The photographs, the documents, the whistleblower testimony are all there — the brutal details of our diggers’ conduct brought forward into the harsh light of day.

A blow has been dealt to the prestige of Australia’s special forces with in-kind damages likely to follow for the reputation of the Australian Army as a whole.

At first, it might seem tempting to think of these kinds of events as isolated incidents that do not speak to a more widespread problem within the Army’s special operations community. But misconduct on the battlefield also speaks to a wayward shift in a military force’s broader operating culture.

Along with the Maywand District murders and the Panjywai massacre, what these new allegations levelled against Australian soldiers in Uruzgan will come to symbolise is the ultimate failure of Western militaries to adapt to a fight where the decisive battle was the human terrain.

According to our military leaders, the reason for Australia’s presence in Uruzgan province between 2001 and 2014 was to “clear, hold and build” a Taliban-free Afghanistan. Per counterinsurgency doctrine, by providing an enduring sense of physical security to local Afghans, the “hearts and minds” as well as the rifles and trigger-fingers of fighting-aged males in Uruzgan would eventually be won over.

At some point it seems that this strategic guidance either failed or was wholly ignored.

While Special Operations soldiers had earlier played a kind of “guardian angel” role in support of their regular counterparts in the Mentoring and Reconstruction Task Force, as the Afghan war dragged on, that role became increasingly aggressive.

An upsurge in “direct action” operations began to distract from efforts to secure the population. By 2010, much of the task group was solely focused on so-called “high-value targeting” — the coalition’s effort to kill or capture an ever-growing list of local Taliban “commanders”.

As a former Special Operations Task Group member drily put it to me, the new penchant for fly-in fly-out missions conducted out the side of a Black Hawk saw the entire concept of operations switch from “clear, hold and build” to “land, kill and leave”.

Of course, operating in this manner was never going to defeat the Taliban. Insurgencies are complex adaptive systems capable of surviving the deaths of leaders. As David Kilcullen writes in Counterinsurgency: “decapitation has rarely succeeded [and] with good reason — efforts to kill or capture insurgent leaders inject energy into the system by generating grievances and causing disparate groups to coalesce”.

All this considered then, by channelling an apparent “shoot first, never ask questions at all” ethos, there’s a good argument to be made that much of SOTG’s work in the final years of the Afghan War was counter-productive.

In many ways, the sunset years of operations in Afghanistan marked a transitional moment in the Australian way of war — one which saw our special forces transformed into the hyper-conventional juggernaut it has become today.

In other Western forces, the over-emphasis on “conventionalised” operations — that is heavy-hitting operations which deviate from the subtle and indirect approach of yesteryear — has had similar results on the ground.

Courtesy: ABC News

The New Zealand SAS is currently reeling from allegations that its members carried out “revenge raids” against civilians. US Navy SEAL Teams have now been linked to extra-judicial killings and corpse desecration on the battlefield. In Britain too, the story is much the same. Reports of “rogue” SAS troopers and battlefield executions. Civilian casualties. A Ministry of Defence probe into war crimes allegations.

Incident by incident, this is how the war in Afghanistan was lost.

Despite more than a decade and a half of sustained military effort, today Taliban and other extremist groups cover as much as 40 per cent of the country.

Certainly, where our own efforts are concerned, the data is clear. Australia’s war in Afghanistan was a failure. According to the Institute for the Study of War, districts like Shah Wali Kot (where Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith’s VC-winning charge took place) are now categorised as “high confidence Taliban support zones”.

Elsewhere, the observable metrics on the ground speak for themselves. In 2002, US intelligence estimated the Taliban’s strength at 7,000 fighters. As of 2016, that number has increased to 25,000. As this year’s spring fighting season begins, the Taliban still control roughly a quarter of Afghanistan.

More than anything, what these new revelations demonstrate is that somewhere along the way our military, and our special forces in particular, simply lost the ability to effectively counter an insurgency.

Once upon a time, “the best of the best” were trained to operate like “phantoms” — treading lightly and prudently alongside their local partners.

Today, however, the legacy they will leave behind in the minds of Afghans will be a brutal one. The civilian cost of the Special Operations Task Group’s operations in Afghanistan is now apparent for all to see.

In a world where media outlets are now plucking Middle East experts from the ranks of heavyset non-Arabic-speaking private military contractors (whose interactions with people from “these cultures” are confined to firefights and abusive run-ins at heavily-trafficked intersections), a few colleagues of mine over at the Australian National University have started a great new project called “Re-Anth”. Envisioned as a clearinghouse for popular, prescient scholarship in the social sciences, the general objective of Re-Anth is simple – to re–introduce anthropological thinking into the wider social and political discourse. As such, this will hopefully be the first of many contributions I can make to their new blog.

The first topic I’ve been asked to write about is the concept of “praxis” – one of those great buzzwords you will only ever come across in postgraduate anthropology seminars or in vaguely-meaningful but mostly arcane discussions of Hegel’s contributions to philosophy.

Praxis, in the context which anthropologists use it, refers to the process by which immaterial concepts and ideas (Aristotle’s theoria) are realised by action – the bridge between what Hannah Arendt saw as the two defining categories of human thought and behaviour – “vida contemplativa” (the contemplative life) and “vida activa” (the active life).

While the term itself suffers from a terminal case of jargonitis (in part because praxis is an import word from ancient Greek and in part because praxis is also the German for “practice” which has a separate meaning in English-language anthropology), the spirit of the praxis concept is as follows: there exists a process which connects the things people think about with the things people do and that mapping this contemplation-action algorithm is key to understanding how a member of a particular cultural group is likely to think and behave under a given set of conditions.

There is a huge body of theoretical muck out there to wade through in one’s search for a definition of praxis (from experience, this can actually lead to a reduced understanding of the concept) but since praxis, like anthropological fieldwork itself, is practically-oriented (or indeed, praxically-oriented) a good way to grapple with the concept can be found by thinking about a religion like Islam not only as a “practice” (that is, something someone does) but also as a “process” (the contemplative and active steps which lead to the doing). By reflecting on the process by which religious texts like the Qur’an (a body of work that contains various theoria) are interpreted and then incorporated into the daily lives of individuals, for example, one can observe the praxis concept in the field.

As a student of Islamic societies, the process by which the Quran is brought into the material world is the textbook example of the praxical process. Similarly, if one looks at a political project like “Marxism” – which Antonio Gramsci called “the philosophy of praxis” in his Prison Notebooks – one can observe an analogous process (that is, a revolutionary strategy) by which a utopian ideal is interpreted and then progressively introduced into society by the Marxist. Both the Marxist revolutionary process and Quranic exegesis-enactment (as a hermeneutic process) therefore, are examples of “praxis in the wild”.

With praxis thus defined and with the title of this post suggesting that there is something lacking in how “Islam” is dissected and studied in public discourse, it is now incumbent upon us to consider how the praxis concept might improve the way we think about Islam, re-injecting some intellectual rigor into the discussion.

As I’ve discussed previously, the “true meaning” of any text (especially a religious text) is ultimately interpretive. This should be self-evident to anyone who studied “the novel” in high school – especially if one’s English teacher was intent on extruding bizarre, hidden meanings from the most innocuous of sentences. Certainly, the fact that deciphering a text is an interpretive process (a praxis) should be self-evident to anyone who is familiar with the way in which a nation’s laws are interpreted by the courts.

As Barack Obama said of the US Constitution in his final address as President: “it’s really just a piece of parchment.  It has no power on its own.  We, the people, give it power – with our participation, and the choices we make.”

The “participation and choices” which Obama speaks of is, in this instance, a description of constitutional praxis – the process by which the law is interpreted, reflected upon, incorporated and then lived by “We the People”.

To Islamic scholars, the praxis concept is encapsulated by a process called ijtihad – the mental and physical effort which connects the Muslim vida contemplativa with the vida activa (to revisit Arendt). Ijtihad therefore, is the process (thus the praxis) by which interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence are developed. It follows then, that because jurisprudential interpretation is ultimately subjective, sharia (the legal aspect of Islam) cannot be thought of as comprising a single codex. Indeed, much as constitutional opinion amongst American jurists is not, in any way, unitary, “Islamic law” cannot be understood as a monolithic bloc that regulates Muslim behaviour in any single way.

For this reason – that is, because the ijtihad process produces many different interpretations of both sharia and Islam itself, it is uniquely artless to paint a literal “broad church” of thought with such a broad brush stroke. Likewise and for the very same reason, it is equally artless for one to imply that ISIS’ worldview has “nothing to do with Islam” (this position is often labelled an “apologist” position – often  by those who themselves detest the label “Islamophobic”).

Having said that, I suspect that there are very few serious scholars of Islam who would claim that Islamist extremism has “nothing to do with Islam”. As both Shadi Hamid and Reza Aslan (two very popular scholars of Islam) have argued – it’s not that ISIS’ ideology is “not Islamic” per se (because the very nebulous nature of religious praxis means that if one says it is Islamic then it is Islamic) but rather that using ISIS as a case study to inform a generalization about what it means to be a Muslim is inaccurate and unfair to the majority of Muslims around the world.  As such, despite the shrill cries ringing out from the far-reaches of the internet that terrorist-sympathising “snowflake apologists” are amassing in their “safe spaces” to measure just how little of nothing terrorism has to do with Islam, I’m yet to come across any serious peer-reviewed research that would reject that members of ISIS self-identify as Muslim. The critique, therefore, is probably a straw-man argument.

In many ways then, the greatest intellectual failure of “the anti-Islam school” (that is, the school formerly known as “Islamophobic” ), lies not in its interpretation of Islamic text per se but rather in its refusal to include a discussion of praxis into how Islam is actually lived – that is, the inability to see Islam not merely as a set of practices but also as a process by which the practitioner interprets text and engages with the sacred.

Certainly, it is possible that one could conclude that the Qur’an is intrinsically violent or misogynistic if one selectively read (as ISIS does) verses like 9:5 or 4:34 to the exclusion of contradicting verses like 109:6 and 30:21 (even though, as the anti-Islam school will tell you, later-occurring verses are supposed to abrogate earlier verses). Yes, if you read the Qur’an like that you might find “Islam [monolithic]” guilty of many crimes.

But of course, in order to find Islam guilty of these crimes, one would also have to refute the role of praxis in producing human behaviour – discounting, for example, the possibility that Islam is a living breathing religion (defined by heterodoxy) or that Muslims are followers of a constantly-evolving faith, a community possessing of a diverse collection of doxa that oscillate from “asymptote to asymptote”. So yes, if one used such a myopic approach – that is, if one employed a textualist, literalist, atomistic, and wholly un-holistic approach to religion as an entire field and object of study, ignoring the fact that interpretation matters or dismissing the empirically-tested finding that diversity of religious opinion exists even in small-scale societies – you might conclude that Islam is, must be, has to be “bad”, “evil”, “antithetical to Western democracy”… as Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie seems to have concluded.

Naturally, if you use this approach, you’ll probably not find much intellectual backing for your work outside the various think-tanks run by Daniel Pipes or Robert Spencer (or, indeed, Richard Spencer). But then, “left-wing social justice warriors on university campuses”, right?

Ultimately, the bottom line is this: giving credence to the praxis concept is absolutely critical to the study of Islam [not monolithic]. Moreover, if one actually goes out on the streets and talks to Muslims about how they interpret the Qur’an and how that interpretation influences their behaviour (note: this requires interacting with a sample size that is larger than the cellblock of Camp X-Ray or the mullet-wearing Lebanese teenagers hanging out in hotted-up cars down the road), one would probably conclude that diversity of opinion in a religious congregation which comprises more than a fifth of the world’s population might well be infinite; that praxis is really the only thing that counts when crafting generalisations about “Muslims”; and that ultimately, the Qur’an (whether it is the word of God) is simply a collection of words recorded on a sheaf of palm-fronds. To borrow again from Obama, the Qur’an exists but it is up to Muslims through their “participation and choices” to interpret it and live it.

It might seem bizarre that a religion which scientifically regulates its phases of worship according to incremental changes in the lunar cycle could have so much diversity of thought. Here though, it’s worth noting that, according to hadith, the notion of ikhtilaf (Arabic: إختلاف) meaning “difference” or “diversity” was seen as a blessing by Muhammad. Indeed, according to a comprehensive study of the subject by Musawa, ikhtilaf  al-fuqaha (“diversity of opinion amongst jurists”) not only existed as far back as the Abbasid Caliphate but was also respected as a necessary part of realising a truer, greater Islam.

A non-Muslim interested in thinking more about praxis might consider his own practices, and the contemplation-action algorithm that led him there. If, for example, one ascribes to the Christian faith and goes to church every Sunday, consider the following passage in Matthew 6:4-6:6.

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. ⁶ But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

After reading this passage, would it be fair to say that conducting the commonly-practiced Sunday ritual at church is “un-Christian”? The answer, of course, is “no”. Of sole importance here, beyond your self-identification as a “Christian”, is the praxis which underpins the religious choices you have made. In the end, the process of selecting the Sunday ritual and participating in the ritual itself, is the only bit that matters.

The images coming out of Nice are shocking. Bodies crushed beneath the multi-tonned might of a truck. Revellers who just minutes before were celebrating the festivities of France’s Bastille Day mowed down in the street. Corpses everywhere. People fleeing, running for their lives. All of it live-streamed by the ubiquitous smart-phone.

This terrorist attack (if that is indeed what this was) did not occur in isolation. In preceding weeks we have witnessed similar scenes of carnage in other great cities of the world – Istanbul, Medina, Dhaka and Baghdad. Terrorism is not new to us. But this attack is particularly frightening for two reasons.

At a visceral level, the mangled bodies on the promenade remind us of the human cost of terrorism in a way which even the vaporised nothingness which follows a suicide bombing can fail to convey. The mashed bodies are the bodies of actual recognisable people. The Horror, in the sense which Conrad meant it, is real.

Secondly, and perhaps most frighteningly, the use of an everyday vehicle as the primary weapon in a terrorist attack shows us that despite our best efforts to catalogue and trace the purchases of fertiliser at hardware stores; strictly control the dissemination of firearms and ban pen-knives on planes; we can never fully contain the threat posed by violent extremists. Preventing access to the means by which this violence is perpetrated is crucial but we should be under no illusions – we will never completely eradicate terrorism.

Reactionary voices will come forward saying that a ban on Muslim immigration is the solution to terrorism and Donald Trump will inevitably tweet, as he has tweeted before, that “I alone can solve” (the problem). But make no mistake – no border, no pogrom, no government-funded de-radicalisation program will ever be able to negate the possibility, however infinitesimal, that a madman will slip into the driver’s seat of a legally-purchased, road-worthy truck and run down dozens of innocent people in the street.

The perpetrators of these attacks plan and execute them with specific objectives, that is, a “desired end-state”, in mind. The political function of a terrorist attack is to incite fear in a population and if the scenes of chaos in Nice are anything to go by, IS has achieved this end-state. “Nous sommes terrifiés,” tweeted the Mayor of Nice, begging  the Niçois to remain indoors. The city is in a state of panic. At a global level, the terrorists are celebrating further because we, like the Niçois, are afraid as well – afraid that we will be the victims of the next terrorist attack.

But while the terrorists’ coup in Nice and the marked increase in terrorist attacks should give us all cause for concern, we should not confuse “an increase in terrorist attacks committed by the Islamic State” (assuming IS is responsible) with a statement like “the Islamic State is winning”.

Far from it in fact, on the ground in Syria and Iraq, where this fight really matters, IS is not winning. In the last few months alone, thanks to the co-ordinated efforts of Western, Iraqi and Kurdish forces (and the non-related but mutually-supportive efforts of the Syrian government and its ally, Russia), IS has lost a significant amount of its territory. Palmyra is back in the hands of the Syrian government. Fallujah is back in the hands of the Iraqi army and the Kurds have chased IS back to the gates of Mosul.

Indeed, if we use Mao Zedong’s 3-phased guerrilla war as a model for a successful fight we can see that the last year has been disastrous for IS – a year which has seen it regress from “Phase 3” (wherein the guerrilla army, as in 2014, begins the decisive annexation of enemy territory) back to “Phase 2” – the use of intimidation tactics like terrorist attacks to weaken the enemy’s resolve.

Furthermore, when one observes that the attacks in the holy city of Medina have drawn the ire of prominent Saudi Salafists or when one considers the empirical observation that the use of indiscriminate violence is ultimately counter-productive to a group’s political aims then, all things put together, these attacks appear less as a sign of strength and more as an indication that IS has a reduced threat profile than the one it had just a few years ago.

One-by-one its fighters in Iraq and Syria are being picked off. Just yesterday in a demonstration of the effectiveness of US airpower, Omar Al-Shishani, the Georgian-born commander of the Caliphate’s North and heartthrob of ISIS’ mujahireen  (foreign fighters) was obliterated by a laser-guided GBU-12. Indeed, according to some in the online #ISfanclub, it is yesterday’s loss of Al-Shishani which inspired this new attack in Nice. Thus we arrive at the following conclusion. Outgunned, on the run and lacking the means with which to commit atrocities, ISIS has now resorted to running innocent people over with trucks.

In real terms, as I tweeted just yesterday, ISIS is in a bad place. If current trends in Iraq and Syria continue, my guess is that ISIS will be militarily defeated by this time next year. On the conventional battlefield, they are done. The terrorist attacks however, will likely continue as ISIS reverts to “Phase 2” tactics. In kind, we should prepare ourselves for the next battle – to make sense of and systematically defeat the ideology of salafi-jihadism. This will take time. And patience. But we should be confident about our ultimate victory. Yes, we know now that a truck can be used by this enemy for indiscriminate violence. The prospect truly is terrifying. But as Omar Al-Shishani learned yesterday, 230kg of ordnance (when used selectively), and a patient, cerebral approach is far more effective.

The Arabic word for “Islam” on the right. Inverted into the shape of a Kalashnikov in the thought bubble. Source: Jabertoon

Radical (chemistry): “A molecule that contains at least one unpaired electron… because of their odd electrons, free radicals are usually highly reactive… they [can] react with intact molecules, generating new free radicals in the process”(Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2015)

Radicalism (political): “Radicalism is characterized less by its principles than by the manner of their application” (Cyclopaedia of Political Science, 1893)

If it can be said that free radicals in chemistry are good at creating more free radicals or that political radicals have a tendency to replicate and create revolutions then it is also a rule of Twitter that anything the popular neuroscientist Sam Harris says about Islam and Islamism will be liked, retweeted and defended by his legions of fans. The Law states if it is he that created it, then the Tweet will be spread, regardless of any discrepancies or oddities in the Tweet’s molecular structure.

Such was the case with Harris’ online rebuttal against the terminology used by Hilary Clinton in her response to the Orlando shooting – 691 retweets, 1,866 “favourites”.

Here Harris sought to chide Clinton for her use of pleonasms, arguing that the excessive use of the adjective “radical” made her terminology linguistically redundant. In many ways, Harris is right to focus on language. Phraseology is important in the discussion of jihadist violence. “If Hilary is only against the radical jihadists,” an onlooker might otherwise wonder. “What about the mainstream jihadists? Are they OK then?”

At this point in Trump’s over-televised run for Presidency, everyone who isn’t living under a rock should be aware that there is no such thing as a “mainstream jihadist” but the larger point Harris is trying to make is still valid – terminology is important and informed debate begins with the correct use of language.

Not being one to shirk the opportunity to nitpick however, I offered that although the term “radical jihadism” is a redundant pleonasm (much as the term “redundant pleonasm” is itself a pleonasm) the term “radical Islamism” is acceptable to use since there are many different schools of Islamist thought. This includes what we might call “mainstream” and “radical” forms of Islamism.

Harris’ response was simply:

Harris’ suggestion, of course, is that theocracy – as a system of government wherein all authority is derived from a deity – has some kind of innate quality which makes it “radical” and that because of this quality it is therefore redundant to affix the adjective “radical” to the word “Islamism” (since the central aim of most Islamists is the establishment of an Islamic theocracy).

As awful as theocracies are, one runs into problems by blanket-labeling an entire system of government as “radical” – even one as flawed as theocracy. If theocratic ideas were necessarily radical what would one then make of a country whose Pledge of Allegiance is a pledge to “one Nation, under God”? Or what would one make of the Vatican – a religious theocracy run by priests? Would one really argue that the Pope and his cabal of cardinals are nothing but “a bunch of radicals”? One could argue that I suppose but it would be a very radical argument to make indeed. And there would be a great many Catholics in the American mainstream (citizens of “one Nation, under God”) who would disagree with your position.

It is clear then that the word “radical” has an inherently relative quality and that it is better understood  simply as “that which is not mainstream”. Contiguously, the term “radicalism” refers simply to a collection of political beliefs which do not exist in the mainstream. It is merely the antonym of the humdrum middle-ground.

The distinction I was trying to make between what we might call “radical Islamism” and the less radical (but no less repugnant) forms of Islamism essentially coheres with the same distinction made previously by political philosopher Olivier Roy. Roy’s thesis was that Islamism is not one single movement but a spectrum of political beliefs which “oscillates between two poles” – a “revolutionary pole” and a “reformist pole”. The distinction should seem fairly self-evident to anyone with even a cursory understanding of the history of political Islam. Some radical Islamists (who we typically refer to as jihadists today) want to pick up a sword and accelerate Islamisation with cold steel while others in the mainstream are more relaxed (Jacob Olidort and Graeme Wood calls these relaxed types “quietist”) – seeking to focus their efforts on Islamising society “from the bottom up, bringing about, ipso facto, the advent of an Islamic State”.

The distinction between Roy’s “revolutionary” Islamists (who we can safely call the “radicals” among the Islamists) and “reformist” Islamists should be familiar to Harris because Maajid Nawaz made a very similar distinction in the book they co-authored together:

“…When I say ‘Islamism’ I mean the desire to impose any given interpretation of Islam on society. When I say ‘jihadism’ I mean the use of force to spread Islamism.” (Nawaz/Harris 2016)

Thus, given what we have discussed about the different forms of Islamism we arrive at the following diagram which expresses the fact that Islamism is not unitary but oscillates between “mainstream” and “radical” poles.

Fig 1.1

The “pollination line” in Fig 1.1 is used to demarcate the point at which Islam ceases to be simply “one’s religion” and becomes a political ideology – the point at which the believer pollinates the spiritual life with “the world of the profane“. In essence, the pollination line delineates what we in the West might call “the separation of church and state”. My specific use of the  term “pollination” is intentional here, having borrowed it from a controversial hadith narrated by Anas which offers a glimpse of a secular Islamic world in which worldly affairs are separated from spiritual ones (see footnote below)***.

One will note in the mere existence of this diagram, that I have taken care in how I approach the subject of Islamism, viewing it less as a monolithic bloc (as Harris and Trump have now come to view Islam itself) but treating it as a highly complex collection of diverse social and political movements (all of them seriously flawed).

There are other reasons to be more careful when we taxonomise Islamism. How else can we distinguish between the Shia Islamism of Hizballah and the Sunni Islamism of Al-Qaeda, for example? Or how can we tell the difference between the fractious (and almost-incidental) Islamism amongst the Pashtun  and the ethno-nationalist tinged Islamism now popular amongst many of the Tuareg in Northern Mali?

Indeed, if one were to borrow from the political theorist David Nolan and rework my diagram by including another ideological vector like “primacy of the tribe vs primacy of the Caliphate”, one could plot the significant ideological differences between the various Islamist groups with significantly more accuracy on a Cartesian chart.

As with the following:

Fig 1.2 (Noting that Boko Haram’s ideology is nearly unplottable)

Indeed, once we realise that the issue of Islamism is far greater in scope than the white Muslim convert next door regurgitating the filth he reads on the Internet (that is, once we remove ourselves whole-bodily from the ethnocentrism of our own backyard) we will realise that Islamism, just like Islam itself, is very far from a single creed.

Ultimately, the most succinct way I could put the distinction between “the various Islamisms” was by pointing out that in some Muslim-majority countries (like Egypt) there are some Islamists who almost everyone would regard as a terrorist and others who would be democratically elected.

Naturally, by simply pointing out that Islamist views are fairly mainstream in many Muslim majority countries (which they are) I was likened to an ISIS sympathizer by the Harris fan club. According to my logic, they claimed, ISIS’ ideology shouldn’t be considered radical because within the Islamic State, ISIS’ worldview is the prevailing worldview.

Ad hominem aside, it’s actually a reasonable point to make. Hypothetically, if researchers were able to obtain unbiased psephological data from within the Islamic State or if we reduced the sample size of our “spectrum of political belief” diagram (Fig 1.1) to say, fighting aged males currently residing in the city of Raqqa, we would likely find that ISIS’ worldview is far from radical. One might even observe “the pollination line” shifting completely to the right indicating that everyone is in total agreement that Islam should be indivisible from the affairs of state (although if we use my Cartesian model, one would plot the Anbar tribes on a higher co-ordinate to the ISIS muhajireen on the “primacy of the tribe” vector).

Of course (returning to Harris’ original critique), we know that when Hilary Clinton is talking about trends in contemporary politics she is not restricting her sample size to fighting aged males in Raqqa. So the point is moot – ISIS’ worldview is indeed objectively radical in this context. In saying this, I will concede (to the glee of Sam Harris’ fan club) that if the sample size for this discussion was restricted to the US (which it may have been since Clinton was talking about Orlando) then yes, Islamism should be considered a radical ideology. This would mean that Harris is right and the term “radical Islamism” uses a redundant adjective (shame! O shame on you Hilary!). But if we can leave ethnocentrism out of our thinking for a moment and think of this “war of ideas” as a global war and the entire world (with its 50 Muslim-majority countries) as our sample size than it makes sense to make distinctions between different kinds of Islamist belief. Clinton has served as America’s top diplomat so I would hope that she was thinking big picture on this issue.

While I’m on the topic of making concessions to the Harris fan club, I’ll also concede that all Islamists (“quietist” or not) are in a sense “radical” in that an Islamist seeks to be an agent of radical change to society – transforming it completely. There is very little “moderation” in all Islamist ideation which is why many Islamists end up becoming “extremists” (the antonym of “moderation”). But to repeat the hundred and something year old quote at the top of this article: “radicalism is characterized less by its principles than by the manner of their application”.

Heaving ho then, while we could continue discussing whether “radical Islamism” constitutes a pleonasm, the key point is that if we can’t make simple distinctions between the ideation systems of someone like Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi (a militant jihadist, whom I would label a radical Islamist) and someone like Mohammed Morsi (an Islamist whose views, according to the results of the Egyptian vote in 2012, are fairly mainstream in Egypt) then there really is no hope for our ability to understand the place of Islam in our world.

Of course, Harris’ thesis (the one that is retweeted by his legions of fans… and then repackaged in less savoury terms by Trump™) is that the world’s “Muzz-lims” should be considered followers of an intrinsically radical religion – Islam being what is – a religion founded by a puritanical Bedouin raider.

While the latter about Mohammed might be true, the reality is that in the world we live in today – a world which the founder of Islam was integral in shaping (for better or for worse) – the Islamic worldview and even the Islamist worldview is far from a “radical” one.

This is not to say that one should not speak out against Islamism (as Harris’ fan club seems to think I am suggesting). On the contrary, given all the empirical evidence which suggests that mixing religion and politics is about as good an idea as mixing sleeping pills and alcohol, I’ll be the first to speak out against Islamism if it ever becomes a mainstream belief in Canada (thankfully, an Islamist would be considered a radical in my neighbourhood). I’ll also happily speak out against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, Saudi Arabia’s harsh dispensation of judicial punishment and the reign of theocracy in Iran.

But if we can agree that “Islamism” is the “enemy” (to use a term which others with military backgrounds can relate to) then our first duty in this global war of political ideas is to understand this enemy as best we can. One need not repeat the Sun Tzu edict here for emphasis.

Understanding this enemy involves conducting what military planners call a “stakeholder analysis” – mapping out all the individual actors within the conflict eco-system to grasp the role they play in producing and transforming violence. This mapping exercise might involve building a profile of each of these individual actors, and occasionally, categorising them according to where their views might lie on a spectrum of political belief (as we have done in Fig 1.2).

Understanding and making the distinction between what we might call “mainstream” Islamists (the quietist types) and “radical” Islamists (the jihadists) is important here because it enables us to adjust the parameters of our targeting apparatus within the system. This enables us to focus our efforts on the targets that matter the most. Indeed, if we remember that labor is in short supply, our aim should always be to attack targets who, once removed from the system, will have a significant effect on the enemy’s centre of gravity. A “radical” Islamist is good at creating more “radical” Islamists, just as in chemistry a radical molecule is good at creating more radical molecules. Therefore, it follows, we need to have words which enable us to categorise and identify radical Islamists where they exist.

Remembering that our ultimate aim in this war is to move that pollination line in Fig 1.1 as far over to the left as we possibly can, the greater problem – the problem of Islamist violence in our world – is greater than the debate over terminology. Ultimately however, our ability to solve the problem rests on our ability to understand the problem and if we can’t understand the basic terminology and the importance of making basic distinctions between the different forms of Islamism then we’ll never find a solution.

***

Footnote

Hadith #2363 – narrated from Anas

“The Prophet (peace be upon him) passed by some people who were busy with pollination and said: “if they would not do this, then it would still come out right”

The date crop that resulted was of a very poor quality.

Then he passed by them and asked: “what is with your date palms?”

They said: “You had told us such-and-such…”

He said: “You know best the affairs of your worldly life.”

***Editorial Note***

My views on Australia Day and the #ChangetheDate movement have changed. My current position on the issue can be seen in the Twitter thread I composed during my involvement with The Familiar Strange public anthropology project (click on the below).

That said, the blogpost below does reflect a position I previously held. So, for posterity’s sake (and as an illustration of how views evolve throughout an individual’s ontogeny) I am leaving the post up.

***

As the date marking the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove passes us by, we have all paid heed to the now-annual calls for Australia Day to be struck down in our national calendar. Yes, this year, like every year, we have heard how the date treasured by lovers of barbecues, beer and Triple J is not “Australia Day” but “Invasion Day” – a date which, rather than commemorating some abiding sense of Australianness instead grotesquely celebrates the beginning of White Man’s colonization of the Great Southern Land.

“January 26, 1788 marked the beginning of a cultural genocide which systematically dispossessed the indigenous peoples of Terra Australis of their land, history and future,” follows this argument. Therefore, its proponents claim, it is a national disgrace to be celebrating Australia Day on that date.

This year among the “Down With Australia Day” pronouncements, a popular video produced by Buzzfeed has been doing the rounds on social media. Labelled “an aboriginal response to ‘Australia Day’”, the video documents the responses of several indigenous speakers who discuss what Australia Day means to them. Celebrating Australia Day, according to several of these indigenous speakers, is “insensitive”; a commemoration of an “invasion”; a day which is “really really sad” for the suffering sewed by British colonists after their arrival.

In principle, there’s merit to some of the arguments advanced in the video. Perhaps a date like Federation Day – that is January 1 – would be a more appropriate date to celebrate Australia Day. For the most part though, the entire production only reproduces viral memetic untruths which add little to serious discussions about “real” issues in aboriginal Australia – like continuing disadvantage in remote-living communities.

It’s a shame, because by regurgitating spoon-fed fallacies about the history and culture of aboriginal Australia – most of which hold no weight anthropologically or historically – it leaves the viewer less informed and the whole debate in a state where only the most reactionary voices are likely to be heard.

The many fallacies orbiting this debate are perhaps best outlined in the form of a listicle. I say this half-ironically, of course, because the shallow analysis which propelled Buzzfeed to the mainstream is at the core of the problem. So. Now. A dissection of some random piece of click-bait I watched on social media – for better or for worse.

Point #1: Sweeping Generalisations about Indigenous Australia

What is perhaps most remarkable about this video is the sweeping generalisations and falsehoods many of its speakers make about Aboriginal Australia. This is even more remarkable because the speakers are indigenous Australians.

1a. “Oldest Surviving Culture”

The first and most obvious fallacy is one speaker’s assertion that Invasion Day marks the survival of the oldest culture on earth. Anyone who has browsed through a tourist brochure selling bite-sized aboriginal cultural experiences is probably familiar with the “oldest surviving culture” claim. But how accurate is this framing?

While aboriginal peoples have inhabited Australia for a long long time (certainly far longer than anyone else), even a cursory examination of what a “culture” actually is shows how utterly ridiculous it is to use a superlative like “oldest”.

Anthropology tells us that “culture” – a term which encompasses the discourses and practices within a given human society – is not static. Rather, “culture” is a continuously evolving set of norms in a state of constant flux – a vehicle in-motion not a petrified fossil. Since culture is ever-changing, ever-transforming, resembling something one day and something else the next, to talk about “aboriginal culture” as possessing attributes like “age” or “survivability” is utterly meaningless.

Of course, quantities we might call cultural “cores” do transmit across generations. Transmissable knowledge (like storytelling and native land management practices) and some aspects of material culture have survived millennia in many parts of Aboriginal Australia. And certainly, where a presiding Aboriginal sense of “being” is concerned, the connection with the past remains important, even if the significance of that connection becomes more abstract as the yawning gap between the Dreaming and the Now grows wider. Be that as it may, when there are tens of thousands of years between cultural forms the differences eventually outweigh the similarities.

In many ways then, talking about Aboriginal culture as being “the world’s oldest surviving culture” is akin to calling the mace carried by the Serjeant-at-Arms of the Australian Parliament “a cultural relic of the bludgeoning instruments used by early hominids in the East African Cradle of Humankind”.

Thus, the point stands that Aboriginal culture today is so utterly different to what it was in 1788 that attributing an age value to any currently-practiced customs and traditions makes little to no sense. (Remember, the destruction of pre-colonial Aboriginal Australia is the reason why Invasion Day is so controversial in the first place)

Moreover, perhaps the greatest irony in this video is the fact that the speakers discussing their “oldest surviving cultures” are wearing European-style business attire and Chinese-made German-branded Adidas T-Shirts, speaking English and talking into Japanese-made video cameras.

With this in mind, there is an obvious cognitive dissonance when people speak about “cultural genocide” and “oldest surviving cultures” in the same sentence. Which is it? Were the first Australian cultures wiped out or did they survive? Granted, it’s not necessarily a binary question – but it’s a question worthy of closer consideration.

Personally, I think that the dispossession of aboriginal people in Australia (which began in 1788) constituted a cultural genocide. As the destruction of the aboriginal population of Tasmania shows, this is a historical reality that would seem to fly in the face of the assertion that pre-colonial aboriginal culture has “survived” intact unto the present.

1b. “They were a peaceful people”/”We are an inclusive people”

According to the young boy interviewed in the video (who, it should be noted, is clearly below the age of informed consent as an interviewee), the arrival of the First Fleet was a day when Europeans came and slaughtered “a peaceful people”.

Apart from the historical fallacy that the First Fleeters simply landed and started slaughtering people on the day they arrived (more on this later), there is a more pernicious untruth to the claim that the indigenous inhabitants of Australia were any more “peaceful” than any other people who have ever lived.

“Inclusiveness” is also used to describe pre-colonial aboriginal culture. But how accurate is this? While most of the aboriginal informants I have come across during ethnographic research in Cape York could be described as both “inclusive” and “peaceful” (for the most part, at least)  to claim that either of these adjectives are abiding, essentialising cultural traits is to make a sweeping generalisation without the backing of the empirical record – an over-simplification which borders on stereotype.

Certainly, in pre-colonial Kuuk Thaayorre society, clan rivalries saw the Thaayorre come into almost constant violent contact with members of the Kuuk Yaak language group (“snake speakers”) – a historical enmity which ultimately manifested in the eradication of the Kuuk Yaak as a cultural unit.

No one in the modern Cape York community of Pormpuraaw self-identifies as “Kuuk Yaak” anymore – one is either “Wik-Mungkan” (a language group with strong ties to the township of Aurukun to the north) or Thaayorre. The Kuuk Yaak were literally wiped out. This seems neither “inclusive” nor “peaceful” to me.

My good friend Peret Arkwookerum (nicknamed “Wookie” meaning “flying fox” – also one of his totems – half Wik-Mungkan, half Kuuk Thaayorre, catching a black bream on his first cast at a sacred site near Pormpuraaw

We know of course, that the interviewees are trying to argue that the pre-colonial Eora of Sydney were “peaceful” and “inclusive” – at least in comparison to the world-destroying British. But even in the case of the Eora, there is little evidence to suggest that they were any less war-like than any other human group that has ever existed.

Incidents of spearing were common occurrences among the natives of pre-colonial Sydney. Disputes were often settled by violence. Under Pemulwuy, a group of aboriginal insurgents gathered to resist (perhaps rightfully so) the settlers occupying their lands. Around the Eora campfires of Sydney Cove, discussions about immigration and the unwanted arrival of the “boat people” were vociferous and heated. Pemulwuy himself was rumoured to have been blinded in one eye in a violent incident with an enemy from another tribe.

Indeed, with all the violence and exclusivity observed throughout the history of Aboriginal Australia it is fair to say that perhaps one of the most remarkable features about Aboriginal people, historically and into the present, is how remarkably like the rest of us they are. Aboriginal people were and are people – and like all societies, pre-colonial Aboriginal society had its racism and its bloodshed, its in-group/out-group-isms and its conflict.

Peace and not conflict is the exception to the rule throughout much of human history. It was no different in the Australia that existed before the arrival of Europeans. To imagine pre-colonial Aboriginal society as having embodied some kind of Utopian dream-state is to cling to the long-since discredited Rousseausian myths of Early Man. It also denies almost everything we know about the evolution of hominids. Namely, that our capacity for violence (if not our propensity it) has deep evolutionary roots – inextricably tied as it to our higher-order forms of social organization and our complex cognition. By contrast, if we’re to persist with this imagined version of a warless early Australia, then we may as well start waxing lyrical about “noble savages”.

Bennelong, an Eora collaborator described by Watkin Tench as “a second Omai”, the textbook “noble savage”.

Pemulwuy. Aboriginal Australia’s most successful guerrilla leader.

Point #2: Excessive Use of the First Person Plural (“We”, “Our”)

One of the common traps we often fall into when talking about the historical lives of our ancestors is what I would like to call “the excessive use of the first person plural”. When one sees historical persons as part of the extended genealogical network which we call “our family” it is easy to start using terms like “we” and “our” in discussions about events that took place centuries ago. Even if we ourselves weren’t victims of what happened to these historical family members, the pain experienced by them is often experienced inter-generationally. In making sense of this phenomenon however, it’s also important to remember that we also possess some agency in how we choose to internalize this pain.

Now, I’m not going to claim that there is no validity to the idea of “inherited grievance” or “intergenerational trauma”. There is significant empirical evidence to support the idea that physical manifestations of hurt can be experienced over and over again by descendants of the initially aggrieved. (New research in the domain of epigenetics is shedding interesting light on this). Nor am I going to deny that oppression and structural violence experienced by members of the same social group can be felt, in real terms, for centuries (and still continues to be felt by aboriginal peoples today). Ancestry is a complex issue which is heavily tied to peoples’ conceptions of their own identity.

Even so, it’s still important to remember that no one alive today was also alive on January 26, 1788, so the loss suffered by the indigenous peoples of Sydney Cove was a loss that no one today actually experienced directly. That hurt, though it might continue to resonate in the present, was transmitted socially – not felt in the flesh. The implications of this factual statement are important when considering reconciliation efforts because the point I am making is simple: even though trauma echoes into the future (usually in the form of memory) there is no reason why the trauma of past others should determine the future.

In a similar vein, some years ago, while munching on a shawarma in a Jerusalem hole-in-the-wall eatery, I listened to an Israeli man prattle on about “how we [the Israelites] suffered at the hands of the Philistines (the pre-modern Palestinians)” – how “they took our land [et cetera, et cetera].” This was why, apparently, “his people” were perfectly justified in wresting the Holy Land back from the Palestinians “all the way to the banks of the River Jordan”.

Naturally, being in Israel and surrounded by heavily armed IDF soldiers doing the rounds through the Old City, my immediate reaction was to smile and nod. Inwardly however, I couldn’t help but think: “Really? Did the suffering at the hands of the Philistines actually happen to you? You personally?”

This point – which pertains to the weaponization of traumatic memory – is a point that the historian Norman Finkelstein has previously brought up in his critiques of the Israeli government’s “Holocaust industry” (a term whose framing I personally disagree with). At what point are we abusing the power of memory by internalizing the trauma of long-dead victims in the present?

In the presence of overwhelming firepower one is inclined to agree with whatever one is told. In the Old City of Jerusalem, some years ago.

There’s no easy answer to this question. It’s not binary – it’s complicated. But from my Jerusalem anecdote, it’s easy to see two problems created when we form overly strong connections with past generations: 1.) it is harmful for conflict resolution and it can perpetuate cycles of violence (as we see in the “who stole whose land” debates in the Holy Land or, say, Yugoslavia) and 2.) it becomes easy to fall into an ancestral phantasm whereby you confuse something that happened to a historical person (who you never actually met) with something that happened to you, yourself.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that the subjugation of the Eora peoples in New South Wales in 1788 is something that has no relevance for a Guugu Yimidhirr person in Far North Queensland in the present.

Events like the arrival of the First Fleet are great examples of the butterfly effect – continuing as 1788 does to generate sociological hurricanes across the continent. A small flap of the wings like the landing at Sydney Cove was the chronological initiator of a centuries-long genocide. History, in this sense, is veritably macrolepidopteran.

Equally, I’m not suggesting that today’s aboriginal Australians should collectively “get over” the dispossession of their ancestors from their native lands. Nor am I suggesting that it is wrong to draw parallels between the historical suffering of Australia’s first inhabitants and the ongoing structural violence directed against aboriginal peoples.

It certainly would be insensitive to tell anyone to “get over” a cultural genocide and it would be factually incorrect to claim that the use of the first person plural in the context of one’s ancestors never holds any weight.

What I am really railing against here is the excessive use of terms like “we” and “our” when talking about historical victims – the inappropriate fusion of past persons with ourselves. I have genetic links to the starving Irish who were loaded onto ships and sent to a penal colony in the Southern Hemisphere. And yet I did not feel their hunger. I am not them – those same Irish.

I have a close ancestral link to Lt Jack Walsh, the first Queensland officer to take a bullet to the head at the landing of ANZAC. And yet, I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what taking a bullet to the head actually feels like. While I do not begrudge other veterans who feel strong personal attachments to the shores of Gallipoli, I claim no real inheritance to the “glory of ANZAC”, whatever that is. I wasn’t there, so that particular battle honour should really have no bearing on my life, my curriculum vitae, and the foundations of my identity.

Similarly, while it is perfectly valid for me to claim that my ancestor the Scottish outlaw Rob Roy McGregor was “one of us” (“us” being “Clan Cattanach”: “touch not the cat, bot the glove”), it would be excessive to claim that everything McGregor lost at the hands of the English was also physically lost by me as his ancestor.

To claim Rob Roy McGregor’s suffering as my own would be akin to claiming his achievements as my own, in a way which conjures up today’s “ugly American” laying claim to “the liberation of France from the Nazis”. Very few Americans alive today can claim this as one of their own personal achievements (see comedian Doug Stanhope tear this sentiment apart).

The past does continue to be felt and heard. But only in the form of echoes. Or through the structures it leaves behind.

3. The Date Itself

Perhaps the most eloquent speaker in the video is the bloke in the red and blue shirt. His understanding of Australia Day, as he describes it, is like “if a guy comes into your house, does horrible things to your family, and says ‘we’re gonna have a party and have a barbie and listen to Triple J on the date we turned up’.”

Leaving aside the debatable use of “we”, if read solely as a celebration of “the day White Man turned up” (a date which symbolically represents the beginning of a cultural genocide), it’s true that Australia Day might fairly be interpreted as a bit “sadistic”.

Again, I agree that there is some merit to the idea of picking a different date to celebrate Australia Day. Perhaps a more neutral date like the date of Federation in 1901 would be more appropriate – given that it doesn’t carry the same historical and emotional baggage as the arrival of the First Fleet.

But to play devil’s advocate, if we as Australians have a responsibility to “never forget” what happened to Aboriginal Australians under colonial rule then doesn’t it make sense to commemorate the arrival of the First Fleet in much the same way that “never again” commemorations have memorialised the tragedy of genocide in Rwanda or South Africa?

Isn’t it a good thing that the counter-cultural “Invasion Day” is dredged up every year simply because of the date on which Australia Day falls? Wouldn’t all the awareness-raising efforts about the atrocities in Australian history fade into obscurity if the PM just went and changed our national day to the whatever-th of July?

Similarly, if one is being faithful to the historical record, one should also acknowledge that January 26, 1788 most certainly was not the bloodiest chapter in the history of European colonialism in Australia. There were no slaughters or massacres carried out on the day of the Sydney Cove landing.

Arthur Phillip didn’t simply arrive and begin slaughtering (though his miscreant gamekeeper would later develop a horrible proclivity for that).

According to my reading of history, the actual “invasion” – the very first boat landing – was actually a few days before January 26 anyway. The 26th was merely the date when the colony of New South Wales was formally declared. Compared to some of the other dates in the colonial history of Australia, January 26 was comparatively tame.

Australia Day does not commemorate, for example, the date of the first landfall made by Europeans on Australian shores – June 1605 – when the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon, made the first contact with aboriginal Australians at Cape Keerweer – a contact which was characterised by the massacre of “savage, cruel, black barbarians” who had slain some of Janszoon’s sailors.

Neither does Australia Day celebrate travesties like the Black War in Tasmania, part of which involved the formation of an extended line by the 63rd Regiment to corral Tasmanian aborigines into a penal colony on the Tasman Peninsula.

Certainly, while the landing at Sydney Cove did mark the beginning of colonization, the date of the landing itself – January 26, 1788 – was a pretty low-key, native-friendly event. Per the accounts of Watkin Tench and others, the amicable relations between aboriginals and settlers continued peacefully for at least the first year until the Governor’s game-keeper, John McKintyre, started slaughtering Eora for fun on his hunting parties -resulting in his own death at the hands of Pemulwuy.

Of course, in downplaying the symbolic importance of the 26th, I’m not seeking to revise the history of the First Fleet’s arrival by painting it as a harmless event in our nation’s history. It may have been the contingent event upon which modern Australia was founded but that doesn’t make it something to be overly proud of.

More than that, what I’m not calling for is an Andrew Bolt version of Australia where Aboriginal people just move on from the wrongs done to them and “pick themselves up by their own bootstraps”. Nor am I advocating for any particular position in the discussion over who gets what in modern Australia – the ins-and-outs of Native Title and reparations still need some work.

What I am calling for is a little bit more intellectual honesty in the way we discuss the past. Yes, the colonisation of Australia and the dispossession of its native peoples was a travesty of genocidal proportions. But no, the First Fleet did not land at Sydney Cove and immediately begin “slaughtering” people in droves (as the Buzzfeed video incorrectly claims). No one was killed or poorly-treated on the 26th.

Likewise, while aboriginal Australians have inhabited Australia for a period dating back at least 50,000 years, the heterogenous Aboriginal cultures of today are “not the world’s oldest surviving culture” because the very idea of an oldest surviving culture is a load of anthropological horse-shit.

(And anyway, what about the uncontacted peoples of the Orinoco basin or the grumpy resistant-to-contact North Sentinelese? These groups continue, for the most part, to live in the isolation they created for themselves many thousands of years ago.)

Ultimately, it’s worth emphasising that the video was produced by Buzzfeed (under the watermark “Buzzfeed Aboriginal”) – the internet’s classic purveyor of clickbait-for-profit. So perhaps it is not really worthy of serious intellectual consideration. At the same time, the video still speaks to an increasingly-popular discourse and it has had an impact – purpose-designed as it is to emotionally-manipulate us into sharing and spreading (not unlike war-prop videos produced by ISIS or the Lions of Rojava in Syria). And yes, sharing and spreading is something that many all over my Facebook newsfeed have certainly done… by my last count this video has 2,082,458 views.

Indubitably, the white demographic of the video-sharers is worthy of note. Conspicuously absent from the re-share meme-train are any of my aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander friends on Facebook – probably because they are too busy catching barramundi or counting crocodile eggs with the Indigenous Land and Sea Rangers program. Or doing other, more useful things… like protecting the country.

Wookie examines one of his totemic ancestors (“minh pinch” is the Kuuk Thaayorre word for “crocodile”)

As for me, while my aboriginal friends are out fishing and drinking beer on Australia Day lapping up some or other gorgeous Cape York sunset, I’m writing this from the cold depths of wintry Canada. This 26th, I’ll be spending the rest of the day dreaming of barbecues, thongs, beaches and Triple J.

After that perhaps, I’ll be waiting out for ANZAC Day – sharpening my pencils for the annual debate over whether the remembrance of the landing at ANZAC constitutes a day for the mourning of dead sons or a day when Australians unite to glorify bloodshed and violence. Probably, ANZAC Day (like Australia/Invasion Day) is a little bit of both – a celebration for what we have and a remembrance of what we have lost.

Sunset over the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Western Cape York community of Pormpuraaw. Reminds me very much of the Aboriginal flag.

While Donald Trump and the various Republican fear-mongerers have been crying Lacoön about the so-called existential threat posed by Syrian refugees and outlining vague stratagems about how just a few extra bombs will solve the Middle East’s problems, I’ve been doing some learnzerizing about the Mongols.

Yeah, the Mongols. You know…. Genghis Khan and his prodigal general Subutai. And the sons and grandsons of Genghis as well – Ögedei, Batu, Hulagu and Möngke. Those Mongols. “The fearsome Mongol hordes“. The infamous horse raiders from the Eastern Steppe.

I got onto this tangential Mongol reading binge after noticing some parallels between the apocalyptic horse-borne invasions of the Khans and a popular trope in jihadist eschatology which prophesises the arrival of the Mahdi (the redeemer of Islam) at the head of a great horde coming from the cold netherworlds of Khorosan (a historical region to the northeast of Ancient Persia).

The prophecy of the Mahdi has its origins in an unauthenticated transmission from hadith which says: “if you see the black banners coming from the direction of Khorosan, then go to them, even if you have to crawl over ice, because among them will be Allah’s Caliph – the Mahdi.”

Jihadists, of course, see themselves as the manifestation of these storied Riders of Khorosan and in keeping with the spoken tradition that the Mahdi’s Army will one day defeat the Anti-Christ at the gates of Jerusalem, a patchwork of jihadist cells linked to Al-Qaeda Central (the AfPak coven led by Al-Zawihiri) were reported to be operating in Syria under the moniker “Khorosan”.

Screenshots from jihadist videos dealing with the prophecy of the Mahdi and the “riders of Khorosan”

Imaginariums of all-conquering “black swan”-type hordes from the East have played an important role in the history of Islam. Apart from their role in the fantasies of modern salafist-jihadists, the prophecy of the Mahdi and his Black Banners was also invoked by the Abbasids during the revolution of 750 which overthrew the Ummayid Caliphate.

Elsewhere, and from a position which saw the inscrutable East as the dwelling-place of a great and unimaginable evil, the Qur’an contains a story where Alexander the Great is helped by God to build a wall with which to contain Gog and Magog (the tribal personification of chaos) in order to prevent them from wreaking havoc upon the world. Indeed, these apocalyptic ideas remained so strong for believers that centuries later, when the Mongols arrived to sack the Muslim and European worlds, the Khans were seen by many as the Quranic “Gog and Magog” worst-case-scenario finally realised.

A 13th century bestial representation of the mischievous “Juj and Majuj” (Gog and Magog) from the Qur’an

Certainly, the Mongols, as far as medieval Muslims and Europeans were concerned, were the ontological (and visceral) successors to the Huns of Rome-sacking fame – a pastoral people from the East who, having formed an almighty confederacy, had mounted an unstoppable cavalry charge to conquer the known world. To Medieval Europeans, the Mongols were like the Four Horsemen of Christian eschatalogia – destroyers of worlds. To the Muslims of the Middle East, the Mongols’ arrival served up an equal helping of doom – the end of the Golden Age of Islam.

Writing about the arrival of the “Tartars” in Muslim lands, the 13th century Arab historian Ali ibn Al-Athir began with the following: “to whom, indeed, can it be easy to write the announcement of the death-blow of Islam and the Muslims, or who is he on whom the remembrance thereof can weigh lightly? O, would that my mother had not born me or that I had died and become a forgotten thing ere this befell! … Nay, it is unlikely that mankind will see the like of this calamity, until the world comes to an end and perishes, except the final outbreak of Gog and Magog.” Even professional historians it seems, had trouble recounting the horrors of the Mongols.

Bearing witness to an approaching Mongol horde must have been terrifying. When Genghis Khan entered Nishapur, one of the first major cities he encountered on the edge of Persia, the riders under his command were said to have murdered 1.7 million people in a matter of hours. The skulls of the slaughtered were piled up in pyramids next to the city gates.

When his grandson Hulagu reached Baghdad (the centre of science and government in the medieval Islamic world), the city was sacked so thoroughly that the Tigris, which had once been described as a river running through town “like a string of pearls between two breasts” now “ran black with scholars’ ink and red with the blood of martyrs”.

Mustasim, the Caliph of Baghdad himself, was awarded special treatment. Accounts vary between the more “conventional” tale that he was simply wrapped up in a carpet and trampled to death by Mongol horses and the more fantastic story told by Marco Polo in The Travels – that he was locked in his own treasure room without food or water and told to eat as much of his own treasure as he “wilt”.

The havoc wreaked by the Mongols set off a great deal of fear-mongering in the lands of their enemies and in many ways, when we listen to the various pundits taking over our newscasts, we can see much of the same threat rhetoric now being employed to describe the hordes of ISIS.

Mongol cavalry on the move

ISIS cavalry on the move

I should say that the threat rhetoric surrounding ISIS isn’t, in and of itself, wrong. Indeed, if we compare the “Riders of the Khan” with today’s “Riders of Khorosan”, we can observe some astonishing similarities between the Mongols and ISIS. First, there is the almost-unique proclivity for cruelty and destruction. The Khan’s gold-feeding method of execution seems like it would slot perfectly into one of ISIS’ snuff films. And though ISIS’ war on archaeology is perhaps even more intense than the cultural destruction reaped by the Mongols (the Khans were apparently quite respectful of the mosques, cathedrals and pagodas in the cities they conquered) both groups proved themselves very good at making ruins of fine things.

The second similarity however (and the most crucial similarity to this piece), is the one we see when we look at how the Mongols and ISIS were able to exploit the internal divisions of their enemies. Hulagu’s Mongols, it seems, were able to exploit existing grievances by driving a wedge between the Sunni Caliph and some of his non-Sunni subjects. In the final years of his rule, Mustasim had gained some notoriety after throwing a copy of a celebrated Shia poem into the Tigris – an unforgiveable insult to an already-livid Shia population. The Caliph’s own Shia vizier would later defect to the Mongols and prove integral in the eventual fate of Baghdad.

Likewise, in modern Iraq where a post-Saddam Shia-dominated government oversaw the widespread repression of non-in groups, ISIS was able to obtain bay’ah from the anti-Maliki Sunni tribes in Anbar, creating a tribal union which accelerated ISIS’ military advances in early 2014. Indeed, just as the Mongols took Baghdad riding on the coat-tails of internal weakness, so too ISIS has shown itself capable of riding Baghdad-ward on the backs of angry Sunni tribesmen.

Ex-Pres of Iraq Nouri Al-Maliki. A modern day stand-in for Caliph Mustasim of Baghdad? (note: “malik” means “king” in Arabic).

Insofar as these problematic internal divisions can be observed in our own society, there is perhaps no clearer example of Mustasim-style division-making than some of the recent discourse concerning the moral value of Islam (and its place in our society) and the “threat” posed by the Syrian refugees waiting on our borders.

When, just days after the Paris attacks, it was revealed that one of the perps was carrying a (rightfully- or wrongfully-acquired) Syrian passport an uproar about the so-called existential threat posed by Syrian refugees  (and Muslims more generally) began in earnest. Donald Trump began talking about a religious ID card for American Muslims (with terrific responses from those same Muslims). Marco Rubio proposed refusing entry to certain refugees based on their Syrian-ness. Letting Syrian refugees into the West, these people have argued, might be akin to “letting in a Trojan Horse”.

A similar bout of refugee fear-mongering began when the Mongols arrived on the doorstep of Medieval Europe. Having conquered most of Asia, when the Mongols descended upon Hungary, they did so harassing the fall-behinds of a wave of refugees from a place called Cumania. The Cumans were a nomadic Turkic people (i.e.: they looked different and had a different God) and when a wave of about 40,000 of them were allowed to settle in the lands of King Bela IV, many of the Hungarian nobles immediately suspected the Cumans (in particular their leader Köten) of having Mongol sympathies.

A medieval mosaic depicting a Hungarian noble killing a Cuman… the two groups had some baggage

Eventually, discord between the settled Hungarian agriculturalists and the itinerant Cuman pastoralists reached boiling point. Köten was assassinated by a group of angry nobles on suspicion of being a spy. A rabble of angrier Cumans began plundering the Hungarian countryside. Things fell apart. Unfortunately for all parties concerned however, this internal discord also happened to coincide with the eve of the main Mongol invasion – the real existential threat menacing Europe. The Hungarians were routed, utterly, at Mohi. And Hungary suffered a similar fate to that of Baghdad under Hulagu.

Bearing in mind that for the most part, we humans as a species are very bad at learning from the lessons of the past, there are some very important takeaways from the case of the Cumans in Hungary – the main one being that we should be careful about domestic fear-mongering when there are real threats overseas.

While we’re on the point of refugees, I should point out that history is replete with negative repercussions caused by sudden mass immigration. Just ask today’s Gazans what they think of the Jewish refugees who ended up on the shores of British Palestine. Multi-culturalism is not always pretty. Racism is common in ethnically-diverse communities because, as a general rule of thumb, people tend to get along better with people that look like they do and think like they do.

But though I’ve commented extensively about the need to return to a more isolationist world outlook, ultimately, there’s really only one course of action to take on the refugee issue. Let a few of them in. Because what harm can these people really do? At the very very worst, our post-Paris fears are realised and some kind of shoot-up occurs.

Indeed, as an article in Foreign Policy recently suggested, ISIS-inspired attacks “will not disappear, but they will be too few and [too] small in scope to topple a government”. A terrorist attack – hell, even a nuclear terrorist attack – is not an existential threat to our society. A nuclear bomb exploding in Sydney or New York would be a real bummer, but it wouldn’t spell the end of our society.

Indeed, the real “existential danger”, as political anthropologist David Killcullen has argued, is that “our response to terrorism could cause such measures that, in important ways, we would cease to be ourselves”.

The refugee crisis is more complex than some commentators like ex-soldier Harry Leslie Smith have painted it to be. The economic reality is that Western countries can’t open their borders to everyone from every warzone around the world. We have to be comfortable, if only for the sake of our own sanity, with the fact that we can’t eliminate the suffering of all of the world’s refugees.

But if we follow the medieval Hungarian example and begin demonising people based on who they are (Muslims) and where they come from (Syria) then all we are likely to achieve is the creation of a society with widening schisms between the different faiths and worsening tensions between the different ethnic groups. A recipe for a domestic societal crisis. And all this is likely to do is weaken us against the real existential threats – such as the Mongol-Khorosan hordes on our doorstep.