This is a study on how Islamophobia acts as a driving force in the radicalisation of Islamic people. This study relates to the HL extension topic of Identity, within the context of Human Rights, as it focusses on how systematic violence and social injustice has led to the increase in the radicalisation of Muslim people causing them to join zealot groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (more commonly known as ISIS).
I will focus on how cultural, structural and direct violence lead to the radicalisation of marginalised Muslim communities through soft power recruitment, threatening national and international security. I will explore this issue on an individual, international and global level. The four main actors that I will be focussing on will be:
(1) ISIS: the main perpetrator of premeditated politically motivated violence against the West;
(2) Al Qaeda: the precursor to ISIS;
(3) United States of America: for its heavy involvement in the Middle East;
(4) 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, whose identity is derived from extreme interpretations of Islam. Ever since Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001, there has been a global wave of Islamophobia, that perversely led to an increase in the radicalisation of Muslim people due to a sense of prejudice, injustice and isolation. The US War on Terror in Afghanistan was in retaliation for 9/11 where they used hard power to erase Al Qaeda’s influence; a Realist approach to the issue at hand rather than a Liberal one, which would mean working with the Taliban. This military violence in Afghanistan led to increased American Jingoism and exacerbated post-9/11 Islamophobia. Mohsin Hamid, the author of an autobiographical novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, explored the increased prejudice he faced in the US after the 9/11 attacks just because he was brown and had a beard.
Anti-muslim sentiment continued to increase in the USA. For example in 2011, there were numerous Homeland Security conferences where proposals that Muslims be treated more harshly were debated. Instances like these directly violated the UDHR Article 7 as the Muslim people were no longer seen as equal in the eyes of American law enforcement. 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 also violated through the detainment of Legal Muslim residents at airports on arrival. The actions against Muslims were not only perpetrated by the Government, but also through direct grassroot violence in the US.
I will be exploring the radicalisation of Muslim communities through three case studies: each study will focus on an aspect of Johann Galtung’s triangle of violence. Galtung asserts that there are three types of violence: direct, structural and cultural which leads to injustice. This injustice leads to the polarisation of communities by stripping them of their dignity and identity.
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 “Middle-Eastern looking” was targeted and attacked. Within four days, 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 “Middle-Eastern” 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 Islamophobia spread globally. This act was a direct violation of article 18 of the UDHR as it prevented the right to the safe practice of religion, it was a direct attack on one’s religious identity.
I will now bring in the second example of violence: Structural Violence in France. 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 and public officials were banned from wearing headscarves too. This ban on religious attire, forced the Muslim population to choose between their religion and their country, causing a conflict regarding their identity. Later in 2015, France passed a law that 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 without due process – this was in response to the November 2015 Paris attacks. This resulted in immediate discrimination of these people as evidenced by the exponential rise in house-arrests of innocent Muslims on baseless claims. This violated Article 9 of the UDHR as people were subject to arbitrary detention and arrest. Muslims took to social media to express their displeasure, through non-violent means, writing that "It is truly humiliating to find oneself alone interrogated by two men, obliged to justify one’s identity and one's choices.”.
Structural violence was an unintended consequence of France’s policy in response to the 2015 attacks. This led to the polarisation of the Muslim population resulting in radicalisation, as evidenced by a 25% increase in the number of French ISIS fighters in the Middle East. Currently, the rough approximation of French people in ISIS is double that of any other nation.
Galtung’s third type of violence is Cultural Violence. 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 labelled the Islamic religion as ‘terrorists’, through this exertion of soft power. However this cultural violence was perpetrated under the ideal of Laïcité, the french idea of Secularism which believes in dissociating religion from state.
This brings to mind Samuel Huntington’s famous argument that in the post-cold war period, the main cause for conflict will be religious and cultural identity. Structural and cultural violence in France support Huntington’s belief of how actions against religious or cultural identity sparks inevitable conflict. This trend can be seen globally where it’s not nations which are in conflict but rather civilisations, different cultures are butting heads due to differences in beliefs. For example, Huntington’s idea of “the West versus the rest” is very prevalent today as due to cultural globalisation, liberal Western values are essentially being forced upon conservative nations such as Yemen. In Yemen, girls under the age of 14 are being forced into marriage with men twice their age; this is deemed acceptable in their culture because of the strict interpretation of the Qur’an, however, this practice is considered morally reprehensible under Western cultural norms and issues such as this can spark conflict between the West and the Rest.
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 East 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. According to their parents, the girls’ desire to belong made them vulnerable to the directed, recruitment propaganda. Due to globalisation and modern technology, this 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 co-ordinated liberal response which addresses the issues of Islamophobia, discrimination, marginalisation and cultural clashes. Whilst the 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.
I will now shift my focus onto the concluding statements regarding ISIS’s recruitment techniques exemplified by the case studies and examples I have brought up. ISIS has been very successful in recruiting susceptible Muslim people and this can be seen in statistics. 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. In fact, even hard power demonstrations worked to recruit members: after the ISIS 2016 German Christmas attack, there were 2500 new fighters within a month owing to a sense of injustice and isolation.
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 based on a tenet of inclusion rather than exclusion can overcome Islamist militancy in Syria and the Middle East.
In conclusion, I would like to synthesise all the points brought up to headline that Islamophobia and systematic discrimination leads to marginalisation and ignites an anti-Western sentiment which, in turn, enables easy 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.