Islamic State appeal really isn’t radical at all

As Orwell knew, distorting meaning distorts understanding and obscures or prevents thought.

Rather than being radicalised, young Western Muslims are attracted to what a more religious age than our own recognised as enthusiasm, zealotry or fanaticism. This phenomenon has a long history in Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious understanding. Seventeenth-century Europe knew well the revived post-Reformation penchant for religious sectarianism, enthusiastic zealotry and its deracinating social consequences. Ben Jonson satirised the hypocrisy of the religious enthusiast in plays such as Bartholomew Fair (1614) where characters such as Zeal-of-the-Land Busy imposed their puritanical views on the wider populace.

Fanatical millenarian sects such as the Ranters or the Fifth Monarchists violated social and political norms during the English Civil War (1642-49) to establish what they thought would be a chiliastic millennium leading to the rule of Jesus Christ in England.

In the aftermath of the political chaos caused by sectaries, 18th-century social commentators, wits and philosophers such as David Hume, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison identified the limited character of the zealot.

Writing in The Spectator in 1711, Addison noted that “Zeal is … a great ease to a malicious man, by making him believe he does God service while he is gratifying the bent of a perverse revengeful temper. For this reason we find that most massacres and devastations which have been in the world have taken their rise from a furious ­pretended zeal.”

Hume thought fanaticism and enthusiasm had produced “the most cruel disorders in human society”. Hume, Pope and Addison would recognise in the activity of today’s jihadi zealots fanaticism, not an anachronistic radicalism.

In other words, any analysis of jihadism’s self-confirming zealotry suggests that those labelled as radicalised are not really radicals at all. Ideological radicalism, properly understood, requires a clear break from traditional religion of whatever form to achieve a pluralist, secular modernity.

By contrast, a scriptural literalism based on the message of the Prophet Mohammed and the ­hadith of his rightly guided 7th-century successors, the Rashidun (632-662), fuels Islamic State’s thought and practice. They look to past models purified by ultra-violence today to build tomorrow’s religious utopia. Like the 17th-century puritanical zealots, they are fanatics who adapt the tenets of an ultra-traditional literalism to guide present action.

Today’s jihadi is an enthusiast as defined by the Oxford Shorter English Dictionary as one who is “possessed by a god” or in “receipt of divine communication”. No matter how deluded their actions appear to modern secular sensibilities, in their minds they are ­directly engaged in a divine ­mission to re-create the caliphate.

This renders them immune to community sensitive de-radicalisation programs promoted by Western governments because there is not much that is particularly radical in jihadist self-understanding.

Interestingly, and after much tergiversation, David Cameron’s Conservative government in Britain appears to have grasped this. At the Conservative Party conference in September, Cameron expressed his determination “to tear up the narrative that says Muslims are persecuted and the West deserves what it gets” and to take on not radicalisation but “extremism in all its forms, the violent and the non-violent”.

Malcolm Turnbull, who has much in common with Cameron’s brand of conservatism, may be advised to adopt a similar anti-­fanatical, counter-extremist ­policy.