̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - terrorism

Scriptures rarely a significant motivating factor behind violence, say researchers

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 15:06:14 +0000

When acts of violence are reported in London, New York, or the Middle East, people often wonder what role religion might have played. Especially if Muslims are involved, there can also be a tendency to point fingers at the Qur’an. These knee-jerk reactions are not very helpful, the authors of Scripture and Violence suggest, and can lead to increased polarization in society, as well as unwarranted animosity against Muslims and people of other faiths.

Bringing together scholars from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and other institutions around the world, the contributors to Scripture and Violence set out to clarify the relationship between violent-sounding passages from the Bible and the Qur’an and the actions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the real world. They concluded that there is much less cause for alarm than many people think.

Contrary to popular belief, scriptures are rarely a significant motivating factor when acts of violence occur, the researchers found. One researcher interviewed potential and actual ISIS recruits, and discovered that the Qur’an had not played a significant role in motivating them to join. A desire to be involved in “bad-ass-do-goodery” was much more influential.

Another researcher analysed Muslim debates about suicide attacks, and found that while some Islamic scholars had cited verses from the Qur’an to argue that suicide attacks are permissible in certain limited contexts, other Islamic scholars had used the Qur’an to argue that Muslims are prohibited from carrying out such attacks at all. These scholars all treated the Qur’an as sacred, but they disagreed about what actions were permissible. Political arguments were also much more prominent in the debates than discussion of the Qur’an, which played only a marginal role.

̽��ֱ��authors of Scripture and Violence also argue that there is no need to be afraid of scary-looking scriptural passages.

“Some people think that the best strategy for preventing violence is to pretend certain scriptural passages don’t exist,” explains co-editor and New Testament scholar Julia Snyder. “But that’s counterproductive. Instead, find out how people within these religious traditions actually understand these scriptures.

“When the Qur’an or the Bible talks about violence, religious people most often understand that as linked to specific historical contexts. Or they say that very specific conditions would have to be met for violent action to be taken. They don’t think these passages call for violence now – even people who view their scriptures as the Word of God.”

Clearing up misunderstandings about these issues will help overcome existing divisions within society, the researchers hope, and enable people of all faiths and none to focus on tackling urgent economic and social issues together.

“As lockdowns end and societies open up again, and as we seek to rebuild our communities together, it’s important not to let unwarranted anxiety about people of other backgrounds or religious faiths get in the way,” emphasizes co-editor Daniel H. Weiss from Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity. “This is a great time to let go of polarizing and inaccurate ideas about how religion and scripture actually work. In fact, within these religious traditions, active grappling with tough passages can generate creative new solutions for dealing with present-day concerns.”

According to the researchers, addressing fears about scripture and violence can enable people to recognize other prominent aspects of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scriptures – such as concern for the underprivileged and an emphasis on justice – and use scripture to reflect and debate together about what a good society would look like.

Scripture and Violence is available from 1 September 2020. Published by Routledge, the book includes contributions from international experts on Jewish, Christian, and Muslim texts and traditions, who discuss key issues in interpretation of the Bible and the Qur’an, and highlight the diverse ways in which Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities understand scriptural texts. A variety of contexts are visited, from British India to Nazi Germany, from the Jerusalem Pride Parade to American evangelicals and the US military, and from CNN to European university classrooms.

Many people misunderstand the relationship between religion, scripture and violence, a new book argues. Some people worry that scriptures such as the Qur’an and the Bible fan the flames of violence in the world today, while others insist that they are inherently peaceful. According to an international team of researchers, the reality may be more complicated than either set of people think.

Some people think that the best strategy for preventing violence is to pretend certain scriptural passages don’t exist. But that’s counterproductive. Instead, find out how people within these religious traditions actually understand these scriptures

Julia Snyder

slagheap

World Trade Centre 9/11

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

Children’s fiction on terror is leading a youth ‘write-back’ against post-9/11 paranoia

tdk25 — Sun, 23 Aug 2020 23:26:09 +0000

̽��ֱ��study, by Dr Blanka Grzegorczyk at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, charts the emergence over almost two decades since 9/11 of a distinctive sub-genre in British children’s literature, focusing on themes of terrorism and counter-terror. Many of its authors, she argues, are “writing, rather than fighting, back”: against the simplistic and frequently racist terms in which extremism, immigration and Islam are often framed by politicians and the media.

This writing includes the novels of established and emerging writers such as Malorie Blackman, Muhammad Khan, and Anna Perera. ̽��ֱ��books themselves often confront young readers with depictions of violence, perpetrated both by terrorists and the state, and feature young protagonists who are variously victims, witnesses or participants in wars linked to terror.

Grzegorczyk, a lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of Education, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, argues that these books are encouraging a generation of young people who will become adults in the 2020s to challenge the cultural paranoia of the post-9/11 Britain in which they have grown up.

“One achievement of these authors has been to create a safe space for children to get past the kind of thinking, popularised by successive governments, that the natural consequence of terrorism is constantly having to be vigilant to and to fear the enemy ‘other’ against whom the state is therefore justified to mobilise,” Grzegorczyk said.

“These are books that often expose the inequalities and prejudices that lie behind that. They invite the post-terror generation to think about what needs to change and why, and how to resist the racism and Islamophobia that have been rampant in British society since before they were born. It’s writing as activism, and it invites an activist response.”

Other research has documented how the wars on terror, as well as more recent atrocities such as the Manchester Arena bombing, have preyed on the minds of a generation of young people now on the verge of adulthood. A study in 2018 by the research company Childwise, for example, found that one in three children aged nine to 16 worried about war, terrorism and global conflict more than anything else.

Grzegorczyk’s book, Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary Children’s Literature is the first study which examines the impact of a deliberate effort by children’s publishers following 9/11 and 7/7 to commission novels dealing with those themes.

It analyses dozens of titles: among them Anna Perera’s Guantanamo Boy, about an ordinary boy from Rochdale who is torn from his family and incarcerated without charge; and An Act Of Love by Alan Gibbons, which follows the divergent paths of two childhood friends into the British Army and terrorism.

Many books also explore the overlap between extremism, discriminatory profiling, and gender and social inequality. They include Muhammad Khan’s I Am Thunder, about a British Asian girl whose sense of marginalisation leaves her vulnerable to radicalisation; Nikesh Shukla’s Run, Riot, about a group of teenagers who are pursued by the police after one of them films the politically-sanctioned murder of an ethnic minority youth; and Rachel Anderson’s Asylum: a 2011 novel which prefigures the Grenfell tragedy with its depiction of a condemned London tower block crowded with asylum seekers, migrants and poor families.

Grzegorczyk’s analysis found that a recurrent theme of this literature is that it presents violence as the ‘common language’ of terrorists and governments. ̽��ֱ��novels often feature young protagonists who must form alliances across racial, cultural, religious or national divides to confront the limits of such vocabulary and give expression to a common humanity.

She argues that this encourages readers not only to imagine a future based on shared values, but to think critically about the forces that have shaped the violence, fear and suspicion endemic in British society post-9/11 and 7/7.

̽��ֱ��survey also argues that this politically engaged and charged wave of literature – through its vivid depictions of aggression, retaliation and prejudice – has offered a generation of young readers who have endured the ‘slow terror’ of constant exposure to atrocities in the media a way to handle that creeping trauma while empathising with those who have experienced it directly.

As a result, Grzegorczyk says, the novels frequently underscore the inequalities between wealthy, privileged, white young Britons – who typically only witness violence and prejudice through the media – and those from other communities and ethnicities, in Britain and elsewhere, for whom it is ever-present.

In addition, she suggests, such writing may add fresh momentum and inspiration to a new wave of youth activism, seen in movements such as Fridays For Future, American youth campaigns against gun violence, and Black Lives Matter – which involve similar expressions of cross-cultural solidarity as those found in the novels themselves.

“At one level this fiction is writing, rather than fighting, back against a resurgence of racist and anti-immigrant sentiment in British culture in the context of terrorism,” Grzegorczyk added.

“But it also positions young people as the agents of that resistance, and energises readers to take action. At a time when we are seeing a young generation speaking up, these books are pointing them towards a new kind of connectedness across cultures that moves us on from previous generations’ fixation with ‘us against them’.”

Terror and Counter-Terror in Contemporary Children’s Literature is published by Routledge.

A wave of children’s fiction which tackles subjects such as suicide terrorism, militant jihadism and counter-terror violence is helping young readers to rethink and resist extremism and Islamophobia, new research suggests.

It’s writing as activism, and it invites an activist response

Blanka Grzegorczyk

Yes

Opinion: FBI backs off from its day in court with Apple this time – but there will be others

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 12:57:18 +0000

After a very public stand-off over an encrypted terrorist’s smartphone, the FBI has backed down in its court case against Apple, stating that an “outside party” – rumoured to be an Israeli mobile forensics company – has found a way of accessing the data on the phone.

̽��ֱ��exact method is not known. Forensics experts have speculated that it involves tricking the hardware into not recording how many passcode combinations have been tried, which would allow all 10,000 possible four-digit passcodes to be tried within a fairly short time. This technique would apply to the iPhone 5C in question, but not newer models, which have stronger hardware protection through the so-called secure enclave, a chip that performs security-critical operations in hardware. ̽��ֱ��FBI has denied that the technique involves copying storage chips.

So while the details of the technique remain classified, it’s reasonable to assume that any security technology can be broken given sufficient resources. In fact, the technology industry’s dirty secret is that most products are frighteningly insecure.

Even when security technologies are carefully designed and reviewed by experts, mistakes happen. For example, researchers recently found a way of breaking the encryption of Apple’s iMessage service, one of the most prominent examples of end-to-end encryption (which ensures that even the service provider cannot read the messages travelling via its network).

Most products have a much worse security record, as they are not designed by security experts, and often contain flaws that are easily found by attackers. For example, internet-connected baby monitors that could be hacked and allow strangers to talk to their child at night. Insecure cars that could be controlled via an internet connection while being driven. Drug infusion pumps at US hospitals that could be hacked by an attacker to manipulate drug dosage levels.

Even national infrastructure is vulnerable, with software weaknesses exploited to cause serious damage at a German steel mill, bring down parts of the Ukrainian power grid, and alter the mix of chemicals added to drinking water. While our lives depend more and more on “smart” devices, they are frequently designed in incredibly stupid ways.

Insecure by design

̽��ֱ��conflict between Apple and the FBI was particularly jarring to security experts, seen as an attempt to deliberately make technology less secure and win legal precedent to gain access to other devices in the future. Smartphones are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and we know from the Snowden files that the NSA can turn on a phone’s microphone remotely without the owner’s knowledge. We are heading towards a state in which every inhabited space contains a microphone (and a camera) that is connected to the internet and which might be recording anything you say. This is not even a paranoid exaggeration.

So, in a world in which we are constantly struggling to make things more secure, the FBI’s desire to create a backdoor to provide it access is like pouring gasoline on the fire.

̽��ֱ��problem with security weaknesses is that it is impossible to control who can use them. Responsible researchers report them to the vendor so that they can be fixed, and sometimes receive a bug bounty in return. But those who want to make more money may secretly sell the knowledge to the highest bidder. Customers of this dark trade in vulnerabilities often include governments with repressive human rights records.

If the FBI has found a means of getting data off a locked phone, that means the intelligence services of other countries have probably independently developed the same technique – or been sold it by someone who has. So if an American citizen has data on their phone that is of intelligence interest to another country that data is at risk if the phone is lost or stolen.

Most people will never be of intelligence interest of course, so perhaps such fears are overblown. But the push from governments, for example through the pending Investigatory Powers Bill in the UK, to allow the security services to hack devices in bulk – even if the devices belong to people who are not suspected of any crime – cannot be ignored.

Bulk hacking powers, taken together with insecure, internet-connected microphones and cameras in every room, are a worrying combination. It is a cliche to conjure up Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the picture it paints is something very much like Orwell’s telescreens.

Used by one, used by all

To some extent law enforcement has historically benefited from poor computer security, as hacking a poorly secured digital device is easier and cheaper than planting a microphone in someone’s house or rifling their physical belongings. No wonder that the former CIA director loves the Internet of Things.

This convenience often tempts governments to deliberately weaken device security – the FBI’s case against Apple is just one example. In the UK, the proposed Investigatory Powers Bill allows the secretary of state to issue “technical capability notices”, which are secret government orders to demand manufacturers make a device or service deliberately less secure than it could be. GCHQ’s new MIKEY-SAKKE standard for encrypted phone calls is also deliberately weakened to allow easier surveillance.

But a security flaw that can be used by one can be used by all, whether legitimate police investigations or hostile foreign intelligence services or organised crime. ̽��ֱ��fears of criminals and terrorists “going dark” are overblown, but the risk to life from insecure infrastructure is real: fixing these weaknesses should be our priority, not striving to make devices less secure for the sake of law enforcement.

Martin Kleppmann, Research associate, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Martin Kleppmann (Computer Laboratory) discusses how vulnerable security technologies really are, and how these vulnerabilities could be exploited by both law enforcement and criminals.

Nicolas Nova

Smartphone rituals

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommerical

Opinion: Confronting the Taliban – an educational encounter

Anonymous — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 15:23:46 +0000

In a country that has five million children out of school (three million of them girls) it may seem incongruous to prioritise higher education. But prestigious higher education institutions, such as Edwardes College in Peshawar – where I was principal from 2006-2010 – are capable of producing the calibre of leaders able to address the full range of educational issues.

Edwardes College, affiliated to the ̽��ֱ�� of Peshawar, is one of a number of higher education institutions in south Asia founded a hundred or more years ago by British administrators and missionaries. Although conceived by the utilitarian administrators of the Raj as the creator of interpreters between themselves and “those whom we govern” – to quote the imperious Lord Macaulay – it initially taught in the local vernaculars and have maintained well above average academic standards. ̽��ֱ��College's progressive ethos and international contacts have enabled them to take on board the education of women and disadvantaged minorities more readily than comparable educational institutions, and they have consistently trained some of the most outstanding leaders from the south Asian region.

In the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly the North-West Frontier Province) Edwardes College was the first men’s college to admit women, the first of whom was admitted to the computer science department. By the time I joined in 2006 about 10% of 2000 students were women, and there was a somewhat higher proportion of women lecturers. By the time I left both proportions were significantly higher, and the college boasted a well-equipped women’s centre. When some of the more conservative professors complained about my preoccupation with women’s participation my answer was always in terms of the examination results: at the end of my fourth and final year the 14% of the total student body who were women were carrying off 53% of the top academic prizes.

There are considerable differences between the social situations of women in different parts of the Pakistan/Afghan region. Benazir Bhutto, from a rich landowning family in Sindh, was not only prime minister of Pakistan twice but, as an undergraduate at Oxford ̽��ֱ��, was president of the Oxford Union Society. However, in Pashtun society, on both sides of the border, women are unlikely to achieve such distinction; their literacy rate is much lower than that of men, and many are severely discriminated against. They can vote in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, but may be prevented from doing so by their menfolk and public opinion. Child marriage was made illegal in Pakistan in 2000 but continues in some places.

̽��ֱ��Taliban’s opposition to women’s education (or sometimes only to co-education) was aggravated during the late 1970s and 1980s when General Zia-ul-Haq became president of Pakistan and imposed a rigid version of Sharia law. In some respects this was surprising because Zia’s early years had been spent as a student in the liberal and cosmopolitan atmosphere of St. Stephen’s College in Delhi. With funds from Saudi Arabia he constructed large numbers of madrasas along the Pakistan/Afghan border, populating them with imported Wahabi mullahs. Such policies paved the way for Taliban militants from Afghanistan to find refuge in these same tribal border regions from which they could plan campaigns inside both countries.

Peshawar bore the brunt of a furious backlash by Taliban militants against “soft” targets during much of my tenure as Edwardes College principal. What happened recently in Paris happened on a monthly basis with much the same number of casualties. ̽��ֱ��international press only began to pay attention to these in September 2013 when suicide bombers killed over a hundred worshippers at All Saints’ Church (four were my own former students). Then in December 2014 a hundred and forty children were shot to death at the Army Public School in Peshawar. ̽��ֱ��first incident was stated by the Taliban to be a response to US drone attacks in the tribal areas, the second a reaction to Army atrocities in Waziristan.

One of the most effective counters to terrorism is quality education which offers hope and employment to the disenfranchised youth in places such as these border areas of Pakistan. A few years ago the former Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Haroon Ahmed, collaborated with General Musharraf and Atta ur Rahman, the distinguished Pakistani chemist, to set up several technological and vocational universities in Pakistan with funding and personnel from several countries, which, unfortunately, did not include the UK. This programme collapsed when General Musharraf left office, but it is an example of the kind of initiative which could help to redress the current imbalances of opportunity between rich industrial countries and their poorer counterparts.

On the basis of my educational experiences in Pakistan such collaborative activities will not lead to a lowering of standards – possibly even the contrary – and will equip and encourage potential leaders (and especially women) from unstable areas to rectify the unjust imbalances which fuel much current domestic and international violence.

David L. Gosling's new book, Frontier of Fear: Confronting the Taliban on Pakistan’s Border, is now available, published by London, IB Tauris ( ̽��ֱ��Radcliffe Press), 2016.

Dr Gosling will launch the book at an event in Magdalene College, with an introduction by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, on Wednesday 9 March at 6:00pm. All welcome.

Inset images: David Gosling at Edwardes College (David Gosling); Taliban ammunition (Resolute Support Media).

Dr David Gosling (Faculty of Divinity) discusses his time on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, his encounters with the Taliban and why education is the best weapon against terrorism.

One of the most effective counters to terrorism is quality education which offers hope and employment to the disenfranchised youth in places such as these border areas of Pakistan

David Gosling

Hashoo Foundation USA on Flickr

Pakistan schoolgirl

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution

Opinion: Why both sides are wrong in the counter-extremism debate

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 11:55:23 +0000

Recently published evidence submitted to the parliamentary inquiry into extremism and the government’s Prevent strategy sheds light on the current debates around counter-extremism in Britain – and it’s clear from reading the submissions and watching the evidence that the debate has reached an impasse.

Those who support and those who criticise the government’s Prevent strategy are in deadlock, caught in a cycle of unhelpful rhetoric and political posturing, and unable to offer viable alternatives to the problems they perceive.

Under the direction of chair, Keith Vaz MP, the Home Affairs Committee is investigating issues around Islamic extremism, terrorist recruitment, and the effectiveness of the Prevent strategy.

̽��ֱ��de-facto leader of the pro-Prevent lobby is David Cameron who has repeatedly voiced his concerns over extremist Islamic ideology while calling for a Muslim revival of “British” values. His position has been backed by the Tony Blair Foundation which also regards “bad” ideology as the prime driver of extremism. ̽��ֱ��Quilliam Foundation, meanwhile, identifies the ongoing threat of “salafi-jihadi” ideology and assorted think-tanks applaud various sophisticated programmes of initiatives (usually their own). But there are some major weaknesses in their position.

Need for clarity

First of all, they ignore the problems faced by teachers and lecturers – now under a legal duty to report and tackle extremism – who are clearly confused about the implications of this new duty and are ill-prepared for the problems that will inevitably arise in the classroom. And who can blame them when the very notion of what constitutes “extremism” or, for that matter, British values, is so vaguely defined in the Prevent strategy.

̽��ֱ��strategy also ignores the main drivers of this so-called “extremism” among many young people – not just young Muslims. Young Muslims are angry about British foreign policy, about perceived injustices to Muslims living abroad, and the relentlessly negative reporting in the UK media of Islam. They bear the brunt of Islamophobia, now increasingly apparent in civil society (especially against women), as well as the social and economic disadvantage caused by high unemployment.

These criticisms of perceived extremism fail to tackle the question of what sorts of attitudes and practices might be considered “less dangerous” and what exactly should lawful political dissent among British Muslim youth look like? What are the “acceptable” limits of social and religious conservatism within Britain’s mosques and madrassas, for example? How should increasingly online global communities of Muslims forge their identities? And how can we increase mutual trust between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain?

Cameron and his supporters offer us few clues. Alison Jamieson, the author of Radicalism and Terrorism: A Teacher’s Handbook for Addressing Extremism, recommends (in arguably the most coherent written submission to the inquiry) the creation of “safe spaces” that might encourage classroom discussion of political violence, the terminology of terrorism, and peace-making through conflict resolution. It is hard to argue against such sensible suggestions. None have come from Cameron’s speeches.

Anger and confusion

But few of the critics of the government’s counter-extremism policy offer reasonable alternatives. There are some sensible voices: Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors and principals of British university institutions, argues, with much justification, that current counter-extremism laws create anger and confusion among their members, pose a threat to freedom of speech, and drive controversial and offensive views underground.

̽��ֱ��National Association of Head Teachers, while broadly supportive of the legal duty on teachers, criticises the current lack of effective training and the uncertainty around ill-defined terms. Others argue more forcefully. In their written submission, representatives from the East London Mosque repeat the words of former senior police officer Dal Babu, who last year described Prevent as a “toxic brand”. Cage UK, which has campaigned against the perceived impacts of the “War on Terror”, calls for the abolition of all counter-extremism legislation.

These submissions demonstrate the growing confidence with which the government’s counter-extremism strategy is now attacked. But a glaring absence from this side of the debate is the lack of any suggestions concerning alternative models of security and policing. What are the current threats we face? What are the “acceptable” boundaries of our freedoms and our security? How should the government protect us?

Squandered opportunities

Organisations representing the interests of British Muslim communities could more often dictate the pace and direction of the extremism debate – but the inquiry evidence suggests only squandered opportunities. Several written submissions contain complaints (some more understandable than others) about inquiry questions perceived by the witnesses as excessively hostile. Others waste energy debating funding and transparency issues, pursuing personal interests rather than community concerns.

There are notable exceptions – various community groups presented evidence of actual criminal activity by Muslim perpetrators, while another submission raised the issue of the repatriation of those who have returned from IS-held territories – a real-world problem requiring a practical solution.

̽��ֱ��Home Affairs Committee is now in recess, deliberating over the submitted evidence and no doubt drafting recommendations. Mine would be two-fold: first, and as Anderson argues, an independent review of the government’s Prevent strategy is urgently needed. Second, we need a government-led initiative that encourages mainstream political engagement from young British Muslims.

Cameron talks of “British” and “liberal” values – and there are none finer than our tradition of political dissent. British by Dissent, a report published by Muslim Youth Helpline provides an example of how Muslim organisations can take back control of the debate around political engagement among British Muslim communities.

It’s clear from the submitted evidence that a better balance of freedom and protection is needed. Such a balance is achievable – but only if each side in the extremism debate begins to the see the world through the other’s eyes.

Julian Hargreaves, Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Inset image: Keith Vaz, who chairs the Home Affairs Committee inquiry into counter-extremism measures (UK Parliament).

Julian Hargreaves (Centre of Islamic Studies) discusses the Government's Prevent strategy and counter-extremism in Britain.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Opinion: Governments should turn to academics for advice on radicalisation, religion and security

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 15:30:10 +0000

In August 1939, the operational head of Britain’s Government Communication and Cypher School, Alistair Denniston, wrote to the Foreign Office about the need to recruit “men of the professor type” into the wartime code-breaking hub at Bletchley Park in order to help combat the Nazi threat.

Following the horror of marauding attacks in Paris, the British prime minister has announced he will be recruiting a further 1,900 personnel to the Security and Intelligence Agencies. “Professors” may also be able to add value to these organisations and wider society. ̽��ֱ��government should not forget the wealth of talent available within our universities to offer insight and depth to the judgments of decision-makers.

In my capacity as champion to the Partnership for Conflict, Crime & Security Research, I organised a workshop recently where four leading academics discussed how best to get research on religion and contemporary security challenges in front of politicians, policymakers and the press, to help them deliver better service to the public. ̽��ֱ��academics were historian of Muslim thought Robert Gleave; Kim Knott who researches ideologies, beliefs and decision-making; Peter Morey who explores trust between Muslims and non-Muslims, and John Wolffe who works on the interface between religion and security.

One key message from this debate was that those in positions of authority and influence must overcome the tendency to regard religious issues as marginal until they become a security risk. Religion is poorly understood, and while academic focus on definition can be dismissed as pedantry, there is a need for clarity when talking about religion and security – to avoid millions of devout people around the world being swept into a bucket labelled “terrorist”.

Improve religious literacy

For instance, research helps us to draw a distinction between religion and faith. Religion is defined by creed, doctrine, framework and practice; whereas faith is more personal, abstract, emotional and often at some distance from the teachings of established religious institutions.

We must improve religious literacy among politicians, policymakers, the press and the general public. In a security context, this should include a more nuanced understanding of the variants of institutionalised religion, while comprehending the universe occupied by men and women of faith.

A single office of responsibility in the government could act as a conduit for informing and shaping policy and legislation relating to religion and religious issues, including those linked to security and violence. An immediate priority for the office should be to inform efforts to address radicalisation, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice. This wouldn’t carry any extra cost if one of the government’s chief scientific advisors was asked to undertake this work, tapping into the wealth of expertise addressing these issues inside the nation’s universities.

Opinion-formers, including those in the press, must also resist the simplistic temptation to describe religion as the motive for acts of violence. In the same way, “Third World” insurgents during the Cold War, such as those in North Vietnam, were too easily defined by the Communist ideology they embraced.

How to dispel alienation

But closer attention needs to be paid to the relationship between faith and alienation. There is a wealth of research – including historian Kate Cooper’s work into the radicalisation of early Christian martyrs over 1,500 years’ ago – that can help us understand how alienation, especially of young people, leads to a sense of hopelessness that translates all too readily into violent resolve.

We must galvanise support for the public sector, faith groups and charities to promote engagement between polarised communities. But this is not a simple matter of issuing a commandment from on-high that: “thou shalt engage in mutually informative dialogue and develop trustful relationships”.

Evidence and experience, for instance from Northern Ireland, shows how different the certainties of macro-political strategies can be from micro-realities, leading to communities being filled with mistrust and disillusionment. Interventions tailored to dispel alienation and build trust must reflect local circumstances, with a strong emphasis on “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” solutions.

There are some powerful examples of how the arts can operate to communicate religious difference in our complex, multicultural society, but common artistic endeavor can also help heal divisions. For example, the UK-based Berakah Choir works to transcend barriers of faith and culture through collaborative activities, allowing the individual voice to be heard working in harmony with others to build a common humanity. There is much that could be achieved at a low cost to harness the arts to counter alienation.

Draw on academics as an asset

Western governments are deploying a range of strategies and tactics to deal with the threat posed by the so-called Islamic State. David Cameron is recruiting more spies, and parliament is discussing profound changes to the way in which digital intelligence is collected.

Great minds were brought together at Bletchley. Marcin Wichary/flickr.com, CC BY

But we must not ignore the invaluable supply of knowledge and insight available from our men and women in academia. Research can provide evidence-based context to contemporary challenges, including an enlightened understanding of the place of religion and faith in a security context.

We can stop mistakes being made in terms of misguided policies and knee-jerk reactions. And researchers can help the design and deployment of interventions that make a real difference, focusing limited resources effectively.

It has been said that the scholars working in Bletchley Park saved countless lives and took one or more years off the duration of World War II. Let us hope that politicians, policy-makers and the press are enlightened enough to make full use of the contribution that university researchers can make to today’s security challenges.

Tristram Riley-Smith, Associate Fellow, Centre for Science and Policy; Director of Research, Department of Politics & International Studies, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Tristram Riley-Smith (Department of Politics and International Studies) discusses how universities and academics can add insight and depth to national security decisions.

Takver

Bataclan Paris attacks memorial

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-ShareAlike

Spiritual violence and the divine revolution of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh

fpjl2 — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 10:41:32 +0000

By the time he had moved back to Calcutta in 1906, the state had been split in half by Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India. ̽��ֱ��British claimed this schism was ‘administrative’, but it was largely an attempt to quell burgeoning political dissent in the region.

̽��ֱ��partitioning of Bengal – a prime example of British ‘divide and rule’ policy – incensed many sections of the population, and the Indian ‘middle classes’ mobilised under the banner of Swadeshi, the anti-imperial resistance movement that would eventually force the British to revoke the partition six years later.

While ‘moderate’ Indian leaders lobbied the British for greater representation, many of the younger generation in Bengal – particularly Hindus – believed that ‘prayer, petition and protest’ would fail, and more radical action was needed: non-cooperation, law-breaking and even violence, in the name of ‘Swaraj’ – self-rule. One of the figureheads of ‘extremist’ Swadeshi was Aurobindo, a teacher, poet, polemical journalist and underground revolutionary leader.

In his later years, Aurobindo became one of India’s most influential international Gurus, redefining Hinduism for the modern age with his experimental mysticism (Integral Yoga), global outlook and life-affirming metaphysics of divine evolution. His philosophy is taught across India and was recognised early on by prominent Western figures including Aldous Huxley, who nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize in 1950. He was also a major inspiration for the ‘New Age’ movement that swept across the West.

Today, the popular perception of Aurobindo’s life is divided. ̽��ֱ��early political firebrand and later mystic are seen as separate identities, split by a year of imprisonment during which Aurobindo was spiritually ‘awakened’.

However, for Alex Wolfers, a researcher at Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity, this dichotomy is a false one. ̽��ֱ��spiritual and political blurred throughout Aurobindo’s extraordinary life, particularly during his time as a leading light of radical Swadeshi, says Wolfers, who is investigating spirituality in Aurobindo’s early political writing.

Through research at archives in Delhi, Kolkata and Aurobindo’s Ashram in Pondicherry, Wolfers has traced the emergence of a new theology of revolution in Aurobindo’s thoughts, one that harnessed the spiritual to challenge “the sordid interests of British capital”.

Aurobindo fused the political and spiritual, mixing ideas from European philosophy, particularly Hegel and Nietzsche, with Hindu theology under the aegis of the Tantric mother goddess, Kali, and Bengali Shaktism – the worship of latent creative energy – to develop a radical political discourse of embodied spirituality, heroic sacrifice and transformative violence.

He complemented this with poetic interpretations of the French revolution and Ireland’s growing Celtic anti-imperialism, as well as contemporary upheavals in Russia, South Africa and Japan.

Through his polemical speeches and essays, Aurobindo furiously developed his political theology against a backdrop of assassination, robbery and bombings, weaving all of these strands into what Wolfers argues is the central symbolic archetype in his political theology: the ‘revolutionary Sannyasi’.

In Hindu philosophy, Sannyasis are religious ascetics – holy men who renounce society and worldly desires for an itinerant life of internal reflection and sacrifice. Throughout the late 18th century in famine-stricken Bengal, roving bands of Sannyasis – together with their Muslim counterparts, Fakirs – challenged the oppressive tax regime of the British, and repeatedly incited the starving peasants to rebel.

Aurobindo amplified and weaponised this already potent symbolic figure by recasting him as a channel for divine violence. By embodying Swaraj, the revolutionary Sannyasi could kill with sanctity. Violent revolution became spiritually transcendent, without murderous stain.

“Just as the traditional Sannyasi intensifies his inner divinity through ascetic practice or the voluntary embrace of suffering, Aurobindo venerates the element of violence and adversity in existence as a prelude to collective ‘self-overcoming’,” says Wolfers.

As Wolfers puts it, the revolutionary Sannyasi is the man of spirit and action, sanctified by sacrifice, whose volatile potency is ready to detonate like a bomb in a violent spectacle of Liebestod: the ‘love-death’ of German romanticism, the ecstatic destruction needed for rebirth. As Aurobindo himself states, “war is the law of creation”.

“This violent vanguardism is often seen as an infantile politics that limits broader participation in a political movement,” says Wolfers, “but even the non-violent Gandhi significantly borrowed from Aurobindo’s transgressive politics. This form of terrorism was crucial in implanting the radical ideals of Swaraj that later anti-imperialist politics were structured around.”

Aurobindo’s highly Anglicised, elite Cambridge education had left him estranged from his roots. On his return to India in 1893, he had to ‘re-learn his identity’ through classical Hindu texts, whereas his younger brother Barin, who had grown up closer to home, was more familiar with the living traditions of Bengal.

Together, Aurobindo, the prophetic visionary, and Barin, the untiring activist, organised the spread of a loose network of underground terrorist cells throughout the land and incited the increasingly politicised student communities of Bengal to submit themselves to the militant spirituality of the ‘revolutionary Sannyasi’.

“These young revolutionaries took their cues from Aurobindo’s discourses of Sannyasi renunciation: they left their families and society, living rigorously according to rituals and timetables, dressing in the traditional ochre robes of the Sannyasi. Some even made use of Tantric practices, carrying out blood rites and secret vows in cremation grounds to purify their life in contact with death,” says Wolfers. “Through these practices they cast off their allocated ‘middle classness’, breaking free from imposed British society.”

̽��ֱ��revolutionaries targeted figures of British state authority and, in May 1908, Aurobindo was arrested in connection with the botched assassination attempt of a notorious magistrate. It was while in solitary confinement in Alipore jail that he experienced the ‘spiritual awakening’ that confirmed his mystic status.

Over 60 years after his death in 1950, Aurobindo’s legacy continues to live on, despite often being misappropriated for political gain.

“ ̽��ֱ��figure of the ‘revolutionary Sannyasi’ has had an enormous afterlife: in its various guises and mutations, its influence is evident across the political spectrum from Gandhian mobilisation to Bengali Marxism and Hindu nationalism. Even today, it remains an important trope in Indian politics,” says Wolfers.

“From as early as the 1920s, Hindu nationalist organisations began to recast Aurobindo in an increasingly right-wing mould to assert Hindu dominance against the subcontinent’s Muslim and Christian minorities,” he says. “But hyper-masculine Hindu chauvinism, still a major force in Indian politics today, stands in sharp contrast with his original inclusive and ‘anarchic’ outlook.”

In 1879, a young Indian boy arrived in England from Calcutta (now Kolkata), in the state of Bengal, sent by his father to receive a British education. Aurobindo Ghosh showed enormous promise and would go on to receive a scholarship to study classics at King’s College, Cambridge.

Even the non-violent Gandhi significantly borrowed from Aurobindo’s transgressive politics

Alex Wolfers

Wikimedia Commons

Sri Aurobindo Ghosh

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

̽��ֱ��1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany

bjb42 — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��staging of an Olympic Games is both a formidable task and an exciting opportunity, not least because it firmly places the host nation on the world stage. Take the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, Canada – an event that was viewed by some 3.5 billion people, more than half the world’s population. In effect, the event is a chance for the host country to promote itself globally.

Perhaps one Games above all others in the last century was imbued by a particular eagerness to present a national identity afresh to the world and to erase past memories: the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. As events transpired, it is almost exclusively remembered for a very different reason – the murder of 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team by the terrorist group Black September. Yet, this tragedy is only part of the story of the Munich Games.

Although some aspects of the 1972 Games have received academic attention, most notably from scholars of terrorism, there has been a major gap in research that uses the Games as a case study to highlight broader historical currents in Germany. As a topic, the Munich Games lies neatly at the intersection between my research interests in Germany and in sports history and so, a few years ago, I set out with historian Dr Kay Schiller from the ̽��ֱ�� of Durham to provide the first cultural and political history of the Munich Olympics. ̽��ֱ��resulting book, ̽��ֱ��1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany, seeks not only to explain the significance of the event in modern German history, but also to ask why such great store was set on hopes for its success.

Archives and oral histories

With funding from the British Academy, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), I was able to delve into documents, most of which had only recently become available, held in archives around the world.

̽��ֱ��research reached from the federal archives in Koblenz and Berlin to the Bavarian State Archives and the city archive in Munich, from the research libraries at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in Lausanne to the Amateur Athletics Foundation in Los Angeles, and even to the archive held at the ̽��ֱ�� of Illinois relating to Avery Brundage, the IOC President who controversially decided to continue the Munich Games following the terrorist attack.

Supplementing the investigations was an array of oral history sources gained from interviews of political and societal figures involved with the planning and staging of the Games. These included Hans-Jochen Vogel, the Mayor of Munich at the time, members of the Organizing Committee for the Games, participating athletes, an Israeli survivor of the terrorist attack and the now deceased Markus Wolf, formerly the head of foreign operations at the East German Stasi security service.

Showcasing a modern Germany

Much of the research focused on the years leading up to the ’72 Games. ̽��ֱ��Federal Republic of Germany was at a crossroads in the mid-1960s, still under the shadow of World War II but viewing the future with optimism. In the seven years between being chosen as host and staging the event itself, Germany experienced favourable economic conditions and a belief in technocratic optimism, but was equally marked by national and international debate and dispute.

Against this background, the symbolic potential of the Games did not escape the organisers of the Munich Olympics, who took just one month in 1965 to secure promises of funding from the city of Munich, the Bavarian State and the Federal Government. Hosting the Games was deemed to be of immense importance. As Chancellor Willy Brandt put it succinctly, Munich 1972 was to serve as a ‘showcase of modern Germany’, a chance to replace memories of the Third Reich with images of a thriving and prosperous Federal Republic, an opportunity to present an optimistic Germany to the world through its ‘Happy Games’ – its official motto.

In the end, the hopes were shattered by the horrific terrorist attack in the early hours of 5 September. As on 11 September 2001, the world had been caught off-guard and unawares, and the Munich organisers, from the chief committee members down to the hundreds of stadium hostesses who had welcomed the international community to Germany, saw the life seep out of their Games overnight. Years of effort now left a dubious legacy and, more immediately, the Federal Republic was plunged into months of diplomatic firefighting with Israel and the Arab world.

Into the melting pot

It’s impossible to write such a book without combining perspectives of political, social, cultural and urban history. As a result, ̽��ֱ��1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany is really about a nation’s handling of a melting pot of issues: Germany’s urban, regional and national identity; intergenerational conflict and social transformation; ideologies of the past; political and diplomatic disputes; architectural visions and ceremonial imaginations; terrorism and security; East and West Germany; and Israeli–Arab relations.

At the same time, however, it’s a book about sport or, more accurately, about sport’s slippery nature as a phenomenon that is both apolitical and deeply rooted in political discourse. To take one example: even for an event that claimed its legitimacy through an Olympic tradition reaching back to antiquity, it was impossible to make a complete break with the political past – ‘Hitler’s Games’ of 1936 loomed large over the ’72 Games.

A question of sport

Until this research project, apart from the extensively studied inaugural Athens Games of 1896 and the Nazi-influenced Berlin Games of 1936, there had been virtually no attempt within sports historiography to write comprehensively about the impact of individual Games on their respective host nations. Remarkably, there has also been no general account of the modern history of European sport from a comparative and international perspective. This is the case despite sport being such a central cultural feature of European life, both as a participant activity and as a spectator entertainment.

To remedy this situation, an AHRC-funded Network entitled Sport in Modern Europe has begun the first comprehensive historical analysis in this area. ̽��ֱ��overarching aim of the research network, which is led by Cambridge, together with academic partners at the ̽��ֱ�� of Brighton and De Montfort ̽��ֱ��, is to establish the central themes for the writing of a history of modern European sport. At a series of three international workshops, colleagues from around the world have been looking both comparatively and chronologically at sport, encompassing the elite diffusion of British sport in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as its modern-day democratisation, and exploring the problems associated with defining a distinctive European model of sport.

For me, moving from an in-depth analysis of the Munich Games to a broader outlook on European sport has been an enrichingtour d’horizon– and the work is only just beginning.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Chris Young (cjy1000@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of German and Dutch, or visit the Sport in Modern Europe Network.

A new analysis of the Munich Games of 1972 places the event at the very centre of modern German history, as Dr Chris Young explains.

Public conflicts arose over political ideology, culture and the legacy of the German past, and foreign policy shifts impacted in intricate ways on East–West German relations.

Alexandra Young

1972 Munich Olympic Stadium

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes