The dust is settling in Bamako, Mali, and drizzle is falling on the Place de la République. Brussels fears an “imminent attack”. Another week begins.
After the horrors of the last nine days, millions across the world are fearful that more violence is to come. In this, terrorism has succeeded in its principal aim: to terrorise, or inspire anxiety disproportionate to the threat to an individual. A climate of fear has been created. This, it appears, is a time of killing, whether in hotels, cafés, concert halls, on planes or elsewhere.
The question many are asking is simple: when will this end? Possibly not for decades is the short and depressing answer.
To understand why, we need to look backwards, as well as forwards. This current wave of terrorism did not come from nowhere but has roots reaching back 40 or more years. Some, particularly on the right, will say they run back to the birth of Islam in the 7th century. Others, largely on the left, point to a reaction against successive waves of western imperialism in the Islamic world starting in 1798.
In fact, the violence we face today, though influenced by factors reaching back centuries, began in the 1960s and 1970s when, as part of a broader religious resurgence in the Muslim world, the ideology of Islamism surged from the margins towards the mainstream. With regimes that spouted western-inspired slogans of nationalism, secularism and socialism singularly failing to deal with acute economic and social problems, a supposedly more authentic, faith-based alternative had mass appeal. In Iran, in 1979, the Islamists seized power, hurling now familiar slogans against the west, Israel, decadence and social iniquity
In fact, the idea that a modern state should be run according to a particular interpretation of Muslim teachings was far from as authentically local as its proponents claimed. Something more indigenous, a hardline, puritanical conservatism, labelled Wahhabism by critics, also emerged, boosted by preaching funded by Gulf petro-dollars. On the margins of both were violent men – such as those who seized the main mosque in Mecca in 1979, killed President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981, or blew themselves up in Lebanon in the early 1980s. The world woke up to the new threat. Eventually crackdowns in Egypt and elsewhere, such as that which killed thousands of Islamists in Syria in 1982, in effect repressed the problem.
But only temporarily. A second phase of Islamist activism, accompanied by renewed violent militancy, came a decade later. Fuelled by the veterans and ideas of the conflict in Afghanistan, repression of “moderate” Islamists, and by economic strains, it was contained within the Islamic world. But it was lethal. In Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere, civil conflicts killed hundreds of thousands. The violence was savage, with massacres and beheadings. The tactic of suicide attacking was developed further. The twin strands of Islamism – the political project, and Wahhabi conservatism – fused into a new powerful ideology. This time, attrition and division within the militant factions, as well as repression, weakened the threat.
A third phase came at the end of the 1990s. This time the target was global. Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida launched a series of strikes culminating in the 9/11 attacks of 2001. This campaign of international violence, fuelled further by the invasion of Iraq, continued until the end of the last decade, when it, too, began to fade. The key factor this time was, after indications of early attraction for some, the rejection of Bin Laden’s ideas and methods by populations throughout the Islamic world. With al-Qaida itself degraded and eventually decapitated – Bin Laden was killed in 2011 – security officials looked happier than they had for years. The main threat was, it was said, from “lone wolves”.
Then came this new phase: the aftermath of the Arab spring, the hideous violence of Syria, the failure of Iraq (and of western policymaking in the Middle East), regional squabbles, renewed Shia v Sunni competition and the rise of Islamic State. Add multiple crises in Europe, including one of integration of young locally born men from nominally Muslim backgrounds, and we are where we are today.
This background tells us several things. It explains, for example, the hybrid nature of Isis, one element which makes the threat it poses so complex. The organisation borrows elements from every phase. From the 1970s comes a vision of an authoritarian state, which, if it cannot be captured, must be created. From the 1990s comes savagery and suicide attacks. A global campaign of spectacular strikes comes from the early al-Qaida period, while the call for “leaderless jihad” is from its later years.
Isis has brought its own elements too, of course: a populist apocalyptic strand, a vicious sectarianism and impatient, immediate re-establishment of the caliphate.
The history also shows us that the intensity of Islamic militancy has risen and fallen in cycles over the decades. This is reassuring. The new tide of Isis-led violence, many experts believe, is still rising. Yet it will almost certainly ebb again, as policymakers and publics react, security services adapt and the militants suffer attrition of every sort.
At the moment there is a tactical stalemate in Syria and Iraq. Isis is able to endure, if not expand. The gap that has opened up between the threat posed by western Isis volunteers and the resources devoted to countering the threat they pose has made western nations vulnerable. All this is likely to change in coming years and we can be reasonably confident that the balance of power will swing away again from the extremists, as in previous cycles.
But tracing the evolution of the contemporary threat is dispiriting, too. For though we can look forward to a time when Isis disintegrates, the chances of this current cycle being the last must surely be remote.
