Temo wrote:
Islam is never going to be the "sole cause for violence", to make such an argument strikes me as a reductionist political correctness that probably belongs more on Fox News. Only the most xenophobic can't see that there's multiple things at work here. Otherwise logic will follow every muslim or "scripturalist" will in turn be violent. Another thing to note is just because someone committing the violence is doing it in the name of power and not Islam, doesn't mean they are not acting out the multi-generational psychological undercurrents of separatistic thinking inherent in Islam.
The propagation and action of ideology is very real, but it is a material process that does not occur in a vacuum. The word I used was "entwined".
Ideology can lead to all kinds of falsely premised decisions for individuals. It can lead people to believe that same sex attraction is "abnormal" rather than a relatively commonplace expression of human sexuality. It can lead people to accept poorly constructed false pretexts for wars of aggression. And it can lead a suicide bomber to think blowing himself up will lead to eternal reward and dignity.
But it doesn't come from nowhere. Ideas flourish on their own terms to some extent, but on the "multi-generational" terms to which you're referring, generally only in conjunction with material support. Ownership, control, funding of mass communications, of the institutions of formal education, and material support for the family units that are responsible for informal education are the mechanisms.
None of us is free from ideology. Once you've gone to school or turned on a television or accessed the internet, you're choosing between other people's ideas for the greater part of your own thoughts.
To sustain this ideological production, there must be a corresponding source of value, money to pay for it. In the case of Wahhabism it's the extraction of the vast oil reserves of the Gulf monarchies, protected by military alliance with the US and UK since the 1920s, an alliance threatened by the House of Saud's power plays in the 1970s (and currently) but continuing to this day.
The complicity of western nations in this ordering of world affairs and in the consequent spread of radical Islam must be admitted! This is a basic and important bit of honesty. We condone and arm the Gulf monarchies. We endorse their culturewashing actions as football sponsors. We reorganised our global banking system to accommodate the reinvestment of their enormous cash reserves.
All that wealth is how Wahhabist imams get paid, and how Wahhabist families are happy and able to raise their children with the same beliefs. An economic view also explains why Islamic State, with its related but alienated salafist ideology, has managed to flourish to some extent—it's not just because it's Islamic, it's because it's a State. It controls oil profits (which it monetises in competition with Gulf nations), raises taxes, pays wages, and enforces a harsh rule of law, and it has done so moving through a lawless vacuum of dispossession, violence and poverty caused by imperial war.
That's why I think it's silly to talk about "Islam" or the "Qu'ran" (or indeed religion in general) as if they are a kind of Necronomicon, sending children mad when they open the covers of a book and read a few words of evil ink. That's not how it works. An ideology succeeds when it goes along with a system that answers for people's needs and desires, without that, it either remains marginal or becomes extinct.
