This is a study on how Islamophobia, through anti-Muslim sentiments, acts as a driving force in the radicalisation of Islamic people. The chosen area of study relates directly to the topics of Identity and Human Rights as it focusses on the idea of how systematic violence and the social injustice has led to the increase in the radicalisation of Muslim people enabling them to join zealot groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (more commonly known as ISIS).
I will focus on how social injustice stems from cultural, structural and direct violence which leads to radicalisation of marginalised Muslim communities through soft power recruitment. This is a threat to national and international security so I will explore this issue on an individual, international and global level. The main actors that I will be focussing on in this presentation will be ISIS as it is the main perpetrator of premeditated politically motivated violence against the West, Al Qaeda as it is often dubbed the precursor to ISIS, the United States of America for its heavy involvement in the Middle East and, lastly, France for its blatant Islamophobia.
Identity is defined as the distinct set of characteristics, values, cultures and traditions that distinguish people and groups from others whilst religious identity is how people assert a specific set of beliefs and cultures which derive from a religious conscience. I believe that religious identity plays a big role in radical groups, such as ISIS who have taken extreme adaptations of Islam into their own hands. Ever since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, there has been a wave of global Islamophobia leading to the radicalisation of Muslim people as they felt a sense of injustice, isolation and prejudice. The War on Terror in Afghanistan was a direct effect of the 9/11 attacks perpetrated by Al Qaeda as the USA adopted a realist approach to the issue at hand – they didn’t collaborate with the Taliban in Afghanistan and instead moved towards removing them and, thereby, Al Qaeda’s influence by invading Afghanistan with their troops. This demonstration of hard power through military violence led to increased nationalism in the US, increased xenophobia and fear of Muslims. Mohsin Hamad, the author of a biographical scripture, the Reluctant Fundamentalist, explored the increased Islamophobia and the prejudice he faced in the US during 2001 after the 9/11 attacks just because he was brown and had a beard.
The anti-muslim sentiment was prevalent in the USA as in 2010, there was a movement to ban the Sharia law in the US courts and in 2011, numerous Homeland Security conferences were proposing that Muslims be treated more harshly. These instances in the USA directly violated the UDHR Article 7 as the Muslim people were no longer seen as equal in the eyes of American law. And in 2017, Executive Order 13769 was passed in the USA which created a Muslim travel ban. Although this did not last very long, this was an example of how the US government was increasingly discriminating against the Muslims and violating human rights – Article 13 of the UDHR was violated because legal Muslim residents were not allowed back into the USA as they were detained at the airport. However, the sentiment against the Muslims was not only structural or mental dispositions, but it was also demonstrated through direct violence in the USA.
I will be exploring the radicalisation of Muslim communities in three case studies in this presentation; each study will focus on an aspect of Johann Galtung’s triangle of violence.
I believe that an acute sense of social injustice can stem from Galtung's assertion that there are three types of violence: direct, structural and cultural. The first example of violence against Muslim communities is direct violence. Direct violence is defined as behaviours that serve to threaten life itself as these acts diminish the ability to meet basic human needs. There were several cases of direct violence in the US during the aftermath of 9/11 and the War on Terror – anyone who appeared to be quote, “middle-Eastern looking”, unquote were targeted and harassed. Within four days of 9/11, there was already a murder of a Sikh in Arizona and a mass shooting by a white supremacist in Texas which resulted in the death of two men and the injury of one. None of the men injured were Muslim, they just looked Muslim and were killed for that. Furthermore, this direct violence was not only limited to the USA – mosques and places of worship were blown up in Dresden in 2016 as people were afraid of Muslims. This act was a direct violation of article 18 of the UDHR as it prevented the right to religion and safe practice.
I will next present France and the policies that they have adopted in an anti-muslim sentiment as an example of structural violence. Structural Violence is defined as the systematic ways in which groups are hindered from equal access to opportunities and services that enable the fulfilment of basic human needs by a certain structure. In 2011, the French government banned the wearing of full-face veils in public whilst public officials were no longer allowed to even wear headscarves in their jobs. This forced people to choose between their religion and their country, provoking a sense of confusion regarding their identity. Prohibiting the accessories that are religious such as the Burqa and the Hijab led to a sense of injustice as France was essentially prohibiting the expression of being Muslim. Later in 2015, France passed a law which stated that individuals may be assigned to residence, subject to restrictions on their freedom of movement, subject to house searches or dismissed from employment, based largely on secret intelligence information without due process – this was essentially in response to the November 2015 Paris attacks but this law enacted and sanctioned the immediate discrimination of Muslim people as the number of Muslim people being put on house-arrest for no valid reason increased exponentially. Whistleblowers in France were able to give the government fake evidence regarding radical Islamism provoking the arbitrary detention of many innocent Muslim people. Muslims took to social media to express their displeasure, writing that "It is truly humiliating to find oneself alone interrogated by two men, obliged to justify one’s identity and one's choices.”.
Understanding the very direct structural violence and the French government’s intent to inflict harm upon Muslim people allow us to then understand why in a recent poll, conducted by Vox News, one in six French people support ISIS. The systematic discrimination by Emmanuel Macron led to sympathy for the cause of ISIS and this can be seen as after the 2015 Paris attacks, there was a 25% increase in the amount of French ISIS fighters in the Middle East and, currently, the rough approximation of French people in ISIS is double that of any other nation.
Galtung declares that the three types of violence are interlinked and this idea can further explore radicalisation in France. Cultural violence is symbolic violence expressed in media which promotes and disseminates prevailing or prominent social norms that make structural and direct violence seem justified. It leads to a sense of marginalisation and alienation as the norms disseminated often discriminate against a certain group of people. This can be seen in France when President Macron stated that the country needs to work towards hindering the effects of the “Islamist Hydra”: he publicly rendered the Islamic religion a terrorist paradigm and called for people to be against it. This is an example of cultural violence as Islamophobic ideology is being disseminated into the French populace by the President himself. Structural violence perpetrated by the government led to cultural violence in the people against the Muslim minorities. Laïcité is the term for Secularism in France, it explores the social injustice and the implications of structural violence and cultural violence amongst the French people.
Another example of how cultural violence can lead to a sense of injustice can be exemplified in the Bethnal Green Trio case. The Bethnal Green trio were school girls who felt isolated due to the cultural hegemony and norms discriminating against Muslims in London. This sense of discrimination made them susceptible to the soft power recruitment of ISIS. Aqsa Mahmood, an ISIS recruit from 2013, recruited the girls to join ISIS via twitter. After an interview with the parents of these girls, the notion that there was a lack of belonging in London was highlighted and the sense of belonging in ISIS seemed very idealistic to these girls. Due to globalisation, soft power recruitment has become a transnational crisis. The internet has enabled radical extremist groups to target and radicalise susceptible people across countries through playing on their desire to belong. This emphasises the need for a liberal response to this issue as nations need to cooperate to hinder the effects of ISIS’s recruitment. Whilst the in-depth analysis of France proposes the unanswerable question of whether religious identity is more important than national identity, the Bethnal Green trio case provokes another concern regarding national identity – what nationality should Shamima Begum, one of the Bethnal trio, hold? Currently, there is a violation of the UDHR Article 15 as she, amongst all other displaced ISIS refugees, do not have a nationality which means that they have lost a large portion of their identity.
ISIS has been very successful in recruiting susceptible Muslim people and this can be seen in statistics. After nearly every ISIS attack in a nation, there has been hundreds of new recruits joining as they saw the effects of the attack and sympathised with the cause. In fact, after the ISIS 2016 German Christmas attack, there were 2500 new fighters within a month owing to a sense of injustice and isolation. Marginalised people are easy to radicalise, as seen in the Oxford research study stating that 3/4 of the recruits for ISIS joined because of friendship and the need to belong.
The influence of ISIS and its recruitment has detrimental effects for the world as they can, through globalisation, increase their outreach and bolster their anti-Western stance through increasing the incidence and scope of terrorist acts in the West. This becomes a serious threat to national security; for example, France declared a state of emergency and began attacks on ISIS in response to the 2015 Paris attacks. But as ISIS affects nations on a global level, a cooperative liberal approach can overcome Islamist militancy in Syria and the Middle East.
In conclusion, we can synthesise all points brought up to headline that Islamophobia leads to marginalisation and ignites an anti-Western sentiment which enables easy radicalisation through soft power by ISIS. The marginalisation of communities for exercising their rights to religion is a form of systematic discrimination that needs to be accepted as a precursor to radicalisation. Globally, discrimination has led to retaliation, as seen with Uyghur Muslims and the African Americans in the USA. Islamophobia makes Muslim people feel victimised, so how can we blame them for trying to reclaim their power? Therefore, I claim, in a generalised manner: Galtung’s typology on violence and the social injustice it forms creates an urge to defend one’s identity, making one very susceptible to radicalisation, enabling them to join zealot groups such as ISIS.
Sources:
Model GPC Presentation (as presented by UWCSEA)