Thank you so much.
We are very honoured to join you.
even over this long distance to discuss what is clearly a very compelling and anguishing issue.
The events of the last 24 hours only stand to strengthen our concern about the rise of ISIL and the shocking and abhorrent violence that we're seeing in at least pockets of the Arab world.
I very much appreciate Canada's concerns about this. I think those concerns are very much shared by the U.S. and other western governments. It's a dramatic moment at which to be thinking about these issues and about whether the west can do anything, or what it can do to diminish the threat not only directly to ourselves but also to good citizens in the Muslim world.
I do hope we can all keep the human dimension in mind, that not all Arabs are falling to the siren's call of ISIL. They are struggling very much to keep some normal conventions of social and political behaviour in check even while this radical and extremist threat increases.
We used to think this was a problem just for Syria and Iraq, and now clearly we understand that Jordan is threatened. It could spread to Saudi Arabia. It has certainly already affected Lebanon, and there are other countries as well that will be struggling with this for some time.
In terms of the western response, I was in government for 25 years working on the Middle East. At this particular juncture, I think we all have to be somewhat humble about, first of all, whether it is a problem that we can solve, and we have to accept the limits and the challenges of the role of outsiders. We have to consider whether some of our responses to deal with the horrific violence and the threat to journalists and more generally to innocent citizens actually end up compounding the problem. I just want us to be attentive to that, because I do think there are policy responses that feel right in the short run, but that in the long run actually compound the problem.
I think it would be most useful to try to give a little bit of historical and political context. How did this happen? My colleague Geneive will look much more deeply at how these extremists talk to each other and what they talk about, and a little bit at how we understand what motivates them.
There are a number of different historical reference points that I think are all relevant when we are trying to put in context the rise of ISIL: the Iranian revolution in 1979, and the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, which demonstrated that what were then considered peaceful Islamists, under the guise of the Muslim Brothers, were being challenged and superseded by a much more violent and extremist form of political Islam in Egypt, which was, after all, the heartland of Arab and Islamic thought.
For those of us of a certain age, these events are all from our fairly recent memory, but more cumulatively, there has been a failure of the west to transfer its model to the Arab world. From the end of the colonial era through the end of the 20th century, there has been a realization that the western project for the Arab world wasn't really working. Certainly the American intervention in Iraq in 2003, with all the good intentions and all the efforts to try to work with like-minded Iraqis to build modern institutions, fell short because there were some other countervailing forces in Iraq and in the region.
So it is both the failure of the western project to build an Arab world that had western-style institutions and a failure of the Arab world to develop an ideology that was modernist and positive and constructive for their own citizens.
We think of the sequence of Arab ideologies that have tried and failed, from pan-Arab nationalism to nationalism within individual Arab countries to various kinds of political Islam.
When the Arab Spring began in late 2010 and 2011, there was a flurry of hope and belief that at least some in the Arab world were now ready to try again to modernize and liberalize and open up Arab politics.
What is striking to me from recent travels in the region is how quickly the disappointment has set in. Even for people who supported the change in Tunisia, for example, with a moderate Islamist party coming to power for a brief time, or the one-year reign of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the disappointment in that experiment has led to very quick radicalization by some young Arabs. The notion that people who are being recruited successfully into ISIL had a very different political agenda only a few years ago is a very disturbing thought. We really will have a very difficult time understanding who are the vulnerable populations that can be recruited by this radical movement.
My next large point is that really we have to see this as a struggle both within Sunni Islam and between Sunni and Shia Islam. I hope Geneive will explain this in much greater depth. What we are seeing in ISIL now is a willingness to kill other Muslims. This is not Islam versus the west in the first order; in the first order, it is a struggle within the world of Islam, of Sunni Muslims profoundly disagreeing about what kind of governance they want. I still believe that ISIL represents a very small minority of Arab populations, but because of their aggressiveness, they are able to coerce much larger segments of Sunni communities. They are using intimidation, and obviously, extreme violence to keep people in fear of them.
But between the world of Sunni and Shia Islam, that's another cross-cutting theme that has started to replace identity that earlier might have been focused more on “in which Arab country do I live?” Now, the source of identity may be more determined by that sectarian affiliation.
The last point I want to make when I know that all of you are thinking about possible policy responses is that I think we in multicultural societies have to stick with the core themes that we value, which are religious tolerance and commitment to a modern education, so that people have greater understanding of other communities and not just the community in which they themselves live. I would like us to think about the policy responses as having a very wide spectrum of activities, not defaulting only to a military or a counterterrorism response. It is my view, and it is one of the things that I think we have learned of the political dynamics within Iraq after 2003, that if we come on too strong, we are actually contributing to the radicalization problem. There's no way around it.
Then we can motivate people who might not otherwise have turned to a more radical course. I would argue for a very careful integration of different tools of policy response, with the understanding that we are not likely to be the primary agent of change, that these are long struggles within societies and communities, and that outside actors can play—I hope on the margins—a helpful role to somewhat reduce the violence and to give people who are more moderate in their world view some solace.
But I don't think that we alone will be able to turn the tide in what could be a generational struggle within the world of Arab Islam. This is not yet infecting Islam in Asia, but that should be something that we have on our screens as well.
Thank you very much for your attention.