The UK now knows there’s much to learn about Islam

A month after the July 7 bombings in London, I was appointed deputy convener of the UK government’s working group on tackling extremism and radicalisation.

A decade on, the UK government is due to release a new extremism strategy, possibly before parliament’s summer recess at the end of the month. It is unclear if Britain as a society has learnt what it should have in the last 10 years, but some of the old issues remain.

In 2005, one lobby group or other represented, inaccurately, the diverse array of British Muslim communities. Britain no longer makes that mistake but Whitehall has yet to discover fruitful ways of engaging with Muslim communities in general. The dynamics of the state’s relationship with the Muslim community remain as bad as they have ever been and look set even to worsen.

In the media, there is a pronounced stereotyping of Muslims en masse and prime minister David Cameron’s recent declaration that some British Muslims were “quietly condoning ISIL” was an unwise further move in that direction. If Islam is mentioned in public discourse, it’s almost always in relation to radicalism or in the context of it being utilised in the fight against extremism.

The public rhetoric and mood are immensely unhealthy but only a healthy society can be resilient enough to fight the efforts of radicals to recruit the vulnerable.

In 2015, Britain is no closer even to a genuine debate around the notion of “British values”, though these are constantly cited in contra-distinction to extremism. Instead, the term “British values” is used to avoid genuine debate about what is genuinely British in the 21st century.

When it comes to “extremism” and “radicalisation”, everyone has become rather befuddled. Some prominent figures use “extremism” as a catch-all phrase, which incorporates not only radical ideology but simple conservatism within Muslim communities. This is a dangerous precedent. During the Cold War, Britain was in a potentially existential conflict with a state that believed in a particular form of communism. But still it continued to recognise that not all types of socialism were problematic. Today, Britain needs to be far more precise about what it means by “extremism”. It exists and it is not limited to those who actually carry out violent acts. But there is a need to be very deliberate and specific.

There are those who say that radicalisation is always about social or political factors. That is not helpful. Radicalisation often does occur via ideas and ideology as well, though it is also a fact that political and social grievances have a role to play. Denying the power of ideology flies in the face of the evidence offered by security professionals.

The very idea that there is a single radicalisation process is flawed. There are a multitude of processes and they rely on ideology and sociopolitical circumstances in different ways. But thus far, in some quarters, there’s been the overwhelming temptation to find easy answers and identity a single radicalisation process. There is no quick fix to the problem.

Finally, a decade on from 7/7, Britain clearly does realise that it needs to understand more about Islamism. On the one hand, there are a number of allies who argue that all Islamists are essentially the same as Al Qaeda or ISIL, with only superficial differences. On the other, there are those who insist that all Islamists are essentially pluralist democrats. Both models are woefully inadequate. Britain must realise that Islamism comes in many different shades and being naive about them in general, whether positively or negatively, doesn’t help as it moves into the decade after 7/7.

None of these issues are going away. Britain needs to start thinking in a more strategic fashion about all of them because they’re only likely to become more important as time goes on.

Dr HA Hellyer is an associate fellow in international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, and the Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC

On Twitter: @hahellyer