 We've talked about just war and we've used just war theory as a template for discussing just rebellion. And we've talked about the justice that enables a rebellion to take place. And we've also talked about what is just conduct within that rebellion. In both cases burrowing from just war theory. What happens, however, if rebellion uses war as one of its instruments to achieve its aims? At this point in time you've got an amalgamation of both just war and just rebellion theory. Both in terms of just cause and in terms also of course of just conduct during the actual uprising which would then necessarily involve war. This becomes the backdrop theme to what we want to discuss today. Which is essentially in the first instance historical examples and debates on Jihad. But also talking about its modern day manifestation, particularly in today's headlines. Things that concern all of us. Not only in the Middle East today but in other parts of the world including here in Europe. But insofar as Jihad is often said to be launched against the new crusaders I thought it might be interesting to start with an example from the early medieval crusades. We're very familiar with the crusades from our history books. Of course we have history that tells one side of these crusades. But really from 1096 through to 1272 you had protracted efforts to launch crusade in the Middle East led by Christian armies, led by Christian kings and emperors. And there were a total of nine of these crusades in this period of time. The first three were the ones that made most of the historical as it were the grandeur of the efforts of these crusades to reclaim the former Christian lands and to establish Christian kingdoms in them. And of course one of the great English kings, Richard Lionheart, was very much involved in the second great crusade. And even outside the houses of Parliament today you'll see two statues. One is of Oliver Cromwell and the other one is of Richard Lionheart holding the sword. A loft and this is the sword of Christianity, the sword of Christendom. There's actually a very famous story of a truce during the second crusade and a meeting of the two kings, Richard Lionheart leading the crusaders and Saladin leading the resistance as it were to the crusaders. They met in a moment of truce during the Battle of Arca. The truce meeting was held and Saladin's tent, Richard Lionheart strode into the tent and took out his broadsword, crashed it down on one of the logs burning at Saladin's fireplace and said, this is the sword of Christianity. In reply it is said Saladin picked up a silk scarf and tossed it in the air, took out his cement heart and sliced it in half and said, this is the sword of Islam. That kind of mutual regard and that kind of contrast in terms of methodologies, of course, did not obviate any of the bloodshed that took place in the crusades. But a very interesting thing happened towards the end of the second crusade which ended in the defeat of the Christianity and Saladin was able to take the cities that we would now recognize as Syrian cities and also cities in what we would call the disputed territories of Israel and Palestine such as Jerusalem. And after the capture by Saladin of Jerusalem, after the capture of what was left of the Christian kingdom and the Christian armies he did not commit any atrocities and so great was his mercy, so great was his capacity to spare life and to let people go free, usually for very, very token ransom, that the rumor was spread abroad in Europe itself that in fact this Islamic fighter must have been a closet Christian because so great was his mercy that it was inconceivable in terms of the propaganda of that point in time that he could have been someone who was in fact a Muslim. For Saladin himself, he would have been observing the emerging Islamic doctrines of what was just caught up in war, more of that a little bit later. But as I say, the whole image of the new crusades is put forward today as a justification for she had. So a lot of the modern discourse on Japan is associated with what we call Wahhabism and I want to have a brief look at what Wahhabism means. It's a form of Sunni Islam. It comes from the territory that we would now call Saudi Arabia. It was very, very much conceived as a repost too and this land that had been starting to go soft and luxuriant as the 18th century progressed. So Wahhabism is a purification movement that began quite recently. The 18th century, as I said, propagated by a pre-general scholar called Muhammad Ibn Abdul-Hal Wahhab. And of course Wahhabism is named after Wahhab. And it's influence spread throughout the desert lands. So much so that in the 20th century when Lawrence of Arabia was conducting war on behalf of the Allied cause in this part of Arabia, he encountered what he came across in the town of Kasim. And he said in Kasim it was a place which had been overtaken by Wahhabist beliefs and he found no coffee, he found no tobacco. He was unable to have dalliances even of a platonic nature of the local women. There were no silk clothes, there was no gold and silver for head ropes for the head dresses of the men. And for Lawrence after months of riding around on camels in the desert this was a terrible deprivation not to have what he thought were quite innocuous and innocent pastimes that he could settle into in the pause for battle. The idea of Wahhabism as a cult of deprivation almost like an equivalent of puritanical Christianity took hold from his writings in this book. Seven pillars of wisdom. Now in fact it was much more to Wahhabism than a simple puritanical element to it. But what you've got in particular is an element of purification which is not as I said puritanical but an idea of purification which makes an outcast or an enemy of anyone who is not Islamic in the strictest possible sense. In other words if you've fought outside of a certain pale you become not a sinner. In other words if you're a sinner there may be all kinds of possibilities of you all being forgiven you're being reincorporated into the fold at a later point in time. But if you fall outside of the fold even if you profess a form of Islam you're necessarily a heretic. So the distinction that you would draw between someone who's lapsed and someone who's beyond the pale was something that was drawn very very strictly indeed in Wahhabism. Not only that but the purification of the religion also meant a very strict adherence to the worship only of one God. So intervening variables such as giving respect to the shrines of saints for instance is something that was very very much associated with both the Sufi and the Shia approach to Islam. That kind of intermediate advice that detracted from worship directly to the glory of God that was forbidden. So that Wahhabism necessarily at a very early stage came to be at odds with both Shia and also particularly with Sufi approaches to Islam. And the idea that here you had in the desert itself a metaphor of the purity of Islam and the purity of worship towards God, Stark and Osteer it was given a geopolitical impulse in the alliance that our heart made with the House of Saud. Ancestors of the present rulers of Saudi Arabia, political rulers, they and our heart formed an alliance which was with various deviations along the way to last the test of time. So that the relationship between a form of Wahhabism and the House of Saud continues to this present day. And this implicates us directly into the geopolitics of today. It's not necessarily the same Wahhabism because obviously the House of Saud, particularly the royal family is not given to living a particularly Spartan life but some of the strictures that you see in terms of the laws of Saudi Arabia the very strict observance of certain parameters the role of women being a subservient one, being a case in point the impossibility underneath Saudi law to leave Islam as your religion in other words you cannot become an apostate you cannot legally leave the religion of Islam if you were born Islamic that is regarded as blasphemous and is actually a capital crime as we speak there are people who are charged with capital offence of being apostate of leaving Islam and that is very much resonant of the original Wahhabism that puts you beyond the pale. If you desert you are not simply a sinner, you are apostate, you are heretical and that is a crime that is punishable by death. But the very very great links and almost tenacious integration between the religion and the state became something which was cemented by an incident in Mecca itself with quite recent history but before I describe that particular incident I should say that what you had was not just Wahhabism as the only representative of a purified Islam Wahhabism probably is best regarded as a peculiarly Saudi variant of what we call Salafism which is very very much to do with purification it is something which you might say was closely associated for instance with the advent of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt for instance and that began in 1928 so again a 20th century manifestation but very very much taking on board certain tendencies that were demarcated by the Egyptian environment opposition to the particular ruling class and the ruling elite in Egypt at that point in time and of course the Brotherhood has retained its role as an oppositional device in Egyptian politics with a brief period in recent times and was able to form an unsuccessful government before it was outlawed and purged yet again but the idea that there could be a purity within a state structure that all the same sought to modernize is something which differentiates to a very large extent Salafism that is not Wahhabi in other words the idea of integrating with a modern context of trying to practice the religion within a modern context even if a very purified form of the religion. In Saudi Arabia of course the great contradiction is how to transact a religion which is to do with purification in a state which simultaneously wishes to have the trappings of modernity but at the same time wishes to have the administration of antiquity and that gives rise to all kinds of difficulties when it was seen that the House of Saud and the state of Saudi Arabia was moving far too much towards a lack of purity in its habits and its association with outside forces then there was rebellion within Saudi Arabia itself and I'm thinking here particularly of a moment in time when there was in Mecca what we might today call an atrocity and that was in 1979 when a group of militants seized the grand mosque it was at precisely the time of pilgrimage it was at precisely that point in time when everyone thought that of all the places in the Islamic world that would be saved would be the grand mosque in Mecca itself so the militant struck at that point in time declaring that a new Maadi was going to come to power that it was to cleanse Saudi Arabia from the decadence of the House of Saud that the Maadi would return all of Islam not just Islamist practice in Saudi Arabia to a purity not only at the time of Awar Haab but a purity that was resonant at the time of Muhammad himself now the Maadi I should hasten to add is not actually a Quranic figure it's a post-Quranic figure it's probably a title that is first referred to in the late Hadith it's not something which is originating from Muhammad's time itself but it is very very much to do with a restoration to Muhammadian era the Maadi is someone who is yet to come in some respects you could say he has messianic qualities the counterpart of the Christian messiah but when he does come certainly he's going to be Muhammad's successor that is very much the article of faith in a Sunni approach to the idea of the Maadi in the sheer belief in fact the Maadi has come but has disappeared but will be able to reappear this is called the occultation of the hidden Imam and at a point in time when he does reappear the era of the just man will also come upon the earth but one way or the other at the appearance or reappearance of the Maadi justice will come to the earth and will be justice in the image of Muhammad this has not prevented all kinds of would be or want to be Maadi's declaring themselves to be exactly this figure the British had an experience with a Maadi who overcame British colonial forces in Sudan General Gordon fell at the battle of Khartoum at the hands of the Maadi himself and what we have now in the so called Islamic State is simply the latest and the long line of people who are declaring themselves to be this much prophesied figure to come to cleanse the earth of wickedness but in 1979 at the battle for the Grand Mosque in Mecca what you had was the representation of a rebellion on behalf of the new Maadi who was going to accomplish this cleansing and purification in Saudi Arabia itself and bloody battles took place and the Saudi forces were able to make no headway whatsoever against the rebels who entrenched themselves not only in the buildings but the underground chambers and the mosque precinct so it took some weeks before this standoff was able to be brought to a military conclusion even now accounts differ as to exactly who accomplished the overcoming of these Maadiist rebels we have accounts in which the CIA did the actual overcoming of the rebels you have other accounts where the French foreign legion was brought in and they tried to gas the rebels out of the tunnel complexes in the mosque precinct you have other accounts in which Pakistani commanders actually did the final deeds not all of the rebels who became them were killed many of them, several hundred of them were publicly executed very much as a warning to others after the event, after they were overcome by whichever force was able to do that but what it meant was that apart from the public spectacle of beheading the surviving rebels the House of Saud decided according to many commentators although this is never publicly admitted that it had better come to a deal with its Wahhabist religious counterpart within the kingdom so there was according to those who have speculated on this matter a political deal that allowed the House of Saud to continue its rulership of Saudi Arabia provided certain approaches to the legal system and the constitutional system were maintained along Wahhabist lines and provided the House of Saud turned a blind eye to the propagation of Jihad outside of Saudi Arabia this establishes a dichotomy in the practice of statehood and state craft when a state which is meant to be part of a Westphalian system isn't some part involved, implicated in perhaps directly concerned with the sponsorship and degradation of states outside of Saudi Arabia we have no real evidence that this kind of deal was formally made however there does seem to be a lot of circumstantial evidence that this deal was made however those who make a straight linkage between this Wahhabism and its accommodation of the House of Saud and Islamic State today should bear in mind that there was not just one straight descendant of Wahhabism that infected other parts of the world if you're looking for instance at Al-Qaeda at its association with the Taliban for instance in Afghanistan you're looking in a very very different form of Wahhabism not one that renounces the purification of Islam but one which is resonant of local influences and even though some of these were influences that were inflected by Saudi support are some of the Laden coming over to Afghanistan for instance a Saudi nobleman from a very rich family who came with a very great deal of money military capacity to help those who were resisting warlordism in Afghanistan you still have in Afghanistan the determination of key elements of how this Wahhabism should be addressed and of course the presence of the late Mullah Omar is very very important here don't forget in 1994 very much in the wake of the disputes and wars in Afghanistan very very much engendered by resistance of the Soviet invasion of that particular country in 1976 very much exacerbated by Pakistani chalors being used for American support of the resistance to the Soviet occupation what you had in 1999 was basically a fragmented country with many warlords many of whom were supported by American weaponry and American finance but what it meant was that these warlords were eligible to no central code of law no central code of conduct and were rapacious in the literal sense of being responsible for raping people as opposed to pillaging the countryside and the local population so the story in 1994 is that the parents of two school girls who were abducted from their local village could find no redress they could not get their daughters back they were abducted by a warlord who was going to use them as his concubines and the parents came to Mullah Omar who said please help us he was the local illiterate village priest blind in one eye, incapacitated for physically and they pleaded with the Mullah can you help us to get the girls back and the Mullah said yes I will try 30 Talib, that is theology students the students of God the 30 Talibs of Mullah Omar so there were 31 of them managed to secure 16 rifles so one between two the 16 rifles they assaulted the military barracks of the warlord and miraculously overcame the forces of the warlord they executed the warlord hanging him from the gun barrel of one of his own tanks and restored the girls to their parents and of course overnight a legend was born within weeks the small number of 30 Talib had become the Taliban and they assaulted the capital city Qaboo took it from the forces that were occupying Qaboo that point in time restored a form of Islam to Afghanistan which was peculiar however to the south, to Pashtun territory those who were not part of the south melted away into their northern strongholds many of them were sheer so you had as it were the construction the typical division within Afghanistan with the south being led by Pashtun inflected Bahabism enunciated and articulated by the Taliban with help from Osama bin Laden who then made of course the mistake of attacking the United States and then of course the wrath of the west fell upon Afghanistan if it was left at that maybe well and good and you might have had a contained phenomenon taking the fight into Iraq was of course as many of us would now tend to agree very much a step too far but the meltdown in Iraq is what concerns us now because this is now an area that's associated with the depredations of ISIS it's spread over into Syria very very much in terms of the geopolitical construction of the region it is now a zone of complete conflict but a zone of conflict should not be dichotomized as simply one between western civilization and Islamic state representing a form of militant Wahhabism Al-Qaeda factions are still active in Syria the al-Nusra front for instance is formally affiliated to what's left of Al-Qaeda and they are fighting Islamic state when they're obviously fighting the Soviets what the Russians that is using western weaponry in other words despite this binary elements that come across in western newspapers you've actually got all kinds of cross cutting currents and Al-Qaeda affiliate armed and encouraged by western powers part of the 70,000 strong army that Mr Cameron is going to depend upon on the ground fighting another Wahhabist organization Islamic state but doing so for very very different reasons and that is for a sake of ownership of the Syria as opposed to ownership of a new caliphate underneath the new Madi so the complication of all of this is profound what is even more profound is in fact the extent to which the Islamic state might seek to reach don't forget that the early title of the Islamic state ISIS the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria was not in fact demarcated as Syria in the first instance originally it was meant to stand for the Islamic state in Iraq an asham an asham is a historical term for all that part of the Middle East between Anatolia and as the middle of Turkey right through across Syria Iraq, Lebanon Palestine, Israel and reaching into the upper reaches of Egypt or into the Sinai if that is in fact the vision of the eventual extent of the caliphate then that is an awful lot of territory of course it has been drawn into Iraq and into Syria because of the vacuum there because of governments that were weak and corrupt in Iraq and certainly in terms of the civil war in Syria that allowed a vacuum to be created ISIS was able to step and to declare itself as the progenitors of a new kind of state or rather a very old kind of state the caliphate which would realize the dreams of Muhammad complicating all of this of course in Iraq is that you have a government in Iraq which no matter how incompetent or corrupt is Syria thus the Iranians had drawn in the side of the Shia in the government of Iraq when you look at the situation in Syria although the majority of the population in Syria is Sunni the Alawite faction from which President Assad draws his support and of which he is a member something like between 12 and 15% of the population that is Shia when you look at other forces that support President Assad like Hezbollah from Lebanon then you're also looking at a Shia force so what you have is a multi-dimensional conflict which involves not only geopolitics and international politics you also have a clash within Islam itself between a purified Islam in two very key and different forms the Al-Nusra Front which is siding with the other rebels fighting against the Assad regime but also fighting against ISIS which is trying to declare and maintain a caliphate across the borders of Iraq and Syria now this is all given rise to a number of questions what in modern terms does all of this mean in terms of the beliefs of ISIS and of course the characterization of ISIS as somehow mindless, as somehow thoughtless, as somehow fundamentalist has relieved us of the burden of trying to decipher whether or not something deeper might be at stake here you also have the great contradiction of course that here you have an organization of movement that seeks to restore a moment of purity to Islam a moment of purity along the lines of Muhammad himself and this particular time that looks to Ahmadiyy that regards himself as restoring a period of rule and the conduct of rule and the ethos of rule and the purity of rule from the times of Muhammad but at the same time using all kinds of modern devices you're looking at latest generation electronic capacity for instance latest generation social media commands and not just the use of electronic means but also very sophisticated usages of them for propaganda and recruitment purposes, access to electronic banking of the most sophisticated sort access to weaponry of the very latest generation access to transportation of the very, very latest sort the number of toyotas and nissans that have been armoured that have got reinforced trays and carrying identical browning machine guns does suggest that there is somewhere along the line an originator in terms of the financing and the procurement of equipment for this insurrection among others. Of course since the early conquest they've been able to establish other sources of income not least oil, not least the reserves and the banks of the cities that have been conquered in the ISIS outreach and of course also by taxation of the citizens who are now living within the newly established caliphate. So whether or not there was an original financial sponsorship and equipment for ISIS forces, that is now only one part of the overall economic picture which constitutes the formation of a financial base for ISIS. So you've got all of this sophistication and all of these multifarious inputs that all the same are meant to sit alongside a fundamentalist ideology. And I think that what is striking about discourse in the West is just how primitive it has been. About a year ago there was the appearance of one article and it was the first article that was more than 3000 words long. It appeared in the Atlantic Monthly which is an American intellectual journal, I think you can call it that conservative leanings but you would not call it a right wing journal and simply say that was all its content represented. Let us say it was a very well considered thinking person slightly right wing journal, not a neocon journal in any sense that we would normally wish to give it. But that was the only such article to have appeared up to that point in time almost exactly a year ago. There's been very very little since. A recent effort has been a book by a colleague of mine called Poor Mokra that she had as threat. Paul is not only an academic but also a journalist and also let us say politely a military adventurer. So the book is largely breathless journalism giving a journalistic account of the history of Jihad but also very very much something which has not yet included upon most Western discourse the latter part of the book is a very very real interrogation of strategic ways forward which of course would differ from a simple airstrikes will fit and fix everything approach to the problem that is now ISIS. Karen Armstrong who is the author of numerous books on religious issues a former nun turned scholar, books on Christianity, books on Islam, even a book on Buddhism and the character of Buddha himself wrote a series of essays one in the new statesman again reaching back six months ago to springtime 2015 very much reinforcing the idea that this is very very much part of a Saudi outreach into the rest of the world and mostly into the rest of the Islamic world. So the casualties of the ISIS outreach have been predominantly Islamic predominantly those regarded as apostate those who have fallen by the way those who are not merely sinners but therefore heretics and therefore worthy of condemnation whether you can sustain a soul and single Saudi link in the face of all of the other international links that ISIS has been able to make and that is something I think the western statesmen are trying in a very very simplistic way to ponder but certainly the recruitment devices used by ISIS have been profound. You have essentially international brigades fighting on their side people attracted by the idea of just cause not necessarily restrained however by what is meant to be just conduct in a war which is meant at the same time to be a rebellion against imperial outreach which is apostate. So you've got a code joint geopolitical that is in terms of the imperialism of the West and religious and confessional ambition that is to roll back apostasy. To create as it were an alternative to the Westphalian state by the restoration of a caliphate which would be ruled along Muhammadan lines. You've actually got a series of ambitions there which anything but simply fundamentalist are quite profound when you put them all together. In other words the sophistication of the ambition is profound. Which of course leaves unanswered the question what is the nature of the belief. I think this has to be approached in two ways. Whether or not the nature and the profundity of the belief there is profundity is in fact what attracts recruits to the international brigades who fight or whether they are attracted by other reasons the very simplistic degradation of the complexities of the world into as it were a sound bite jihadism. Whether or not there is underlying all of it in the circles around the self-proclaimed Mahdi. A deeper idea of a form of resistance to not only imperialism as led by the West as it was infected the House of Saud and therefore a response and a rebellion on the grounds of purity. Whether or not that has any kind of resonance and sophistication beyond a simple blanket statement. What is this purity? There would seem to be a very fair degree of pragmatism in the way that ISIS administers its conquered territories. For the most part apart from implementing regimes of strict discipline you cannot stray beyond certain as it were forms of everyday behaviour. Most of the actual day-to-day administration has been left in the hands of municipal authorities who are already there. They know how to do it. In other words there has been a contextual accommodation of those territories that they have conquered. Whether or not this is simply as it were something which is convenient at this point in time or whether it is something which is going to be a template for how other conquered areas, if indeed there are other conquered areas, how they are going to be administered remains to be seen. What does it mean in terms of the Western response? Well, first of all there needs to be an engagement which involves Islam itself or different strands not only of Sunni and Shia Islam but within Sunni Islam itself exactly what is meant by modern Wahhabism. As I said if you have one archaic affiliate that is able to cooperate with the West surely there are certain lines of negotiation and accommodation even of a pragmatic nature that are possible. What does the new caliphate mean to do in terms of the West Baelian state system if it is allowed simply to maintain its place in the Middle East and occupies on a perpetual basis parts of northern Iraq and parts of northern Syria. Will it simply be satisfied with itself as that self-contained caliphate or will it wish to spread into the areas that stretch from Anatolia to the Upper Sinai? Or will it wish to spread further to combat apostasy in all different parts of the world? One way or the other there is an idea of food here and as Dostoevsky said in his famous novel you can't actually fight an idea with guns. If however you are going to fight an idea with guns then of course the debate that is raging this very day as we speak here not too far in parliament is will guns be enough and will guns from the air simply be enough. And just as we have not heard a joined up foreign policy in the past with regard to this phenomenon so it seems unlikely we are going to have a joined up military policy on this matter. Nor does it seem likely that we are going to have a joined up policy on the economic consequences of an Islamic state or for instance that they use for part of their income. Nor have we got a joined up ideological philosophical and ethical approach to how to have as it were and intercourse with Islam and all of its manifold manifestations. That idea of being able to meet idea with idea is something which I think has defeated the West up to this point in time and actually speaks volumes about the failure of the West even as the West hopes for an eventual military victory.