Islam is the root cause as Islamism is a product of Islam

People who should know better are saying that we have a problem with Islamism, which they distinguish from Islam. They call Islamism a “perversion”.

They say this because they want to be nice; because they do not want to condemn one million or so of their fellow Australians; because they are ill-informed.

They say it because they think that all religions are similar, if not the same, so they think Islam is a sort of Christianity with Arabic characteristics.

They are wrong. Islamism is in the mainstream of historical Islamic theology. 

If more people were prepared to say that the problem is with Islam, then we wouldn’t have such a problem with Islamism.

None of this piece is an accusation against Muslims as people. It is an argument about ideas, institutions, and theology - precisely because ideas, institutions, and theology shape behaviour at scale.

There are many strands of Islam, but hardly any of them, apart from the Ahmadiyya, have an easy relationship with liberal democracy or grant innate dignity to non-believers.

The largest Islamic democracy in the world is Indonesia. It works partly because of the secular doctrine of Pancasila, but there are periodic pressures around blasphemy laws, locally inspired sharia by-laws (Aceh being the obvious case), and the political use of religious mobilization.

Turkiye was formed as a modern country around secularism, but modern politics in Turkiye is riven by conflict between the ~50% of the mostly metropolitan population that holds to secularism, and the other ~50% rural conservatives and immigrants from Gulf States who would like it to be a theocratic state.

Outside that you have countries that once had fragile democracies, like Afghanistan and Iran, that have been transformed back into Islamist theocracies.

And then you have the Middle East, where many countries – for example Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar – are monarchies, or others, like Egypt, republics that function as security states, or sectarian polities like Iraq where democracy is procedural, but not consolidating.

Contrast this to Christian countries. Actually scrub that, because there are only 5 officially Christian countries where Christianity is the state religion, but these are countries like the UK, Denmark, or Costa Rica – all high-functioning liberal democracies.