EDL as 'extremists'; it's not as though there's a shortage of other insults that could be deployed to equal effect. Above all we should reclaim the word. The world stands in urgent need of extremists, the right kind of extremists, religious or otherwise. For as long as moderation remains the only option Margaret Thatcher stands vindicated, 'There Is No Alternative'. There is an alternative, extremism, and it has never been needed more.

i'David Cameron launches anti-terror task force to tackle extremism', Press Association, 26^th May 2013.

ii'Tackling Extremism in the UK : Report from the Prime Minister's Task Force on Tackling Radicalisation and Extremism'. HM Government. December 2013.

iii'The day I found out I'm a Domestic Extremist', Jenny Jones MLA, Daily Telegraph, 20^th January 2015.

ivSteve Cooke, 'Animal rights and environmental terrorism', Journal of International Terrorism Research 4(2), 2013.

v'Tackling Extremism in the UK'

viibid.

viiSpeech to US Congress, 20^th September 2001. The line is not without its own theological resonances, c.f. Matthew 12: 30.

viiiSee especially Edward Said, Orientalism, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003).

ixChapter 3 below.

xThe terminology here is paraphrase. But 'good Muslim' and 'bad Muslim' are actually used in Angel Rabasa, Cheryl Bernard, Lowell H. Schwartz and Peter Sickle, Building Moderate Muslim Networks (Santa Monica, CA.: RAND Corporation, 2007).

xiOn integration see Arun Kundnami, The Muslims Are Coming : Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. (London: Verso, 2014), p. 75 ff. Also LENTIN/ TITLEY

xiiSam Harris, Lecture at the First Congregational Church, Berkley, CA. November 10^th, 2010.

xiii

xivThe key text here is Samuel P. Huntington, 'The Clash of Civilizations?', Foreign Affairs 72(3), 1993.

xvThis position is not appropriately described using the over-used term 'anti-essentialism'. It is no part of my claim that religions don't have natures, but rather than these are formed, and changed, in human history. See Marx's views on human nature in the Theses on Feuerbach .

xviSartre

xviiThus Desmond Tutu: 'If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.' Quoted William Quigley, Ending Poverty as we know it : Guaranteeing the right to a job at a living wage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), p.8.

xviiiTo theorise this slightly more carefully: whether or not religious practice is extreme is relative to a context of assessment. Wahabism is not extreme relative a perspective internal to Saudi society; once one's purview is a just about still Western-dominated global order, it is extreme.

xixA theopolitical intervention which is preserved for posterity on the internet: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/09/12/ian-paisley-pope-antichrist_n_5809840.html Accessed 21^st March 2015.

xxWAR AND AN IRISH TOWN . Against those, including Richard Dawkins, who point to the Irish conflict as an instance of the harm done by religion, it is worth emphasising that the division of the Irish national question along religious lines is a relatively recent imperial import. Early Irish nationalists, notably Wolfe Tone, were Protestants.

xxiThe whole letter, dated April 16^th 1963, is available on-line: http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/letter.html

xxiiAlexandra Topping and Nishaat Ismail, 'Who is Mohammed Emwazi? From 'lovely boy' to Islamic State killer', The Guardian, 2^nd March 2015.

xxiiiMegan Levy, 'How London rapper L Jinny became Jihadi John, suspected of beheading James Foley', Sydney Morning Herald, 5^th August 2014.

xxivOn the theological resonances of the concept of evil at work here see Terry Eagleton, FIND REF (HOLY TERROR?)

xxv 'Who is Mohammed Emwazi?'. A Cage report on Emwazi is available at http://www.cageuk.org/article/youre-going-be-followedlife-will-be-harder-you-story-mohammed-emwazi . Accessed 23^rd March 2013.

xxvi'David Cameron condemns Cage over blaming MI5 for radicalisation of Jihadi John', Daily Telegraph, 27^th February 2015.

xxviiSam Rkaina, 'Mohammed Emwazi : Jihadi John's former headteacher says he 'was bullied but showed no signs of radicalisation', Daily Mirror, 2^nd March 2015.

xxviii'Jihadi John's old university was a 'hotbed of radicalism where students celebrated 9/11, claims ex-pupil – and hate preacher was even due to speak there tonight', Mail online, 27^th February 2015. On Kassam see http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/blog/item/5502-the-extreme-anti-extremist-raheem-kassam-s-climate-sceptic-greencease-project . Kassam was employed as UKIP's election strategist for the 2015 UK general election.

xxixhttp://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/02/27/extremist-students-consis_n_6767440.html Accessed 23^rd March 2015.

xxxAnthony Glees and Chris Pope, When Students Turn to Terror : Terrorist and Extremist Activity on British Campuses (London: Social Affairs Unit, 2005).

xxxiOn some of the political concerns around the appeals to 'feeling unsafe' and 'feeling uncomfortable', now endemic in the left around British universities, see http://anonymousrefused.tumblr.com/post/99047385737/for-your-safety-and-security

xxxiiSee, for instance, https://blackfeministsmanchester.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/my-hijab-is-rainbow/ Accessed 27^th March 2015. See also Liz Fekete, A Suitable Enemy : Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe (London: Pluto, 2009), Ch. 3.

xxxiiihttp://electronicintifada.net/content/eight-questions-palestinian-queers-are-tired-hearing/12951 Accessed 27^th March 2015.

xxxiv'Prevent Strategy', HM Government, June 2011.

xxxv'Police, Prevent, and universities. Guidance for police officers and police staff to help Higher Education Institutions contribute to the prevention of terrorism', Association of Chief Police Officers, May 2012.

xxxviFor a sense of this see SPRINGTIME

xxxviiA phenomenon which seems to be ongoing: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/is-prevent-being-used-to-hassle-student-protesters-156 . Accessed 24^th March 2015.

xxxviii

xxxixRyan Gallagher and Rajeev Syal, 'University staff asked to inform on 'vulnerable' Muslim students', The Guardian, 29^th August, 2011,

xlThis was the result of reading a lot of liberation theology. I now think there are insuperable problems with this school of thought, and my own views are now broadly along the lines of Herbet McCabe, 'The class struggle and Christian love' in God Matters (London: Continuum, 1987), pp. 182-98. I will remain forever grateful, though, to liberation theology, whose concern with 'the poor', served to innoculate me against a New Labour which was, in Peter Mandelson's words, 'intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich'.

xli

xliiMark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), Ch. 2 is particularly insightful here.

xliiiMark Neocleous, Fascism, (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997).

xlivJudith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p 5. See also John Rawls, 'Justice as Fairness: Political not metaphysical', Philosophy and Public Affairs 14(3), pp. 223-51, especially p. 249 ff.

xlvIn another sense, of course, there is very genuine and praiseworthy progress from the kind of society which gave rise to the Inquisition and mid-20^th century American society, its just that this very real progress is inseparable from progress, in Adorno's words, 'from the slingshot to the atom bomb'. Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 320.

xlviWilliam T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Discovering the Liturgy as a political act in an age of global consumerism (London: T&T Clark, 2002), Ch. 1.

xlviiOn Barth's theology and politics see Timothy Gorringe, Karl Barth : Against Hegemony (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

xlviiiOf course, the normal response from the moderates here is 'we're not celebrating war, we're honouring the dead'. The comeback is appropriately scriptural, 'they know not what they do'.

xlix'The class struggle and Christian love', p. 196.

l The Muslims Are Coming, p. 68.

liTony Benn, The Benn Diaries : Single Volume Edition, editted by Ruth Winstone (London: Arrow, 1985), p.485.

Religion in a broken world

This post is even longer than the previous one. See here for an explanation.

“Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”

T.S. Eliot – The Journey of the Magi

In the course of a single day a person might catch the train into work, phone some state agency (perhaps to find out her National Insurance number, or to enquire after a passport) during her lunchbreak, and return home in time for Shabbat dinner with her family. In the space of 24 hours she has played three roles: as an employee, a citizen, and as a private individual. In her first role she stands in a relationship to her employer of a sort that is fundamental to the organisation of production in capitalist society, and which is regulated by the state by means of employment law. After the swift lunchtime scene change, she now plays a citizen, dealing with the state directly, in this case as a consumer of its services; in other cases she might interact with the state at the ballot box or at the end of a police officer's truncheonⁱ. Finally she enters the domain where, many would have us believe, she can at last be herself; she is now improvising rather than acting to a script. What she does in private is her own business, and she in fact chooses to spend her time on the day in question engaged simultaneously in two characteristically private pursuits, family life and religion.

If Jaques was correct to declare all the world a stage, the men and women only players, our experience of modernity is like that of some dizzying piece of fringe theatre, where the audience are battered in quick succession with play upon play upon playⁱⁱ. Against claims sometimes still made to the contrary, I do insist that our society remains modern, at least with respect to these crucial divisions, which is to say that it is still bourgeois society. The politics of modernity, instanced by the policing of the boundaries of these divisions, has surfaced, amongst many places, in the standard liberal response to the Charlie Hebdo massacres of January 2015. What one could see as an obscene, culpable, killing spree nonetheless produced by the contradictions of modern society becomes when refracted through the prism of 'Je suis Charlie' a case of failure to respect private freedom. Freedom of speech is something we all have and freedom of speech includes freedom to cause offence. On the insistence of this point turns the inviolable freedom of the sovereign individual. Those less persuaded of the dominant conceptual framework might query the sense of the word 'private' in which the capacity to make available racist cartoons in every corner of the world is a private capacity.

To say that the shattering of our lives into disconnected fragments is modern is, amongst other things, to say that it would not have made sense to anyone who lived before the renaissance. When Aquinas argues that the Church has the power to remove infidel rulers simply because of their lack of faith, he doesn't give the impression of recognising a distinction between persons-as-citizens and persons-as-religiousⁱⁱⁱ. In the Summa Theologica, whilst discussing the question whether judgement is perverted by usurption, he considers the objection that 'spiritual power is distinct from temporal', and whilst acknowledging the distinction in a certain sense, replies that 'the secular power is subject to the spiritual, even as the body is subject to the soul.'^iv The force of this claim is prone to be misunderstood unless one grasps what Aquinas means by 'the soul'. To post-Cartesian ears the phrase invites thoughts of disembodied minds, as distinct from the body as chalk is from cheese. Yet, for Aquinas, following Aristotle, the soul is the form, the essence, of the body. It is that in virtue of which matter constitutes a life. To speak of the soul is simply to observe that matter can be meaningful. And so his claim about the spiritual and temporal powers amounts to an assertion that the Church lives through the Christian realms of this earth, bequeathing them with sense, rescuing from the abyss of meaninglessness that later philosophers would call nihilism. It is not the kind of stuff that would go down well at New Humanist magazine.

What goes at the level of society applies also at the level of the individual. The medieval European is not a Christian, and a husband, and a vassal in any way which involves these roles being purely externally related. It is not as though he might easily be one but not the other. Rather, his religious commitment is expressed both in his marriage (which is understood as a sacrament of the Church) and through his fidelity to the feudal bond. These states-in-life, in turn, constitute and constrain his religiosity. Not without reason, albeit a somewhat ethnocentric reason, does an archaic usage of the word 'Christian' mean simply 'human', and when Shaftesbury writes in his Characteristics of 1711 that 'The word Christian is in common Language us'd for Man, in opposition to Brute-Beast, without leaving so much as a middle place for the poor Heathen or Pagan' he embodies a modernity becoming self-conscious^v. What could be taken as given is no longer so, those roles that once composed an organic unity are now increasingly related in a merely accidental, external fashion. A similar story can be told about the passage from medieval Islamic society to the kind of gulf state where the Adhan sounds through the hotel window whilst an oil executive employs the services of sex workers over a gin and tonic. The attempt to repair the rupture in society and self that goes by the name of fundamentalism identifies correctly a tension here. It is just that, as with so many political remedies, the medicine on offer is much worse than the disease.

The birth of modernity, then, is traumatic. It involves loss and displacement; it gives rise to a new form of polity and a new sort of subjectivity only through imposing deep cleavages at the heart of both. 'All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned', as Marx and Engels describe the impact of the capitalist social relations that are the motor of this giddying tumult^vi. In admitting that the coming-to-be of the age we inhabit involved genuine loss and well as undoubted gain we ought not, of course, to sign up for the kind of faux-sophisticated medieval revivalism that has been perpetrated in continental philosophy of religion under the label Radical Orthodoxy – a movement whose actual radicalism should be assessed in full awareness of the fact that, by means of its acolyte Philip Blond, it has fed directly into the policymaking of the British Conservative Party^vii. Rather, we should acknowledge that there is a genuine cost in the kind of disorientated, diffused, experience of self, and the alienated practice of politics of our current order. At the same time this very wrenching apart of unities brings in its wake the possibility of feminism, LGBT rights, religious pluralism, and many other manifest benefits. Tragically, however, these very real gains are brought about by, and so inseparable from, the equally real losses of the transition to modernity. Just as the surgeon's knife both wounds and heals, and does one through doing the other, so the social supremacy of the bourgeoisie brings with it new possibilities and novel fragmentations, bound tight as fibres of a single thread.

So there are real contradictions^viii in the kind of society we inherit. Our lives as citizens, workers, and 'private individuals', and thus as religious (or non-religious) persons, exist apart from each other. Within each broken part of the social whole lie further estrangements: crucially, our economic life is characterised by the condition of alienated labour^ix and our political life by the fact that our collective life as political animals confronts us as something apart from us, and oppressive of us – the state^x. In the private sphere, so called, our confrontation with gender roles shows how problematic the designation of this part of existence as 'private' actually is: in the most intimate moments of our lives we are ruled, consciously and otherwise, by monsters of society's making.

Religion too, feels itself pulled apart, not only because many of these contradictions, especially those around gender, manifest themselves in it in a particularly sharp way here, but also because religion typically makes a claim on the whole person, structuring her life, and bequesting it with meaning as a narrative unity. Yet when religion exists in a society which relegates it to one particular subdivision of life, banishing it from the rest, whilst also calling into question, intellectually and practically, the very notion of 'the whole person', tensions are inevitably formed. The politics of religion in modern society consists in the attempt to negotiate, abolish, or transcend these tensions. The psalmist's question, 'How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?' is the major query confronting this politics from the religious side of the fence. Amongst the characters on the other side, the dominant ideology is represented by the liberal, whose anxiety-ridden response of sorts is 'How shall we keep political justice safe from unreasonable conceptions of the good?'^xi The leftist who finds herself prone to align herself to the liberal here should at least be aware that socialism, as classically conceived, in being unwilling to sign up to the platitudes of Rawlsian justice, is likely to find itself classed as every bit unreasonable as politicised religion.

The dominant view on religion and politics, therefore, is not simply wrong in speaking of a division between religion and the rest of society. Yet whilst not simply wrong, it is at least wrong, for at least two reasons. First, whilst human life as lived typically lacks the kind of unity of which religion speaks, there remains a desire within us, as the kind of language-using, story-telling, creatures that we are, to lend it that unity – a unity that we can sometimes glimpse, either in the corners of reality that the scythe of capital has yet to harvest, or by negation, through terror at the sheer inhumanity of things as they are. The dominant view lies in as much as it denies possibilities. Second, whilst religion is set apart within the social totality, in being so set apart it remains part of the totality, albeit that this is a totality riven with contradictions, constituting a whole as does a pain of cracked glass. Indeed, the isolation of religion within society is itself the product of a historically specific social configuration; it is social to the core. The observation that the dominant view is both wrong and not wrong, in distinct yet connected senses, identifies it as ideological, a legitimating production of a social reality riven with contradiction, misleading insofar as that reality itself produces the illusions that sustain it.

The production of the practice of religion

The dominant view of religion as non-social acquires a modicum of plausibility if religion is understood as a species of belief^xii. For, one might suppose, there is something intrinsically private and first-personal about belief. Beliefs are, it might further be imagined, pre-social, both in the sense that I come to the business of society-making already in possession of some beliefs, and in that whilst I might very well be deceived about the existence of other people – perhaps I am the victim of some cruel Cartesian deceiver – I can be secure at least in the knowledge that I exist as a believing subject. Now, even in its own terms there is a lot wrong with this line of argument, not least that it ignores the integral relationship of thought, and therefore belief, to that most social of practices, language. Nevertheless, that religion should be understood as belief is a popular supposition. The modern European religion par excellence, Protestant Christianity, is noteworthy for its focus on belief, and for effecting a shift away from the orientation towards bodily practice of medieval Catholicism. At least part of the disquiet about Islam amongst Western liberals is surely traceable to the fact that it dissents from religion's decreed function as a system of (private, non-manifest) beliefs^xiii. While Islam certainly does emphasise belief, as evidenced by the centrality of the Shahada, it does so alongside four other 'pillars' that are visible and practical. Potentially – in the cases of fasting and prayer – they cut into that part of the adherent's time that the modern division of life has set aside for wage labour. Islam refuses to be simply a matter of the mind, of holding certain metaphysical beliefs about which educated people might reasonably disagree. It has this in common with Catholicism and Orthodox Judaism, both of which have also had not a few civilised detractors.

Religion is a social practice: it involves people coming together, performing rituals, charitable acts, wearing certain clothes, fasting, feasting, convening administrative committees, painting icons, lighting candles, spending time in solitude.... These actions, which are intrinsically communal (even deliberately separating oneself from a community, as does the religious hermit, is communal insofar as the action's meaning is communally bestowed), embody beliefs, constitute beliefs, and form subjects as believers. Belief and practice exist in symbiosis, as any adequate theory of ideology admits.

In recognising that religion is a practice, we admit that it is material, and therefore constrained. In particular, it is conditioned by the material and social circumstances in which it finds itself situated. This does not mean – to pre-empt a likely misreading – that religion is determined by more fundamental social realities, so that all those prayers and homilies are no more than epiphenomena, say, of the economy. It is, firstly, to make the mundane, but often ignored point, that if one is going to sustain a religious organisation for any length of time, its members need to stay alive, and so need to eat, find shelter, be kept safe, and so on. The conditions for the material reproduction of religious people form boundaries of possibility for religion. If, not being in possession of sufficient surplus wealth for my disciples to live without toil, I form a cult that demands that its members spend every waking hour in prayer in a society where the means of sustenance can only be obtained by performing labour in exchange for money, my new religious movement will be stillborn. The history of religious development is littered with modifications of religious practice in accordance with the needs of production, and with conservative backlashes against these modifications.

That religion is, at any given time, a product of a whole society follows also from the equally mundane observation that religious people – the odd cultist aside – do not live in isolation from the world. However much our society might compartmentalise our lives, a tattered unity remains, and whatever internal contradictions and tensions she might wrestle with, the ideas someone takes to Mass on Sunday morning are in part the products of conversations at the pub the night before, the article she read in Friday's newspaper, and much else besides. Religious practice and doctrine assert themselves in response to, or in reaction against, currents in the 'secular world'. The inane fixed grin on the face of Nicky Gumbel, the closest thing Britain has to a televangelist, might resemble that of an insurance salesman, but the similarity here is more than superficial. The nauseating upwardly mobile form of religiosity pushed by his Alpha course wears on its sleeves the individualism and lifestyle-orientation of neoliberal society, and its evangelism looks like nothing more than network marketing^xiv. In a much darker sense, the would-be theocrats of Christian Voice acknowledge actuality in the very act of reacting against it, no less than do Hizb ut-Tahrir. We make religious history, sure enough, like any other kind of history, but not in conditions of our own choosing. Not even God could bring about a liberal synagogue in the fifth century BCE.

Religious change and religious stasis are produced in a social context. This does not somehow magically cease to be the case when the religious phenomenon whose genesis we are considering is violently oppressive fundamentalism. Nothing raises the heckles of a certain kind of conservative commentator more than the suggestion that the rise of ISIS might be explicable, partly at least, in geopolitical or economic terms, or the preparedness of unremarkable young British men to go and fight for them in terms of Western foreign policy, and of the absence of any credible domestic alternative challenging that policy. These conservatives seem to suppose that in explaining these things, we would be excusing them. In fact, the opposite is the case. To offer social explanations for the murderous activities of a self-professed holy warrior is to show how he might suppose himself to have reasons for his actions, however crassly inadequate those reasons might be. Actions without reasons are not free, on the contrary they are psychotic, and presumably therefore not culpable.

What explanations also often imply, and this may well be the unacknowledged motivation for much conservative opposition, are routes towards change. If, for instance, the palpable injustice of the starvation and frequent bombing of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip creates a context where deeply reactionary forms of religion get a hearing, one obvious remedy might be justice for the Palestinians. Another result of recognising the social roots of even the most disturbing sorts of religion, vital to emphasise in the current global context, is that it undermines the claim that there is something peculiar to Islam that gives rise to indiscriminate violence – a claim that has been aired not only on the far right, but also by 'New Atheist' authors such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and is insinuated by far more^xv.

Quite apart from the undoubted fact that the ideological lens of states and media emphasises the Islamic allegiance of murderers when it might fail to mention, say, the substantial amount of Christian fundamentalist theology swimming around the Pentagon, it is unsurprising that a form of religiosity that provides a framework within which sense can be made of the desire to hit back against oppression indiscrimately attracts followers in contexts where that oppression is a live issue. Nor, sadly, is the desire to enforce religiously sanctioned boundaries and absolutes unexpected in a social reality that seems to admit neither, even when the proposed absolutes are viciously patriarchal and uncompromisingly xenophobic. Nothing follows in either case about the nature of Islam as such.

In fact, the perpetrators of violence in the name of Islam are often deeply ignorant of even basic aspects of the religion whose name they claim. Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed were convincted of terrorism offences at Woolwich Crown Court in July 2014, after fighting in Syria for an al-Qaida linked group. It turns out that in the run-up to their trip they had ordered copies of “Islam for Dummies” and “The Koran for Dummies” from Amazon^xvi. This shopping list is not that of two Quranic scholars, driven to murder by taking the text to its logical conclusions. Rather, it speaks of a certain form of religion providing a framework after the event for pre-existing discontent, the roots of which must be looked for in society as a whole. Lest this be thought cowardly leftist apologism for terror, here is what an MI5 briefing note had to say in 2008: 'far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could . . . be regarded as religious novices.'^xvii

The influence of religion

As we have seen, religion is part of a social totality, a practice that occurs in the context of wider society. This does not mean that religion is simply a reflection of 'deeper' social phenomena and does not itself have any influence beyond its own allotted domain. It would be absurd to claim that the history of the Christian movement from its first century beginnings, through the middle ages and reformation, up until the present and its encounter with secularisation (and, indeed, post-secularism, if there turns out to be any such thing) is simply the story of ancient society, feudalism, and capitalism at one remove. Religion feeds into this history, moulding it, giving millions of ordinary women and men the controlling narrative of their existence, and inspiring rebels and tyrants alike. This remains the case even if one wants to claim, as well one might, that in the last instance religion is not the dominant explanatory factor. Historical materialism, in any sense in which that phrase names a doctrine with any plausible claim on truth, entails that Michaelangelo couldn't have painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling were there not a sufficient surplus production to allow some members of society to subsist as artists. It does not entail that the painting is nothing more than the representation of nascent bourgeois social relations in the form of art, whatever the adherents of some more anorakish left-wing sects might claim.

It is a banal point that the impact of religion in society has been variously good and bad. However, banal points are sometimes worth making – especially in contexts where they are, incredibly, not taken on board. As Eagleton comments of Richard Dawkins,

Such is [his] unruffled impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has ever flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false.^xviii

With this falsehood a good number of leftists concur.

One reason for this is that it is patently apparent that religion is very often a force for ill. The Madgalene Laundaries in Ireland, the preparedness of some religious Zionists to justify theologically the crimes of the IDF, and the brutality of the Wahabi regime in Saudi Arabia are hardly adverts for religion's benefactions to humanity. The leftist tempted by this line of thought to dismiss the adherents of these three religions, in their billions, as write-offs as far as emancipatory politics are concerned should pause to consider the liberation theologians of Latin America, the role of religious Jewish youth organisations in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the Islamic Socialism that exerted a considerable influence in the Middle East during the mid-to-late 20^th century. Irreducibly religious movements can have, and have had, impacts of a kind that the left ought to applaud.

The ambivalent critic – religion as questioning modernity's fault-lines

This chapter began by observing the fragmentation of human existence in the kind of society we inhabit. Religion, on the face of it, cannot rest content with this fragmentation, since it is in the very nature of religion to totalise, to weave a narrative that encompasses all that it is to be human, and much else besides, and to do so whilst making demands on its adherents in terms of this narrative. It has this feature, at least, in common with Marxism, as both the archbishop of Canterbury and the central committees of numerous communist parties will be unhappy to learn. Someone is a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and may very well believe herself to owe to that identity a loyalty surpassing any to the state, or to her employer. It is not difficult to see that the religious believer is likely to feel pulled in several directions at once given our society’s relegation of what she holds to be the organising component of her life to the private sphere; the thing that she might very well profess as unlocking the meaning of her entire existence is a spare-time activity, acceptable insofar as it does not interfere with her duties as a good citizen.

One response on the part of the religious believer, of course, is to concede to modernity its division of social reality. Someone might practice their religion within societally acceptable bounds; they may or may not feel the contradiction, if they do they learn to live with it, as we learn to live with so many other contradictions. Or they might lapse, either absolutely, or whilst clinging to the religion as part of their ‘heritage’, a somewhat quirky pick from the smorgasboard of cultural options served up within late capitalism^xix. Again, they might profess themselves ‘spiritual but not religious’; there is no longer any tension here with the existing order. The odd bit of meditation is the perfect lifestyle supplement to the discipline of work and the frenzy of consumption, as Žižek has noted in discussing ‘Western Buddhism’^xx, hence the current fad for ‘mindfulness’ in corporate offices, and even in the NHS^xxi.

There are collective counterparts to these individual coping strategies. The Protestant Reformation, in its Lutheran and Anglican manifestations, as well as in Calvin’s Geneva, may be viewed in terms of religious accommodation to the nascent bourgeois order. Not all of its heirs were happy with this new concordat by any means – the histories of the Anabaptists and the Levellers, to name but two groups, speak elegantly of the refusal to compromise the new Jerusalem in the cause of a deal with Babylon. It is a refusal which resurfaced in the 20^th century in the Confessing Church’s resistance to the Nazi regime in Germany. These, however, are the exceptions. All religious groups of any size in the modern period have contained significant currents of accommodation. Within Christianity in particular, which was confronted with modernity at its intellectual and material beginnings, this peacemaking with the powers that be assumed theoretical shape in the form of liberal theology. As we will see, theological liberalism in no way provided an inoculation against support for violence, which is one reason to be suspicious of the current fashion for cheering on moderate religion against the excesses of the extremists.

But we should not allow the moderates to have the last word in this chapter. There remains a tension between religious affiliation and the fault-lines of modern society. A natural thought for those through whose lives these fault-lines run is to attempt to repair them by means of politics. There are two basic strategies available here. One seeks to repair the damage it sees by returning to a time before modernity – this way lies the politics of religious reaction, of theocracy. Of course, one can no more undo the impact of modernity by an act of political will than Canute could still the tide by regal command; so the religious forces of anti-modernism, if they achieve any level of political success, invariably find themselves armed to the teeth with the death dealing tools of the social order they despise, which find themselves turned against the society that gave rise to them in a kind of collective Oedipal display. The Luftwaffe flattened Guernica in the cause of Catholic Spain; ISIS post videos on Youtube denouncing ‘the West’, whilst making good use of US-made weapons to bring about the only kind of cessation of progress within their power, mass slaughter.

The alternative is a politics that aims to transcend modernity whilst preserving its undoubted gains. The choice between this option and that of the religious reactionaries is a stark one, it is in essence the same dilemma posed by Rosa Luxemberg: socialism or barbarism. It is in no way inevitable that the sincere religious believer opts for barbarism. She might very well feel in a particular way, because of her faith, the fissures of the capitalist order, but respond to that by committing herself to a politics that aims at freeing all human beings, regardless of religious particularity, from our current alienation and fragmentation, and looks forward to them flourishing together, without abolishing difference^xxii. Whether she does respond in this way depends to a large extent on the circumstances in which she finds herself. Other people, and their behaviour towards her, form a good proportion of those circumstances. This provides an excellent motion for the left to shed the unsophisticated hostility to religion in general that still dominates its organisations.

iA certain sort of republican trainspotter will insist that UK nationals are subjects not citizens. Loathe though I am to pass up an attempt to call for the abolition of the monarchy, I doubt this distinction matters for present purposes.

iiShakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, scene vii.

iiiAquinas, De regimine principum, Ch. XV.

ivAquinas, Summa Theologica, IiaIIae,60.6

vShaftesbury, Characteristicks III Misc II ii. 87

viMarx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), p. 1.

viiThe magnum opus of this movement is John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory : Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). For Philip Blond see The Red Tory (London: Faber and Faber, 2010) . On the impact on Tory thought see Richard Seymour, The Meaning of David Cameron (Ropley: Zero, 2010), pp. 73-8.

viiiA note on the usage of the word 'contradiction', which I use in accordance with the broad critical theoretical tradition from which I am writing, running through Hegel, Marx, and 'Western Marxism'. I intend by the word to indicate a tension integral to some social phenomenon that is at once integral to that phenomenon and destructive of it. Contradiction, in this sense, tends to lend a dynamism to human societies. The acceptance of real contradictions in this sense needn't imply the acceptance of true contradictions in the sense of 'contradiction' which has dominated the mainstream of Western logical theory since Aristotle: a sentence, or thought, or proposition of the form 'P and not P'. I think that tying the critical theoretical usage to the Aristotelian one, and therefore accepting true contradictions, makes radical thought unnecessarily hostage to incredulous stares. See Alex Callinicos, Marxism and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 54.

ixMarx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan (Mineola, NY: Dover), pp. 67-83.

xFrancisco Suárez writes in 1612 of the delegation of popular sovereignty as absolute and 'a kind of alienation' (quasi alienatio) – see Quentin Skinner, 'The State' in Terrence Ball, James Farr and Robert L. Hanson (eds.) Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 368-413.

xiThus John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia, NY.: Columbia University Press, 1993).

xii 'Belief' here means belief that something is the case. I believe that two plus two equals four and I believe that David Cameron is successfully waging class war against working people. Arguably a focus on belief that, widespread though it is, misconstrues many religious belief claims. 'I believe in God' seems to have something in common with 'I believe in my partner' – which isn't simply a profession that I have some opinions about my partner.

xiiic.f. 'In an Islamic religious faith which appears to subsume art, morality, culture and politics, the West can gaze at an image of its own earlier condition, before the great divisions of spiritual labour which characterise modernity set in'. Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, Co.: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 201.

xivThe Alpha phenemenon, particularly apparent in the CofE in London, represents a spread of fundamentalism (of a particularly irritating variety, at once dumbed down and slickly marketed) that would have provoked howls of media concern were it not the preserve of white middle-class professionals within the Established Church. Revealingly, a piece on this movement 'Anglican churches rebrand to draw Londoners back to the fold' was written by the FT's enterprise correspondent: Financial Times, 25^th July 2014.

xvAtheists Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris face Islamophobia backlash', The Independent, 12^th April, 2013.

xvi'Birmingham terrorist's mum handed his 'goodbye' martyr letter to anti-terror cops', Birmingham Mail, 9^th July, 2014. Mehdi Hasan, 'What the jihadists who bought “Islam for Dummies” on Amazon tell us about radicalisation', New Statesman, 21^st August 2014.

xviiQuoted in Hasan.

xviiiReason, Faith and Revolution. p. 97.

xixA sense of the prevelance of these options in contemporary Britain can be had from the surveys at http://faithdebates.org.uk/research/

xx Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 12.

xxi http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/pages/mindfulness.aspx . Accessed 10^/03/15.

xxiiA reader worries that my invocation of 'human flourishing' smuggles in a notion of 'human nature' by the back door. In actual fact, I'm quite happy for that notion to enter by the front door, and think that across-the-board opposition to any concept of human nature, often supported by a thoroughly confused debate around anti-essentialism (see below on the Theses on Feuerbach), is one of the biggest intellectual weaknesses on the contemporary left. But that's a debate that needs to be had somewhere else.