This morning’s paper had an arti­cle in it in which Prime Min­is­ter Howard denounced Islamic extrem­ists as not speak­ing or act­ing in accor­dance with the Islamic world as a whole. It was enti­tled “Ter­ror­ists don’t speak for Islam: Howard”, and I think that mis­rep­re­sents what he said.

“We in Aus­tralia will never accept that organ­i­sa­tions such as al-Qaeda or Jemaah Islamiah speak or act in any way on behalf of the Islamic world,” he was quoted as say­ing. This isn’t some­thing that’s reflected in the article’s title, for there is a dis­tinc­tion between “Islam” and the “Islamic world” — one being an abstrac­tion, the other a reality.

Islam, the reli­gion, is fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent to the Chris­t­ian par­a­digm (if not faith) that has shaped what is con­sid­ered the West­ern world. The notion of Jihad is a cen­tral part of its phi­los­o­phy that can­not be ignored whilst remain­ing true to the faith.* And that, ulti­mately, is what ‘con­ser­v­a­tives’ the world over have been accused of. And rightly so.

I’d dis­pute Howard’s claim that these ter­ror­ists don’t speak for “the Islamic world”, as well, but that’s a lit­tle more abstract: I’d agree they don’t speak for west­ern­ised Islam, which is invari­ably watered down to sub­ur­ban mul­ti­cul­tural bliss, and inevitably turns any belief sys­tem into a fluffy reli­gion — but I’d doubt (though don’t have num­bers to back me up, and this is a blog post, not a pub­lished Opin­ion piece, so I don’t need them either) that this “west­ern­ised Islam” would con­sti­tute a majority.

Con­ser­v­a­tives hold the core of their belief sys­tem to be true. Objec­tive, absolute truth. There are always going to be ele­ments of ‘reli­gion’ open to inter­pre­ta­tion (out­side of bod­ies in which the human leader of that reli­gion issues a man­dated inter­pre­ta­tion — look­ing at Roman Catholi­cism here), but, gen­er­ally speak­ing, the reli­gion will dic­tate its own ‘truths’ which are either fol­lowed as best is pos­si­ble with poten­tial ill con­se­quences (at least in the eyes of another moral­ity sys­tem — see, for exam­ple, the justifiable-under-Islamic-law but appar­ently “evil” acts of Lon­don bomb­ings, Bali bomb­ings, WTC bomb­ings, Islamic treat­ment of women, etc.) or alter­na­tively, met with lib­er­al­ism and an inevitable water­ing down of the reli­gion to some affa­ble but ulti­mately sec­u­lar form.

And this presents prob­lems. Lib­er­al­ism because value sys­tems become abstrac­tions rather than absolutes, as there is no greater power being heeded as “cre­ator” of these value sys­tems, and fun­da­men­tal­ism because it rejects any­thing aside from absolutes. Suc­cess­ful fun­da­men­tal­ism is of greater (rule) util­i­tar­ian ben­e­fit than attempted co-existence of abstract value sys­tems and absolute ones, because there is no poten­tial for con­flict. There is an intrin­sic poten­tial for unhap­pi­ness, but not for injus­tice, as that is dic­tated from another source.

Con­versely, lib­er­al­ism presents poten­tial for hap­pi­ness (hence its appeal — though debate regard­ing the seman­tics of ‘hap­pi­ness’ is of course pos­si­ble), but that same ‘hap­pi­ness’ often comes at the expense of another group (redis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, etc.), or doesn’t really exist at all (hap­pi­ness and afflu­ence being con­sid­ered syn­ony­mous in West­ern soci­ety, but prov­ably real­is­ing a decline in actual sat­is­fac­tion). Lib­er­al­ism jus­ti­fies “indi­vid­ual lib­erty”, and auton­omy of moral­ity within this, which of course in turn jus­ti­fies all man­ner of things. There is an innate human require­ment for an objec­tive, absolute moral­ity, espe­cially as glob­al­i­sa­tion takes its toll and a con­ver­gence — or clash — of soci­eties occurs, as we are see­ing at present.

One could even describe our present mul­ti­cul­tural real­ity as an inverted form of colo­nial­ism: there is an inevitable clash, if mul­ti­ple cul­tures are not assim­i­lated. For the record, I’m as con­vinced that Mac­quarie University’s Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor Andrew Fraser’s views are racist, igno­rant, and there­fore repul­sive, but the real­ity of “mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism” is either that there is an assim­i­la­tion and dilu­tion of non-dominant val­ues (I say non-dominant, because, gen­er­ally speak­ing, “West­ern” val­ues in west­ern coun­tries remain, and pre­sum­ably vice-versa in other cul­tures that have in place insti­tu­tion­alised “mul­ti­cul­tural” poli­cies), or — and this is what has hap­pened — clashes of dom­i­nant and incom­ing cul­tures occur.

And that’s what we call “ter­ror­ism”. Because it’s tak­ing some­thing per­fectly accept­able and even con­doned in other cul­tures and impos­ing it upon our dif­fer­ent mind­set. Here’s a secret: ter­ror­ism isn’t irra­tional or a prod­uct of ‘extrem­ism’. It’s based upon a dif­fer­ent mind­set, cer­tainly, but that doesn’t make it irra­tional or even wrong. See, if West­ern (and Hindu, and Bud­dhist, etc.) soci­ety was coerced into assim­i­la­tion with Islamic val­ues, there’d be no more con­flict (unless you hap­pened to be Jew­ish, in which case there’s no hope at all), because their pur­pose would have been achieved. Unless you hap­pened to be female, but that’s a whole dif­fer­ent ket­tle of fish — if you were female and accepted their val­ues, you’d be fine.

Ter­ror­ists speak for Islam, despite how much as our “lib­eral” (mean­ing “accept­ing only sec­u­lar­ism within an assim­i­lated ‘mul­ti­cul­tural’ con­text”) broad­sheets would like to claim oth­er­wise. Islam, in its true form (as opposed to some bas­tardised “lib­eral” form), rejects other value sets. Just like Chris­tian­ity, in its true form, does — though Chris­tian­ity rejects the par­a­digms estab­lished by other faiths (“faiths”, it should be noted, encom­pass­ing all other sys­tems of belief includ­ing sec­u­lar human­ism) with­out calls for vio­lence. I think Howard under­stands this, from what he has been quoted as say­ing, but some­where that got lost in media-translation.

*From the side col­umn of http://jihadwatch.org/

Jihad (in Ara­bic, “strug­gle”) is a cen­tral duty of every Mus­lim. Mod­ern Mus­lim the­olo­gians have spo­ken of many things as jihads: the strug­gle within the soul, defend­ing the faith from crit­ics, sup­port­ing its growth and defense finan­cially, even migrat­ing to non-Muslim lands for the pur­pose of spread­ing Islam. But vio­lent jihad is a con­stant of Islamic his­tory. Many pas­sages of the Qur’an and say­ings of the Prophet Muham­mad are used by jihad war­riors today to jus­tify their actions and gain new recruits. No major Mus­lim group has ever repu­di­ated the doc­trines of armed jihad. The the­ol­ogy of jihad, which denies unbe­liev­ers equal­ity of human rights and dig­nity, is avail­able today for any­one with the will and means to bring it to life.