JW Portcullis House Presentation 6 January 2015 Thank you everyone - - PDF document

JW Portcullis House Presentation – 6 January 2015 Thank you everyone for coming today - I hope not only that this event will prove both stimulating for ourselves but also that it will lead to significant future actions. I am especially grateful to John Glen and Dai Havard for their sponsorship, which has enabled us to meet here in Portcullis House, to Jenny Taylor and Lapido Media for their collaboration, and to Gavin Moorhead and Taj Bilkhu for all their practical assistance. Time presses though, so I want to move quickly into the substance of my presentation, which is intended to present the report Gavin and I have written and compiled and to highlight and comment on some of its key conclusions and

• recommendations. You all have a copy of the Executive Summary in your

conference packs, and there are also plenty of copies of the full report around the room, which you are most welcome to take with you, free of charge. Slide 3 I would summarize the purpose of the report as being to bring nuanced understanding of ‘religion’ into closer dialogue with discussion of ‘security’ and local, national and international ‘community’. You’ll notice that these three key concepts, religion, security are all in inverted commas, and before I talk about

• ur conclusions and recommendations, I’d like first to show you a short film

that unpicks these a little: 2 minute film This film captures the flavour of some of our discussions last year, involving both academics and practitioners. We went on to explore the issues in a bit more depth, including the implications for policy, education and media. 6 minute film These films can be accessed through our website (www.open.ac.uk/religion- global-uncertainties) and I hope they offer an engaging way in to some of the issues explored in more depth in our written report.

Slide 4 To set our recommendations in context I’d first like to say a word about how we have got to this point. My project has been funded by the Research Councils UK Global Uncertainties programme, which has recently been renamed and rebranded as the Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research. There are two elements to it, as well as the Leadership element which has generated the ‘Religion, Security and Global Uncertainties’ report, which we are promoting at this and other public events, we have been doing more detailed research around the theme of martyrdom in its various and contested meanings

• ver the last century.

The Leadership strand of the project was designed to give added value and focus to the work of other researchers funded by the Global Uncertainties

• programme. Hence we began by interviewing a cross section of them, together

with some other researchers working on related issues. We then presented an initial working paper to roundtable discussions with a wider group of stakeholders, here at Westminster and in Belfast, and held a two-day symposium early in 2014. The final report draws both on short papers presented to the symposium and on the earlier interviews. Slide 5 -6 There are ten key conclusions and recommendations in the report, but in the limited time I have available this afternoon, I am going to highlight five of them, numbers 1, 2, 3, 7 and 8. Jenny Taylor’s presentation will focus centrally

• n recommendation 9 and I hope we can keep the remaining recommendations

in the frame in our subsequent discussions. Slide 7 Conclusion 1 Religious literacy and a wider vocabulary are needed by all. Precisely because mainstream Western society is predominantly secular, a positive effort needs to be made to enable those who do not have a religious faith to have a better understanding both of the significant minorities in the West itself who have a religious commitment and of the continuing – and arguably - growing, influence of religion in much of the rest of world. While

popular attention tends to focus on Islamic resurgence, it is important to empahasize that Christianity too has seen substantial growth in recent decades, notably in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover in a religiously diverse globalized world, there is also a pressing need for religious people themselves to understand other traditions, and indeed to understand varieties of secularity and non-belief. Ignorance, we would suggest, is a key root of Islamophobia, and the growing phenomenon of what has been called Christianophobia among both Muslims and secularists. In the long run we should be looking to schools to address this issue, although the current tendency to run down Religious Education as a subject at a time when it is needed more than ever is hardly encouraging. We would argue that it is in fact significantly at odds with the statutory duty being imposed on schools along with other ‘specified authorities’ by the Counter- Terrorism and Security Bill 2014 ‘to have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. But if better understanding is to be fostered among the adult population, the media have a crucial role to play. While it may sometimes be hard to resist the temptation to go for the eye-catching headline that stereotypes a particular religious group, there needs to be a greater readiness to look beneath the surface and to seek to educate readers, listeners and viewers. Religious groups themselves also need to take responsibility for public education, being more open to a public that does not in general want to be converted, but is prepared to be better informed. All this matters because a negative dynamic in which religious people are feared because they are not understood and themselves feel threatened and embattled by an uncomprehending society is a climate in which insecurity and consequent extremist ideas and actions can fester. It is also a climate in which even people

• f good will, with the best of intentions, are liable to misunderstand each other

because of divergent underlying assumptions. We also want to argue for a broad understanding of the term ‘security’. Security professionals are understandably preoccupied with identifying and combating immediate threats, but measures that – however inadvertently – alienate whole

communities risk being counterproductive in the long term, thus fostering

• insecurity. In particular for those whose sense of personal security and identity

is rooted in a strong religious commitment a sense that that religious identity is being challenged can lead to a destabilising sense of insecurity. Slide 8 Conclusion 2 Religion plays an ambivalent role when it comes to threatening or promoting security. Hence it is crucial to understand the specific context. For example, the hardline evangelical Protestantism promoted by the late Ian Paisley for much of his life was undeniably a factor in prolonging the conflict in Northern Ireland, but that religious tradition has also generated significant resources for reconciliation, especially through the work of the Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland. The political and military activities of Islamist movements in the Middle East, such as Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood, need to be seen alongside their grassroots activities in social welfare, improving conditions in local communities. Popular religious movements in Africa sometimes appear to threaten the security of failing or weak states, but they may well have gathered momentum precisely because of the insecurity people experience due to the limitations of the state. It is also important to understand the specific teachings of various religious traditions, and the differences between them. Our underlying point is that we should not label any religious tradition or sub-tradition as inherently threatening

• r indeed stabilizing but rather seek carefully to understand the particular

situation in question. We recognize that this may appear something of a counsel of perfection for political leaders responding to a fast evolving crisis or for journalists with a pressing copy deadline, but we would still urge that efforts are made to avoid inadvertent stereotyping pending more detailed enquiry. And in some cases – such as the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 – one does feel that more efforts in advance to understand specific religious dynamics would have been helpful, to say the least.

Slide 9 Conclusion 3 There is no simple ‘cause and effect’ perspective whereby ‘dangerous’ ideas lead people to violent action. This conclusion draws particularly on Robert Gleave’s work on legitimate and illegitimate violence in Islam, but it is consistent with insights from other contributors to the project. It does not follow that a Muslim who believes that it is theoretically permissible to kill infidels, or a fundamentalist Christian who believes abortionists to be mass murderers who deserve to be killed themselves, will ever actually act on their convictions. Conversely there are indications that sometimes people with previously quite moderate beliefs can be abruptly radicalised, perhaps for social, political or psychological reasons as much as religious ones. Moreover the attempt to contain ideas regarded as dangerous can risk becoming a counterproductive and polarising provocation. I have particular reservations about the December 2013 report of the Prime Minister’s Taskforce on Tackling Extremism in the UK, which seems to set up a clear polarity between a peaceful ‘traditional’ Islam and what it calls ‘Islamist extremism’. It needs to be recognised that there are many shades of grey in between. Unless that is fully appreciated there is a risk of finding ‘extremists’ in every mosque, alienating majority Muslim opinion, and making it much harder to identify the relatively small minority who are an actual risk to national security. A further factor that is apparent from some of our recent work is the outrage of many Muslims at Western interventions in the Islamic world, which are seldom explained or justified in terms they can readily accept. Slide 10 In this respect I think there is a need to apply elsewhere some of the lessons hard learned in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, about the dangers of antagonising whole communities so that even though they do not actively participate in terrorism they are prepared passively to sympathize with it. To underline this point I include on this slide a quotation from an interview with an an Irish republican, conducted a few years ago, which I think makes the point very eloquently.

Slide 11 Conclusion 7 Religious leaders are potentially effective agents for

• vercoming community tensions.

Nevertheless project participants had the impression both that they are an underutilised resource and that when and where they do take positive initiatives these tend to be under-reported. There are complex and in part defensible reasons for this – government is reluctant to involve itself too actively with religion, and fearful of inadvertently identifying with people who are inappropriate, either because their views on some issues are problematic, or because they lack real influence. Religious leaders for their part may also fear being compromised in the eyes of their own constituency. Nevertheless our point is that, despite the risks and obstacles, such relationships are worth exploring, and when they work well can pay considerable dividends – to apply a Northern Ireland parallel again, one thinks of the crucial contribution

• f Harold Good and Alec Reid to the peace process when they witnessed the

decommissioning of IRA weapons in 2005. Also in 2005 in Bradford, effective collaboration between religious leaders and other key community figures helped to avert any local unrest following the 7/7 attacks in London. Jenny Taylor will be talking about a further example, from Uganda, in a few minutes. But if successes of this kind are to become more widespread, we come back to the need for a more informed understanding of religion in secular government at both local and national level. Without such knowledge there is a danger of choosing collaborators who are not sufficiently representative of the communities they purport to lead, and thereby increasing rather than reducing fragmentation and alienation. There is also a need for the media to be more prepared to report positive stories

• f reconciliation and cross-community collaboration even though these do not

usually have the potential to grab instant attention in the manner that violence and conflict do.

Slide 12 Conclusion 8 Academics and policy-makers need to develop long-term strategic partnerships, informed by proper knowledge of their respective capabilities and requirements. The starting point for this project was a sense that academic insights in this field were being very imperfectly communicated and implemented. I now understand perhaps better than I did when I planned this work three years ago that we are in fact operating in different cultures and with different sets of

• imperatives. Academics have the luxury of being able to engage in more

sustained and deeper analysis than is possible for those needing to formulate a practical policy response to urgent pressing issues. On the other hand academics are not well-placed to move quickly from the theoretical to the practical or to provide instant properly informed answers to unexpected questions they have not previously considered. I would argue, however, that there is both a need and an opportunity for closer

• ngoing collaboration. I know that Tristram Riley Smith is working hard on this
• n behalf of the wider Partnership for Conflict Crime and Security Research,

and I would suggest that links of this kind could be particularly beneficial in informing policy in relation to religion, given the particular complexity and sensitivity of the issues in question. I hope that we can discuss practical ways and means of achieving this later this afternoon, but a possible model is indicated by History and Policy which posts short papers by academics on its website and runs regular seminars. If a network could be established through some kind of pattern of regular activity it would then provide contacts and resources that could be drawn upon quickly when the need arises. I am conscious that this report and presentation do not provide any easy or instant answers for those seeking to combat radicalisation and terrorism. They are however offered as a basis for longer term strategic thinking and action about processes for reducing such challenges in the future. It also points to ways

• f reducing religious and cultural tension and misunderstanding here in Britain,

and to fostering attitudes in the predominantly secular West that will make it more at ease with a majority world in which religion remains a potent force.