I'm sorry to be the messenger of bad news, but I think that maybe we need to be asking a slightly different question, which is not how can we force them to separate church from state.
Before I answer the question, I just want to note that, in a sense, with regard to a lot of what we're seeing, these kinds of extremist ideas, this isn't the first time in the Islamic tradition that some of these ideas have been advanced. There's a whole history of Islamic scholarship. There's a scholar by the name of Ibn Taymiyyah, and there's another ideologue by the name of Hassan al-Banna. There have always been these cycles of radical thought having some resonance in Islamic societies, of course not as violent as what we're seeing today, but perhaps that's just a result of the modern world. We have better technology now. We have better weaponry. The extremists now operate in a different way than they did in the 1990s. In the 1990s, in Egypt, they were attacking cabinet ministers with fairly primitive military operations. I think we have to separate what is technology and the instruments of the modern world from Islamic theology, or what is theological and has been part of the Islamic tradition.
I'll give you an example. The anti-Shia attitudes have existed for hundreds of years among the Sunni; it's just that now there's a different instrument for expressing that intolerance and that hatred: there's social media.
I think those are some of the challenges, but I believe the upside is that, as part of the modern history of these Islamic movements, at some point, public opinion does turn against them. The specific example that has been referred to since the unfortunate death of the Japanese journalist was in 1997 in Luxor, Egypt, when the al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the most militant group that had existed in Egypt for a while, killed a lot of tourists and Muslims in the town of Luxor. That was virtually the end of the movement. I think the question now is, how many more of these really gruesome incidents can ISIS survive without public opinion turning against them in a way that matters?
I think what the west can do is try to help some of the religious leadership. I think there were 180 religious scholars who recently signed a petition against ISIS. How can the west help these people develop bigger platforms so that the extremists' voices aren't the only voices that people hear? As I mentioned earlier, I don't think that, either in the west or in the Arab world, religious scholars who are against ISIS, who are against this interpretation of Islam are effective in their own messaging. I think that is one way that the west can weigh in.