In April earlier this year, I met up with colleagues from the ‘Re-Assembling Democracy: Ritual as Cultural Resource’ (http://www.tf.uio.no/english/research/projects/redo/) research group at the Comptoir Voltaire, a café on the corner of Boulevard Voltaire and Rue de Montreuil, in Paris. Last Friday, at 21:40, a terrorist blew himself up there. The attack on the café was one act in an unfolding horror of a war that has never been declared, has no fixed territory and no clearly defined protagonists. ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, a billion dollar brand franchise, are the enemy, but their fighters are French, Belgian (and British), their Wahhabi ideology is the state religion of the key Western ally Saudi Arabia and numerous theories abound about support ISIS/ISIL/Daesh (may) have received from Assad (to fight the Free Syrian Army), the USA (to fight Assad) and Turkey (to fight the Kurds). Amidst the confusing welter of claim and counter-claim, right-wing media in the UK have linked the attacks in Paris to the refugee crisis. No thought that the refugees are fleeing precisely the same kind of horror. And, more perniciously, in seeking an immediate cause for the violence, the much deeper causes that lie behind the rise of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh are implicitly put to one side in favour of easier headlines that prompt bad decisions by policy-makers.

Western powers long supported dictatorships across North Africa and the Middle East, including Algeria, Egypt, Iraq and Syria. In these countries where political association was curtailed and any form of dissent was met with torture and death, the mosques were the only spaces for people to meet and discuss alternative social imaginaries in relative safety. These imaginaries took shape in the maelstrom of colonialism and a patron-client modernity, and some of them emphasized an Islam oriented toward the cultivation of an inner ascetic of purity, and contempt for all forms of difference. The disastrous adventurism of the war in Iraq and the digital democratic forces unleashed in the Arab Spring that prompted Assad’s utterly unnecessary crackdown and which has since morphed into a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, together created a vacuum filled in part by ISIS/ISIL/Daesh (and I haven’t even mentioned the toxic hatreds fuelled by the deliberate frustration of Palestinian statehood). This is not liberal hand-wringing: acknowledging our complicity in creating the conditions that spawned ISIS/ISIL/Daesh means recognizing that the problem is not Islam or refugees—the problem is democracy or more precisely, its lack.

The citizens of Middle Eastern and North African states did not benefit politically or economically from oil and their dealings with the West. As our world tips seemingly inexorably to greater political, economic and ecological instability, the instincts of Western elites seem to be increasingly dictatorial. We take no steps to deepen our democracy and reform its obvious flaws or indeed those of international institutions. We take no steps to narrow the terrible abyss that has opened up between the 1% and the rest. Instead, in the name of an economically illiterate ideology of austerity, the precariat grows. Because the elite lie behind gated walls and compounds, the precariat is exposed not only to the violence of markets but also the bombs and bullets of hopelessly deluded terrorists who, because they can no longer imagine life only imagine death. And, as my colleagues and I wrote e-mails to remind ourselves of the time we had shared together in the Comptoir Voltaire and to check that our Parisian friends were safe, we reminded ourselves of the project that brought us together. But although we can see the spirit of democratic solidarity in the rites of collective mourning, other, darker and more dangerous forces gather. The times are changing. The time is now. Put fear aside and imagine not just peace, but equality, justice and democracy. That is how we defeat ISIS/ISIL/Daesh.

Paul-François Tremlett
Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University
Paul-francois.tremlett@open.ac.uk