This is worth reading in full, but here are the closing paragraphs.
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What I have tried to show in this talk is a way of thinking about jihadism, and what might attract some to it, that cuts against the grain of much conventional thinking about the issue. You don’t have to agree with my perspective – in fact, I hope some of you don’t, because it is only through debate and disagreement that arguments develop. But two things I hope you will accept, because they are central to the development of any argument about these issues.
First, that if we try to explain away complexity, if we try to reduce it to a simple narrative, we explain away the explanation. And if we try to craft public policy from such a simplistic narrative, the results are often disastrous. So it is with the radicalization thesis. Many of the policies that have emerged from that thesis – banning ‘extremist’ organizations, censoring speech, imposing broadcast bans, maintaining surveillance on Muslim communities – undermine liberties without addressing the issues that has made Islamism attractive to some in the first place.
The second key point is the need for a historical consciousness. One of the problems with much social analysis is a lack of historical perspective, a tendency to take a snapshot of an issue or problem, and to assume that such a snapshot tells us something profound across time. But profundity only emerges by locating issues within context, by placing it within a wider frame. At the same time, the framing of an issue necessarily changes over time.
Consider, for instance, the concept of the ‘radical’, central to the ‘radicalization’ thesis. I was, and indeed still am, a ‘radical’. But when I was growing up, ‘radical’ in a Muslim context meant being secular, ‘Westernized’, leftwing. Today, it means almost the opposite; it describes someone who is a religious fundamentalist, anti-Western, hostile to secularism and to traditional leftwing politics. In the shift in the meaning of that single word is encompassed the remaking of a whole social universe. And without understanding the remaking of that social universe, we will never grasp the reasons for which some European Muslims find jihadism attractive.
https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/radiclization-is-not-so-simple/
Topic: Radicalisation is not so simple - Kenan Malik