As the country sinks into an increasingly repressive regime under the helm of current President Abdulla Yameen – and strengthens ties with China and Saudi Arabia – we will be joined by exiled former president Mohamed Nasheed, journalist and author of The Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy JJ Robinson, and others, to discuss the current situation in this small yet turbulent archipelago.
With at least 100 Maldivian jihadists now fighting in Syria and Iraq, a significant share of the country’s modest population, we will also discuss the increasing role of Islamism – as well as the implications for the wider South Asia region. We will explore hopes for the future and the role of an increasingly-repressed media in supporting an eventual transition to democracy – all as the impending threat of climate change on the low-lying islands continues to loom large.
This event will be chaired by BBC News South Asia editor Charles Haviland.
Mohamed Nasheed is a politician, environmental and human rights activist, and served as the fourth, and first democratically-elected, President of the Maldives from 2008 until 2012. In 2010, Newsweek included President Nasheed in its list of the ‘World’s Ten Best Leaders’, and he is frequently dubbed the ‘Mandela of the Maldives’. Nasheed is the recipient of numerous international awards, including the Anna Lindh Prize in recognition of his work promoting human rights, democracy and environmental protection, and the James Lawson Award for the practice of non-violent action.
JJ Robinson is a journalist and author of The Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy. He spent four years working as an editor of the Maldives’ first independent English-language news outlet, and was among the only foreign witnesses to the 2012 coup d’état that toppled Nasheed‘s government. He was the Maldives’ Reuters correspondent and its Reporters Without Borders representative, and has appeared on the BBC, Radio Australia, Al Jazeera and other outlets as a Maldives expert.
Abbas Faiz is an independent South Asia specialist focusing on a number of countries including the Maldives. Until early 2016, he worked as a senior researcher with Amnesty International. He has travelled widely within the region and has authored scores of reports, press releases and policy documents during his 30-year working time with Amnesty, covering human rights concerns in almost all countries of South Asia including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Maldives. He has given in-depth interviews on human rights issues to a range of media, including Al Jazeera, ABC, CNN and the BBC, and has written for the Guardian, New Statesman and the Lancet amongst others. He has closely monitored the human rights situation in the Maldives over the past 20 years, and has provided strong support during this period to the country’s ongoing movement for democracy and human rights protection.
]]>
On the release of his new book Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea, we will be joined by senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) Dr Shiraz Maher – in conversation with journalist Clarissa Ward – to discuss the origins and development of salafi-jihadism. We will be tracing the evolution of the key ideas behind one of today’s most destructive forces – as well as its transmutation and growing prominence in recent years. We will explore what salafi-jihadism seeks to achieve, and the extent to which its rapid escalation is a product of recent wars.
This event will be moderated by Clarissa Ward, a multi award-winning senior international correspondent based at CNN London.
Dr. Shiraz Maher is a member of the War Studies department at King’s College London and a senior research fellow in its International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR). He currently leads the Centre’s research on the Syrian and Iraqi conflicts and also researches the political philosophy of Salafi-Jihadi movements. He is an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, and has given evidence before three parliamentary committees on the Syrian conflict, the flow of foreign fighters into the country, and the rise of Islamic State. He is a contributing writer for the New Statesman, and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in Journalism in 2016.
]]>In a debate at the Frontline Club on 16 January 2015, in the aftermath of the attacks on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on 7 January, a panel of expert commentators strongly backed the continued promotion of free speech and warned against responding to the attacks with a curtailment of rights and liberties.
Members of the panel urged governments to resist the temptation to try to legislate, or fight, their way out of what was characterised as a crisis of identity for the European continent. Europe must be mindful of the risks of societal polarisation, argued the panel, as well as being aware of the likelihood of further terrorist attacks in the year ahead.
Terror in France at The Frontline Club – Photo by Richard Nield
Despite the attacks on Charlie Hebdo apparently being motivated by the blasphemous nature of some of their cartoons, the preservation of the freedom to blaspheme is vital, argued Maajid Nawaz, formerly a leading member of a global Islamist group and co-founder and chairman of Quilliam, a counter-extremism think tank.
“Blasphemy is one of the most fundamental prerequisites for any form of revolution,” said Nawaz, citing Galileo, Darwin, Martin Luther and Mohammed as examples. “In all four cases, blasphemy was in the eye of the beholder, and that’s all that blasphemy is. Without it, mankind would not have intellectually progressed.”
Maajid Nawaz – Photo by Richard Nield
Natalie Nougayrède, foreign affairs commentator for The Guardian and former executive editor of Le Monde, agreed:
“We must not censor ourselves in a mindset where blasphemy is banned… We don’t want to live in that kind of world, certainly not in Europe.”
Nawaz stressed how important it is to distinguish between criticism of an ideology and prejudice against individuals.
“No idea should be above scrutiny,” he said. “But that’s very different from saying a people should be below dignity.”
Those who stand up for these ideals, particularly in countries where such freedoms are oppressed, should be given our wholehearted support, said Nawaz.
“It is not good enough to say we have the right to scrutinise everything but others don’t,” he said, highlighting the case of Raif Badawi, co-founder of online discussion forum Saudi Arabian Liberals, who has been sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes and a fine of 1 million Saudi riyals (about US$267,000) by a criminal court in Jeddah. “We have to stand on the line and start supporting Arab progressivism.”
Peter Neumann, founder and director of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, warned that the response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks might not be wholly positive.
“I am concerned about the degree of polarisation that [the attacks] may cause in European society,” he said. “That will perhaps empower the far right, not only in France but in other European countries. All this has happened at a very vulnerable moment in our societies”.
Peter Neumann – Photo by Richard Nield
Neumann also warned that governments might not respond in the mature, constructive way that proponents of liberty and free speech might hope.
“I fear that politicians will retreat to one of two comfort zones,” he said. “Either more law or more war. More law means more profiling, more stop and search. This doesn’t help. It makes things worse. Or more war. But you can’t fight your way out of this problem.”
“The other comfort zone is the George Galloway model: burying our head in the sand and saying there is no problem with Islamic extremism and that it’s all to do with foreign policy.”
Nougayrède, warned against the continued use of a vocabulary that revolves around war and echoes George Bush, who on 20 September 2001 coined the phrase ‘War on Terror’, an idea that was later used to justify US-led international interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Two days ago, the French president said that France is at war with terrorist Islamic fundamentalism,” said Nougayrède. “I feel uneasy with the use of the word war… France cannot be at war with any part of its own population.”
Natalie Nougayrède – Photo by Richard Nield
The Charlie Hebdo attack and its aftermath reveals identity issues within French and European society, said the panel.
Nougayrède pointed out that when teachers in one French classroom tried to hold a minute’s silence in memory of the victims of the attack, a third of them refused.
“There’s a very big confusion,” she said. “There needs to be a lot of explaining.”
Nawaz agreed that although Britain and France have adopted very different policies towards Muslim minorities, both have problems, and that even in Britain there is a “huge problem with integration”.
“We are suffering an acute identity crisis across Europe,” said Nawaz. “I want to see a new social contract with a European-wide identity.”
Answering a question from the floor, the panel sought to address the controversial question of why religious extremism is disproportionately associated with the Islamic faith.
Nawaz suggested that there are “problematic scriptures that most Muslims haven’t come to terms with that Christians had to a long time ago.”
Nesrine Malik, a Sudanese-born writer and commentator focusing on Middle Eastern politics and minority matters in the UK, said that Islamic fundamentalism arises for “different reasons in different environments,” but that it always comes down to political differences.
At root, argued Malik, militant Islam has arisen partly because of the radicalisation of the Islamic faith by religious and political leaders.
“If I were to draw a line I would draw it back to the religious environment in the Middle East,” said Malik. “The very extreme rhetoric that is imbibed on a very casual basis is alarming.
“It is part of media messaging, education, religious messaging. It is hardwired…to see Islam as a safe place, as a source of legitimacy.
“Even though the attackers were French there is now a global network that communicates these thoughts very quickly.
“Middle East governments say that Islamic fundamentalism is under control because they have their own version of it. It’s like giving someone an inoculation. But of course you can’t control it.”
The failure of Middle Eastern governments to effectively represent their people is also a key factor, suggested Malik, as it encourages the substitution of religious militancy for political representation.
“There is a lack of representation of Muslims,” said Malik. “They grow up with no rights. They don’t feel represented. Everyone has a sort of cynical, almost mafia relationship with their government, which at the end of the day is not really about them.
“It’s a longstanding political tool to inflict terrorism on behalf of a religion when you don’t feel you have a representative government… When the state acts on your behalf, it’s not seen as terrorism.”
The panel was pessimistic about the prospects for an effective solution to the challenge of Islamic terrorism in the future.
“This will probably not be the last event like this in 2015,” said Neumann. “Parts of the jihadist movement have realised they can force the hand of the world’s most powerful people by having a knife and a camera.
“It is no longer about the number of people you are killing, but about the broader effect… This will pose an even greater political, economic, societal challenge to the whole continent.”
Watch back here:
]]>"We were attacked by hammers, by screwdrivers, by knives, by clubs with nails," Maajid Nawaz said of the attacks he faced as the teenage son of Pakistani immigrants in Essex, South London, in the early 1990s.
"These were men in their 20s, with shaved heads…it was a sport for them. They called it ‘Paki-bashing’."
Nawaz discussed his memoir Radical at the Frontline Club, tracing his path from an angry, hip-hop obsessed teen, to a high-level organizer for the global revolutionary Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT), to a four-year prison term in Egypt, to his co-founding of Quilliam, a London-based think tank that counters Islamist extremism.
"Hip-hop culture was crucial in developing the self-confidence needed to assert oneself," Nawaz remembered. But it was Islamism that truly gave him community, security, and identity. An organizer for HT handed him a flyer one day,
"an articulate, young, trendy, and intelligent man who was studying medicine, from my hometown, who could relate to me and my problems."
Nawaz joined HT, electrified by
"the level of power and seeing results that came immediately as a result of me adopting this identity… how we managed to face down so many of the conflicts and violence that we were exposed to on the streets of Essex…. Suddenly, we had backup. Suddenly we were members of this internationally feared and renowned club…the global Muslim community."
Nawaz built HT branches in Britain, Denmark, Egypt and Pakistan. The aim of HT being to reestablish a Muslim caliphate like the Ottoman Empire, whose "armies would protect Muslims across the world just as the American army protects American citizens."
After 9/11 he was imprisoned in Egypt and there he experienced a change in thinking, coming to believe that Islam as a faith had nothing to do with the political project of Islamism. Islamism, he came to feel,
"was a stifling, totalitarian, victimhood ideology that prevented independent thought, and all it ever did was breed more extremism, more discrimination, more racism, and more division."
At Quilliam, Nawaz seeks to address the grievances of Muslims and to reverse radicalisation by taking on the arguments of Islamism and countering them.
Nawaz does not agree with the line of thought from the right or the left. The left, he says, must challenge the injustice not only of racism but of Islamism as well. The right, he says, must show care for Muslims’ grievances at the hands of racism and Western foreign policy.
Muslims, meanwhile, must question their own narrative. Nawaz explained,
"sadly…the victimhood narrative has become popular. And it’s part of the story, but it’s not the whole story."
He put particular focus on Muslims’ ideological narrative, without which,
"the 7/7 bombers wouldn’t have said, in their thick Yorkshire accents by the way, that your people have attacked my people. Here’s a British Pakistani talking about the Iraqis as his people, in a Yorkshire accent… So the recalibration of identity…is what I call the ideological narrative […]
What we’re trying to do [is] engage the young, angry British Muslims with counter-narratives. Those young angry Muslims aren’t engaged in faith […] They’re people like me who weren’t particularly religious, and then get politiciised. […]
Crucially, Nawaz emphasized that the title of his book, Radical, doesn’t refer to his days spreading Islamism. "[It’s] describing me now," he said.
"I’m trying to reclaim the word, and to say that what’s truly radical in majority Muslim societies is to advocate democratic culture on the grass roots. [If that] can be entrenched… then we can secure the future, the democratic future."
Watch the full video here: