Over the past year, I have published a series of stories in the Observer and the New Statesman based on leaks from the Foreign Office outlining the government’s strategy on tackling Islamic extremism at home and abroad. These formed the basis of a documentary for Channel 4 broadcast around the time of the anniversary of the 7/7 bombings, which attracted considerable media coverage.
I was asked to collect the leaks in a pamphlet for the centre-right thinktank, Policy Exchange, where I explained that Whitehall had embarked on a policy of engagement with radical Islam, apparently in direct contradiction to the prime minister’s public pronouncements that this ideology bred terrorism.
The Foreign Office has refused to respond, saying that it never comments on leaked documents. But more puzzling has been the silence of the progressive left, which has consistently failed to take on the ideology of the Islamist extreme right. Some of this failure can be attributed to an understandable fear of being branded racist or Islamophobic, but that is only part of the story.
The Foreign Office documents argued for engagement with Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which believes in the establishment of an Islamic state run on the principles of sharia law. One might have thought that a Labour government would spurn the advances of right-wing theocrats. Instead, the Foreign Office has courted individuals such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, who has defended suicide bombings, supported female circumcision and called for the execution of homosexuals.
Progressives across the Middle East have consistently warned of the rise of Islamism, and yet the government has chosen to treat with the reactionaries rather than their natural allies within the liberal secular opposition.
There is a belief among some on the left that somehow Islamism represents the authentic voice of the Arab or Muslim street and that this somehow justifies dialogue with the radicals. But I believe this is mistaken, even if it were ever possible to accurately poll this opinion. It should be the moral duty of those on the left to argue the case for progressive liberal values, even where majority opinion appears to support the Islamists.
In Britain, this is an increasingly urgent argument to win. The government has been tragically misguided in its belief that it can transfer its policy of engagement with radical Islam abroad to the streets of Britain. Its support of the largely Islamist Muslim Council of Britain has been disastrous and has alienated the moderate silent majority.
My concern is that the government’s conviction that mainstream Muslim opinion is essentially Islamist will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The prime minister’s policy in Iraq and his failure to condemn Israeli action in Lebanon certainly seems designed to drive young Muslims into the arms of the extremists.
But the broader left needs to develop a more sophisticated position of opposition to government foreign policy where it is indefensible, without throwing its weight behind the Islamists out of some misplaced belief that they represent the authentic voice of Muslim outrage. The growth of extreme-right resistance movements is part of the problem, not the solution.