Islam is the root cause as Islamism is a product of Islam

People who should know better are saying that we have a problem with Islamism, which they distinguish from Islam. They call Islamism a “perversion”.

They say this because they want to be nice; because they do not want to condemn one million or so of their fellow Australians; because they are ill-informed.

They say it because they think that all religions are similar, if not the same, so they think Islam is a sort of Christianity with Arabic characteristics.

They are wrong. Islamism is in the mainstream of historical Islamic theology. 

If more people were prepared to say that the problem is with Islam, then we wouldn’t have such a problem with Islamism.

None of this piece is an accusation against Muslims as people. It is an argument about ideas, institutions, and theology - precisely because ideas, institutions, and theology shape behaviour at scale.

There are many strands of Islam, but hardly any of them, apart from the Ahmadiyya, have an easy relationship with liberal democracy or grant innate dignity to non-believers.

The largest Islamic democracy in the world is Indonesia. It works partly because of the secular doctrine of Pancasila, but there are periodic pressures around blasphemy laws, locally inspired sharia by-laws (Aceh being the obvious case), and the political use of religious mobilization.

Turkiye was formed as a modern country around secularism, but modern politics in Turkiye is riven by conflict between the ~50% of the mostly metropolitan population that holds to secularism, and the other ~50% rural conservatives and immigrants from Gulf States who would like it to be a theocratic state.

Outside that you have countries that once had fragile democracies, like Afghanistan and Iran, that have been transformed back into Islamist theocracies.

And then you have the Middle East, where many countries – for example Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar – are monarchies, or others, like Egypt, republics that function as security states, or sectarian polities like Iraq where democracy is procedural, but not consolidating.

Contrast this to Christian countries. Actually scrub that, because there are only 5 officially Christian countries where Christianity is the state religion, but these are countries like the UK, Denmark, or Costa Rica – all high-functioning liberal democracies.

There are 40-50 Christian majority countries, that fall within liberal democratic norms, and only 5 or 6, including Russia, Venezuela, and Eritrea, which are totalitarian.

The populations of Islamic countries also tend to commit most of the terrorism in the world. With 24-25% of world population Islamic terrorism accounts for 65-80% or higher of terror deaths. Christians make up 31% of the global population but Christian acts of terrorism are so rare as to be effectively 0%.

Islamic terrorism is generally supported by some recognised strands of Islam. Indeed, as we have seen in Australia, there are Australian Muslim clerics who celebrated October 7, and others who preach violent Jihad.

There are no Christian equivalents.

It might be argued that the difference could be because Islamic countries tend to be less developed, but that would be to ignore the fact that in quite recent history countries like Iran and Turkiye were sophisticated societies on a par with European ones.

We have to look more deeply.

Most religious believers rely on stories more than theology – as in every other field, those who deal in abstracts are the elite minority. The stories of the founders of Islam and Christianity are instructive.

Tradition says that Mohammed owned as many as nine swords, and they all had names, confirming their importance beyond mere tools. Jesus owned none, and his followers may have owned a couple between them.

Mohammed the prophet was also Mohammed the merchant, the warrior, the legislator, and the ruler. Jesus the carpenter’s son relied on the charity of others, forswore secular leadership, and forbade his followers from using force to protect him.

Mohammed lived his later years as an important, wealthy person. Jesus was tortured and killed by the Romans.

From the beginning the Islamic story was one of community and submission to Allah, with divine law being enforced through history, and political authority only legitimate in so far as it enforces that law. Free will exists theologically, but it is not grounds for political pluralism. Moral equality is strongest within the Ummah, the community of believers, than outside.

By contrast Christianity believes the human being is made in the image of God, with irreducible moral agency (freewill), and is directly accountable to God, not mediated by the state. Salvation cannot be obtained through coercion, and ultimate judgment is outside history and belongs to God and the afterlife.

Violence is therefore theologically constrained in Christianity and theologically normalised in Islam’s political tradition.That doesn’t mean I am ignoring the 30 years war or the Inquisition, or the Crusades, but you would be hard-pressed to find a modern Christian authority who would justify these on religious grounds. They are exceptions, not rules.

These differences mean that liberal democracy is actually inherently suitable to Christianity and unsuitable to Islam.

Democracy requires popular sovereignty, the right to legislate against religious norms, the legitimacy of religious as well as secular dissent, and the idea that law is provisional and revisable.

But Islam believes sovereignty belongs to God, the law is discovered not made, non-believers are subordinate, religious dissent is a grave offence and divine law is eternal.

That is a problem.

It is not insurmountable, but it can’t be solved by legislation, and it can’t be solved by non-Muslims. If it can be solved, it must be solved by Muslims themselves, and given the communal nature of Islam, it is appropriate for once to talk about the “Islamic community”.

Where democracy and Islam coexist they do so by believers privatizing their faith, reinterpreting scripture and suspending parts of the jurisprudence. This is a job not just for individual members of the community but for their religious and secular leaders.

They need to admit that Islamism is a product of Islam and that Islam is an ideology as well as a religion. Islamic institutions need to reconcile their doctrine with democratic norms, and Muslims need to integrate into the broader community.

There should be no more talk that religion cannot give rise to terrorism, as proposed by the government’s Islamophobia envoy Aftab Malik, or setting-up Sharia courts. They must support the removal of blasphemy laws from definitions of hate speech and discrimination. The community also needs to identify and close those mosques that are run by hate preachers.

Ideally, they would also agree to preach against concepts like “From the River to the Sea”, but that would be wishful thinking and unenforceable.

If these conditions create an insoluble crisis of conscience for individuals or leaders, then it is neither cruel nor illiberal to say that Australia may not be the right country for them. A plural society cannot survive if it indefinitely accommodates doctrines that reject its foundational norms.

I have media releases in my inbox from Islamic organisations decrying the Bondi massacre. These media releases mean nothing if these organisations don’t take concrete steps to deal with the evil that uniquely resides in their communities.

They need to join us in saying “Never again” and do something about it.