The Moral Governance of Others

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

In September, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was admonished by the Guidance Patrol for ‘improperly’ wearing her hijab. She was then allegedly beaten to death. Her death triggered an unprecedented protest movement, in which women as well as men are attacking symbols of Iran’s theocracy like never before.

The protests have evolved into an open rebellion against Iran’s morality laws and against groups that the state has employed to implement these laws.

The Guidance Patrol is the successor of the Islamic Revolution Committees that were formed in 1979 to forcibly implement ‘Islamic morality’ in public spaces — especially when wearing the hijab was made compulsory in 1983. Over the years, there have been isolated protests against this law, but nothing like what Iran is witnessing today.

The protests are challenging the whole idea of ‘moral policing’ that began to be adopted by the state in many Muslim-majority countries from 1979 onwards. After Iran, moral policing units also emerged in Saudi Arabia and, from the 1990s, in Sudan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and, in certain regions of Malaysia and Indonesia.

The state gives the units powers to check and correct ‘moral digressions’, such as ‘inappropriate’ dressing (especially by women), ‘unseemly’ interaction between men and women in public, or the exhibition of any other ‘un-Islamic’ behaviour. Moral policing outfits have often been accused of using violent methods, mostly against women.

However, as morality policing organisations are now being openly challenged in Iran, recently they were disbanded in Saudi Arabia by the crown prince Muhammad bin Salman. Their presence contradicts his reformist agenda. Also, the criticism against the tactics used by the police was intensifying. Morality policing units were also dismantled in Sudan in 2019, after the overthrow of the dictator Omar al-Bashir.

According to Amanda F. Detrick (University of Washington, 2017): “States with religious systems of government, employ morality police as a formal method of social control to expand and stabilise their rule. Morality police units enable the regime to project power into society and retain dominance by affirming religious legitimacy, suppressing dissent and enforcing socio-religious and political uniformity.”

Moral policing can also emerge as an informal method of social control. According to the French philosopher Michel Foucault, the “governance of the self” can lead to the “governance of others.” In other words, sometimes, when an individual or a group embraces an idea of morality, they may end up enforcing this idea on others. If the enforcement finds traction among a large body of people in a society, the state is likely to adopt it as policy.

For example, even though most Muslim-majority countries do not have moral policing outfits formed by the state, ever since the 1980s, vigilante groups have been known to implement ‘morality’ by force. Such enforcements have often been turned into law by governments.

In Pakistan, for years, non-state groups campaigned to oust the Ahmadiyya from the fold of Islam. At first, the state treated the campaigns as subversive. But when the campaigns began to find greater traction among the polity, especially in the Punjab, the government declared the Ahmadiyya as a non-Muslim minority.

Informal methods of social control that emerge from below have been highly successful in Pakistan. From the late 1960s, there were campaigns against nightclubs, cinemas and the sale of alcoholic beverages by right-wing vigilante groups. They were suppressed by the government. But in the late 1970s, when a government was struggling to stall a political movement against it, it suddenly agreed to close down clubs and ban alcohol. But this was a futile attempt to regain social control.

Consequently, in 1980, there were plans by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship to form state-backed moral policing units. They were to enforce gender segregation in public spaces, ‘proper’ dressing habits (especially among women), compulsory prayers in the mosques, etc. Women’s organisations saw these as a way to strengthen a myopic patriarchal ethos. Their activism deterred the dictatorship from forming moral policing squads.

However, the frequency of vigilante groups enforcing (their ideas of) morality increased. For example, a group calling itself the ‘Allah Tigers’ started to raid hotels and even homes on every New Years Eve. Technically, their actions were unlawful, but the dictatorship tolerated them and saw them as the actions of ‘common people’ who were willingly implementing the state’s ‘Islamisation’ project.

There have also been non-state groups enforcing the hijab and discouraging the celebration of events such as Valentine’s Day. Although the government and the state have not appropriated these as policy, many educational institutions have.

But formal and informal methods of social control through moral policing are not only restricted to Muslim-majority countries. Ironically, outside the myths of ancient ‘pious’ states, one of the first formal examples in this respect appeared in 19th century England.

The regular police force in 19th century England was encouraged to ‘morally regulate’ the society. To 19th century British ‘gentry’, morality was deemed a necessary part of life, in order to hold and keep social stability. The police often took action (sometimes preemptive) against alleged prostitutes, drunkenness, betting and ‘habitual’ criminals.

Nevertheless, moral policing in most Muslim and, particularly in non-Muslim regions, has largely remained informal. But it has been rather successful in influencing state institutions. For example, years of anti-abortion activism in the US finally led to an abortion ban imposed by the US Supreme Court.

Also, in many countries, non-state moral policing of content on social media and the electronic media has pushed governments to pull down websites, films and TV shows. Interestingly, informal moral policing in a non-Muslim country has been most rampant in India. Vigilante groups often emerge to enforce ‘Hindu values’. These can include action against those celebrating Valentine’s Day, to lynching those who are accused of eating beef.

Moral policing is a serious issue. Morality has mostly to do with factors rooted in religion. There may be a consensus on the more general aspects of a faith, but there are always many interpretations of various topical aspects of it. One cannot impose morality based on a single interpretation.

Instead, states need to educate citizens to embrace pluralism and tolerance and exhibit behaviour that does not create social disruption and divisions. An individual’s choices that form their moral self-governance should be respected, as long as they are not raging to turn it into the governance of others.

Who is dependent? India on Arabs or Arabs on India?

 

Nupur Sharma quoted a Hadith

 

Forget Dubai, Most Arab States Are Weak & Violent, 66% of People in West Asia Are Poor

 

Can Saudi Arabia Reform Muslims Of The Subcontinent?

 

In death, Khashoggi did what all his columns could not.

Irfan Husain in The Dawn


SCHADENFREUDE is a wonderful German word used to express mirth at somebody else’s woes, just as Charlie Chaplin used to giggle when a passerby slipped on a banana peel and fell on his backside.

This is how the world currently feels towards Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or, as he likes to be called, MBS) as he wriggles in the spotlight following Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder. Riyadh’s early denials caused only open derision and disbelief among even supporters of the kingdom.

The problem with one person wielding absolute power and control is that when something goes badly wrong, it becomes hard to pretend he knew nothing about it. So when all we got from Riyadh for the first fortnight were blanket denials about any knowledge or responsibility for the gruesome events in its consulate in Istanbul, we responded with hoots of open incredulity.

Recently, the Saudi government released a chilling photograph of Jamal Khashoggi’s son, Salah, shaking hands with MBS while King Salman stands beaming in the background. Salah is clearly grief-stricken, while MBS has a cold, hard expression. Khashoggi’s son had been under a travel ban for a year.

While Turkey’s President Erdogan has been piling on the pressure, few expect King Salman to sideline his favourite son anytime soon. The best that can be expected is for him to be relieved of some of the portfolios he has accumulated.

Ever since Khashoggi’s assassination made headlines around the world three weeks ago, the story has completely monopolised the 24/7 news cycle. Apart from the shock and horror over the sickening nature of the crime, journalists and politicians alike saw an opportunity to flay the ruling family of what is widely seen as a rotten kingdom.

Turkish intelligence sources have revealed that the audio tape they possess of the torture Khashoggi suffered includes a segment that indicates that his fingers were chopped off while he was still alive. This, apparently, was the reason a bone saw was part of the Saudi hit-squad’s kit, and this savage amputation was intended to send out a signal to other dissidents who dared to use their fingers to write against the crown prince. Apparently, in backward tribal societies, any offending organ is hacked off to teach everybody a lesson.

Given the massive fallout from the crime, why did the Saudis think they would get away with it? The bumbling antics of the killers to cover their tracks would not have fooled Inspector Clouseau of Pink Panther fame. We had a joker who pretended to be Khashoggi walk out of the consulate in the journalist’s clothing, but wearing joggers instead of the black leather shoes Khashoggi actually wore as he entered the consulate.

The reason MBS and his inner circle went ahead with their ham-fisted plot was that they didn’t think their cover-up would be questioned. Used to eliminating domestic opponents without having to justify themselves to anybody, they genuinely thought the rest of the world was an equally lawless zone. Also, MBS — and Saudi money — had been welcomed with open arms around the globe, so he probably thought his actions, no matter how grotesque, would be swallowed.

But three weeks later, the furore continues unabated despite the hundreds of millions of dollars the kingdom has spent on public relations. Even Republican senators who once supported Riyadh without reservations have been revolted at Khashoggi’s murder. One threatened to “sanction the hell out of Saudi Arabia”.

All this bad publicity has taken the sheen off the grand investment conference in Riyadh dubbed ‘Davos in the desert’. Many important political figures from the US, the UK and France bailed out, while key business leaders decided to stay at home. The reality is that MBS is currently toxic, and nobody wants to be associated with him.

It is ironic that tens of thousands of Yemeni lives failed to achieve what one journalist’s death did: call the world’s attention to a cruel, repressive regime that has no respect for human rights. In death, Khashoggi did what all his Washington Post columns could not: shine a revealing spotlight on MBS and his nasty, wilful ways.

But at the end of the day, money talks and bulls---t walks. Although Germany has blocked future arms sales, the US and the UK have no such sanctions in mind. In fact, Trump has clearly said that Saudi arms sales are too important to forego. Western greed is what MBS is counting on. For well over seven decades, US-Saudi relations have been built on the sale of oil and arms, and despite global revulsion over Khashoggi’s killing, politicians and arms manufacturers have little shame or morality.

So after a few weeks, it will probably be business as usual.

Saudi crown prince’s revolution is the real Arab spring

Zev Chafets in The Dawn



WHEN Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia rounded up 500-head of royals and billionaires last weekend and tossed them into luxury confinement, it was more than just a power grab by a young man in a hurry. It was a revolution. But of what kind?

Faisal Abbas, editor of Arab News, the English-language daily that normally speaks for the government, provided an answer of sorts from the Saudi perspective.

“With all due respect to the pundits out there, ‘experts’ analysing Saudi Arabia in previous decades had it too easy,” he wrote on Tuesday. “We need to understand that the days when things took too long to happen — if they happened at all — are forever gone. The exciting part is that thanks to the ambitious reforms being implemented … we are finally living in a country where anything can happen.”

Muhammed, known as MBS, is 32. He looks like a storybook Arabian prince and he talks like a progressive. He says he plans to liberalise and modernise his sclerotic society, expand the civil rights of women, reduce the economic power of the Saudi fossil fuel industry, and loosen the grip of the 5,000-member royal cousins club that has bled the country dry for generations.

Not only that: the prince also promises to transform Saudi Islam into a more tolerant brand of religion that does not fund extremist mosques in the West or underwrite jihadists in the Middle East.

Isn’t this the Arab leader we have been waiting for?

Yet so far, there doesn’t seem to be much enthusiasm in world capitals. With the exception of US President Donald Trump, who has tweeted his support, events in Riyadh have elicited mostly silence.

This is understandable. Sometimes bright young Arab revolutionaries turn out to be Anwar Sadat, whose radical vision brought peace between Egypt and Israel. More often, they are tyrannical like Gamal Abdul Nasser or murderous like Osama Bin Laden or hapless like the Egyptian yuppies in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2010. Let’s hope the dismal outcomes of that so-called Arab Spring have taught gullible Westerners not to engage in wishful thinking.

Still, you have to admire the boldness of the young prince. He has made enemies of the Saudi aristocracy, its billionaire class and their foreign business partners, who will eventually be looking for revenge. He has also locked up some senior clerics. The Saud family has historically derived its status as the Protector of Makkah from its alliance with the ultra-conservative Wahhabi sect of Islam. The kingdom is full of young disciples who will not take kindly to the silencing of their jihadist preachers. (It’s true, however, that the prince has shown a less enlightened penchant, cracking down on human-rights advocates and academics as well.)
The prince also faces a threat from Iran. This week, President Hassan Rouhani warned that a Saudi alliance with the US and “Zionist regime” of Israel would be a “strategic mistake”. Since the US has been allied with the Saudis for decades, this sounded like a redundant warning.

It was not. Adding “Zionists” to the equation made it a death threat. Open collaboration with Israel by Arab heads of state is life-threatening. In the early 1950s, King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated in Jerusalem for allegedly talking peace. In 1981, after signing the deal with Israel, Sadat was shot to death by Islamic extremists at a military parade in Cairo. The next year, Bashir Gemayel, the president-elect of Lebanon, was blown to bits in Beirut, presumably by Syrian agents.

Like MBS, Gemayel was the scion of an aristocratic family, one that publicly allied himself with Israel. The Saudi crown prince is too young to remember Gemayel, but Saad Hariri — who resigned as Lebanese prime minister over the weekend and is currently hiding in Saudi Arabia (or a nearby Gulf state) from Hezbollah assassins — can fill him in on what happens to Arab leaders who get accused of philo-Semitism.

This dynamic, by the way, explains Israel’s silence over MBS’s manoeuvrings. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is delighted by the emergence of a new Arab leader who shares his view of Iran. The last thing Bibi wants to do is get him shot.

Let’s be optimistic. Suppose Prince Mohammed survives hitmen, the wrath of his cousins and the fiery opposition of jihadist clerics — that he rises to the throne and moves to implement his domestic reforms. Granting women equal civil rights, permitting theatres and cinemas to open, tamping down the more inflammatory mosques, diversifying the economy — it is, as Abbas writes, an exciting prospect.

But there remains the question of his wider ambitions. He has made it clear that he considers Iran a mortal enemy. It is equally clear that he wants to lead a Sunni Arab coalition that can take on Tehran and end its regional aggression. This is a worthy goal, but not realistic.

The crown prince is the commander-in-chief of the army. He knows that it is a third-rate fighting force, unable to defeat even Houthi militia bands in Yemen, let alone Iran and its allies. His father and previous kings have been elderly rulers, cautious and focused on self-preservation. The most impressive fighting force in the kingdom is the National Guard, whose main role is guarding the royal family. The Saudi style of warfare has been funding proxy armies, while the US defends its borders.

Will MBS follow prudently in the footsteps of his predecessors? Or will he be seduced by dreams of restoring his family’s ancient warrior tradition and imposing Sunni primacy in the Muslim Middle East? I vote for option No 1.

An energetic, liberalising young king in Saudi Arabia would be a very good thing for the Middle East. He could be an important ally in the international war against terror, and a fine role model for other aspiring Arab revolutionaries. It would be a shame to waste this potential on half-baked military adventures. He needs to bring the Gulf into the modern world, not get bogged down in an Iranian Bay of Pigs.

For the first time, Saudi Arabia is being attacked by both Sunni and Shia leaders

Robert Fisk in The Independent

The Saudis step deeper into trouble almost by the week. Swamped in their ridiculous war in Yemen, they are now reeling from an extraordinary statement issued by around two hundred Sunni Muslim clerics who effectively referred to the Wahhabi belief – practiced in Saudi Arabia – as “a dangerous deformation” of Sunni Islam. The prelates included Egypt’s Grand Imam, Ahmed el-Tayeb of al-Azhar, the most important centre of theological study in the Islamic world, who only a year ago attacked “corrupt interpretations” of religious texts and who has now signed up to “a return to the schools of great knowledge” outside Saudi Arabia.

This remarkable meeting took place in Grozny and was unaccountably ignored by almost every media in the world – except for the former senior associate at St Antony’s College, Sharmine Narwani, and Le Monde’s Benjamin Barthe – but it may prove to be even more dramatic than the terror of Syria’s civil war. For the statement, obviously approved by Vladimir Putin, is as close as Sunni clerics have got to excommunicating the Saudis.

Although they did not mention the Kingdom by name, the declaration was a stunning affront to a country which spends millions of dollars every year on thousands of Wahhabi mosques, schools and clerics around the world.

Wahhabism’s most dangerous deviation, in the eyes of the Sunnis who met in Chechenya, is that it sanctions violence against non-believers, including Muslims who reject Wahhabi interpretation.Isis, al-Qaeda and the Taliban are the principal foreign adherents to this creed outside Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The Saudis, needless to say, repeatedly insist that they are against all terrorism. Their reaction to the Grozny declaration has been astonishing. “The world is getting ready to burn us,” Adil Al-Kalbani announced. And as Imam of the King Khaled Bin Abdulaziz mosque in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, he should know.

As Narwani points out, the bad news kept on coming. At the start of the five-day Hajj pilgrimage, the Lebanese daily al-Akhbarpublished online a database which it said came from the Saudi ministry of health, claiming that up 90,000 pilgrims from around the world have died visiting the Hajj capital of Mecca over a 14-year period. Although this figure is officially denied, it is believed in Shia Muslim Iran, which has lost hundreds of its citizens on the Hajj. Among them was Ghazanfar Roknabadi, a former ambassador and intelligence officer in Lebanon. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has just launched an unprecedented attack on the Saudis, accusing them of murder. “The heartless and murderous Saudis locked up the injured with the dead in containers...” he said in his own Hajj message.

A Saudi official said Khameni’s accusations reflected a “new low”. Abdulmohsen Alyas, the Saudi undersecretary for international communications, said they were “unfounded, but also timed to only serve their unethical failing propaganda”.

Yet the Iranians have boycotted the Hajj this year (not surprisingly, one might add) after claiming that they have not received Saudi assurances of basic security for pilgrims. According to Khamenei, Saudi rulers “have plunged the world of Islam into civil wars”.

However exaggerated his words, one thing is clear: for the first time, ever, the Saudis have been assaulted by both Sunni and Shia leaders at almost the same time.

The presence in Grozny of Grand Imam al-Tayeb of Egypt was particularly infuriating for the Saudis who have poured millions of dollars into the Egyptian economy since Brigadier-General-President al-Sissi staged his doleful military coup more than three years ago.
What, the Saudis must be asking themselves, has happened to the fawning leaders who would normally grovel to the Kingdom?

“In 2010, Saudi Arabia was crossing borders peacefully as a power-broker, working with Iran, Syria, Turkey, Qatar and others to troubleshoot in regional hotspots,” Narwani writes. “By 2016, it had buried two kings, shrugged off a measured approach to foreign policy, embraced ‘takfiri’ madness and emptied its coffers.” A “takfiri” is a Sunni who accuses another Muslim (or Christian or Jew) of apostasy.

Kuwait, Libya, Jordan and Sudan were present in Grozny, along with – you guessed it – Ahmed Hassoun, the grand mufti of Syria and a loyal Assad man. Intriguingly, Abu Dhabi played no official role, although its policy of “deradicalisation” is well known throughout the Arab world.

But there are close links between President (and dictator) Ramzan Kadyrov of Chechenya, the official host of the recent conference, and Mohamed Ben Zayed al-Nahyan, the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince. The conference itself was opened by Putin, which shows what he thinks of the Saudis – although, typically, none of the Sunni delegates asked him to stop bombing Syria. But since the very meeting occurred against the backcloth of Isis and its possible defeat, they wouldn’t, would they?

That Chechenya, a country of monstrous bloodletting by Russia and its own Wahhabi rebels, should have been chosen as a venue for such a remarkable conclave was an irony which could not have been lost on the delegates. But the real questions they were discussing must have been equally apparent.

Who are the real representatives of Sunni Muslims if the Saudis are to be shoved aside? And what is the future of Saudi Arabia? Of such questions are revolutions made.

The Shias are winning in the Middle East – and it's all thanks to Russia

Robert Fisk in The Independent

The Shias are winning. Two pictures prove it. The US-Iranian photo op that followed the signing of the nuclear deal with Iran last year and the footage just released – by the Russian defence ministry, no less – showing Moscow’s Tupolev Tu-22M3 bombers flying out of the Iranian air base at Hamadan and bombing the enemies of Shia Iran and of the Shia (Alawite) regime of Syria and of the Shia Hezbollah.

And what can the Sunni Kingdom of Saudi Arabia match against this? Only its wretched war to kill the miserable Shia Houthis of Yemen – with British arms.

Poor, luckless Turkey — whose Sultan Erdogan makes Theresa May’s political U-turns look like a straight path – is at the centre of this realignment. Having shot down a Russian jet and lost much of his Russian tourist trade, the Turkish president was quickly off to St Petersburg to proclaim his undying friendship for Tsar Vladimir. The price? An offer from Erdogan to stage Russian-Turkish “joint operations” against the Sunni enemies of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Turkey is now in the odd position of assisting US jets to bomb Isis while ready to help Russian jets do exactly the same.

And Jabhat al-Nusrah? Let’s remember the story so far. Al-Qaeda, the creature of the almost forgotten Osama bin Laden, sprang up in both Iraq and Syria where it changed its name to the Nusrah Front and then, just a few days ago, to “Fatah al-Sham”. Sometimes allied to Isis, sometimes at war with Isis, the Qatari-funded legion is now the pre-eminent guerrilla army in Syria – far eclipsing the black-costumed lads of Raqqa whose gruesome head-chopping videos have awed the West in direct proportion to their military defeats. We are still obsessed with Isis and its genocidal creed. We are not paying nearly enough attention to Nusrah.

But the Russians are. That’s why they are sprinkling their bombs across eastern Aleppo and Idlib province. Nusrah forces hold almost all the rebel areas of Syria’s second city and much of the province. It was Nusrah that fought back against its own encirclement by the Syrian regime in Aleppo. The regime kicked Isis out of Palmyra in a short and bloody battle in which Syrian soldiers, most of whom are in fact Sunnis, died by the dozen after stepping on hidden land mines.

But Nusrah is a more powerful enemy, partly because it has more Syrians among its ranks than Isis. It’s one thing to be told that your country is to be ‘liberated’ by a Sunni Syrian outfit, quite another to be instructed by the purists of Isis that your future is in the hands of Sunni Chechens, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Saudis, Qataris, Egyptians, Turks, Frenchmen, Belgians, Kosovars and British. Isis has Sunni Saudi interests (and money) behind it. Nusrah has Sunni Qatar.

As for Turkey – Sunni as well, of course, but not Arab – it’s now being squeezed between giants, the fate of all arms smuggling nations as Pakistan learned to its cost. Not only has it been pushed into joining Moscow as well as the US in waging war on Isis, it’s being politically attacked from within Germany, where a leaked state intelligence summary – part of a reply to a parliamentary question by the interior ministry – speaks of Turkey as a “central platform for Islamist and other terrorist organisations”. State interior secretary Ole Schroder’s remarks, understandably stamped “confidential”, are flawed since he lumps Erdogan’s support for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas with armed Islamist groups in Syria.

The Sunni Brotherhood, prior to its savaging by Egypt’s President-Field Marshal al-Sissi, did indeed give verbal approval to Assad’s Sunni armed opponents in Syria, and Sunni Hamas operatives in Gaza must have cooperated with Isis in its struggle against Sissi’s army in Sinai. But to suggest that Turkey is in some way organising this odd triumvirate is going too far. To claim that “the countless expressions of solidarity and supportive actions of the ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) and President Erdogan” for the three “underline their ideological [affinity] to their Muslim brothers” is going too far. “Ideological affinity” should not provide a building block for intelligence reports, but the damage was done. In the report, the Turkish president’s name was written ERDOGAN, in full capital letters.

Someone in the German intelligence service – which regularly acts as a negotiator between Israel and the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon, usually to exchange bodies between the two sides – obviously decided that its erring Sunni NATO partner in Ankara should get fingered in the infamous “war on terror” in which we are all supposed to be participants. So Erdogan offers help to Russia in the anti-Isis war, continues to give the US airbases in Turkey – and gets dissed by the German federal interior ministry, all at the same time. And the only Muslim state in Nato, which just happens to be Sunni Muslim, is now being wrapped up in the Sunni-Shia war. What future Turkey?

Well, we better not write it off. Just as Erdogan has become pals with Putin, the Turkish and Iranian foreign ministers have been embracing in Ankara with many a promise that their own talks will produce new alliances. Russia-Turkey-Iran. In the Middle East, it’s widely believed that Tehran as well as Moscow tipped Erdogan off about the impending coup. And Erdogan himself has spoken of his emotion when Putin called after the coup was crushed to express his support.

The mortar to build this triple alliance could well turn out to be the Kurds. Neither Russia nor Iran want independent Kurdish states – Putin doesn’t like small minorities in nation-states and Iran’s unity depends on the compliance of its own Kurdish people. Neither are going to protect the Kurds of Syria – loyal foot-soldiers of the Americans right now – in a “new” Syria. Erdogan wants to see them crushed along with the dreams of a “Kurdistan” in south-east Turkey.

Any restored Syrian state will insist on national unity. When Assad praised the Kurds of Kobane for their resistance at the start of the war, he called their town by its Arab name of Ein al-Arab.

It is, of course, a paradox to talk of the Middle East’s agony as part of an inter-Muslim war when one side talks of its enemies as terrorists and the other calls its antagonists apostates. Arab Muslims do not deserve to have their religious division held out by Westerners as a cause of war.

But Saudis and Qataris have a lot to answer for. It is they who are supporting the insurgents in Syria. Syria – dictatorial regime though it is – is not supporting any revolutions in Riyadh or Doha. The Sunni Gulf Arabs gave their backing to the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan, just as they favour Sunni Isis and Sunni Nusrah in Syria. Russia and America are aligned against both and growing closer in their own weird cooperation. And for the first time in history, the Shia Iranians have both the Russians and the Americans on their side – and Turkey tagging along.

Tony Blair: the former PM for hire

Randeep Ramesh in The Guardian


Emails show oil firm questioned complex structure of Blair’s company, and reveal his closeness to Chinese leadership


 

Tony Blair meets China’s then vice-premier, now premier, Li Keqiang in Beijing in 2011. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock



When Jonathan Powell, the gatekeeper to the corporate empire of Tony Blair, sat down to lunch with the former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Faisal Al Turki in June 2010 he could not have known how lucrative it would turn out to be for the former British prime minister.

As the high-profile mediator of the stuttering peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Blair had to be careful not to mix business with pleasure. However, one of those lunching with Powell at the annual “global mediator’s retreat”, organised by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was looking to make a deal.
--------

Bird and Fortune on Blair's socialism

-----

Nawaf Obaid, a security analyst who accompanied Prince Faisal, emailed Powell a week later, according to documents seen by the Guardian, with a suggestion to work with his brother Tarek’s company, PetroSaudi, which he “co-founded and co-owns with Prince Turki bin Abdullah, son of King Abdullah”.

“They have several projects that [they] are working [on] and I think it would [give] a very interesting perspective to see if we could establish a strategic partnership with former PM Tony Blair and yourself,” he wrote.

 

Tarek Obaid

Tarek Obaid was a former banker who styled himself as an adviser to members of the Saudi royal family and a director of a joint venture with Malaysia’s multibillion-dollar development fund, 1MDB. This fund had put $300m through PetroSaudi and as the latter’s chief executive, Obaid was on the lookout for deals.

On paper PetroSaudi looked impressive: its chief investment officer was a former Goldman Sachs banker, Patrick Mahony. The chief operating officer was listed as Rick Haythornthwaite, a City insider who was also chairman of Network Rail and MasterCard.

Blair’s team sold the former prime minister as someone who could help “unlock situations which might otherwise be blocked by political factors” in places such as China and Africa. PetroSaudi was interested in Beijing’s appetite for oil and how Blair’s firm could help.

The role assumed by Blair shows his influence in one of the most important areas of global economic cooperation this century: between the oil sands of the Middle East and hydrocarbon-hungry China.

While in office, Blair oversaw the handover of Hong Kong to China, but visited the latter just five times. His sixth visit in 2007 – when he earned £200,000 for a speech in the industrial city of Dongguan – marked a turning point in how he viewed the rising power.

Since then Blair has been back two dozen times and has built a reputation for befriending the rising stars of Chinese politics. In March 2010 he secured a meeting with Li Keqiang, now China’s premier.

PetroSaudi signed up Blair’s team to lobby Beijing in the summer of 2010 and internal PetroSaudi correspondence reveals there were questions raised about the apparently opaque nature of Blair’s businesses and the role he could play.

Tony Blair courted Chinese leaders for Saudi prince's oil firm



PetroSaudi executives warned in early September 2010 that they had “no contractual nexus with TB” and were anxious about “the lack of apparent employment or other involvement of TB in the corporate structure”.

To convince PetroSaudi that if it paid it would get Blair, his executives revealed for the first time how his complex web of companies worked. Blair’s businesses are split into two wings: Firerush, which was governed by the then City regulator the Financial Services Authority, and Windrush, which was not.

What bothered PetroSaudi was that it was paying roughly $55,000 to Firerush and about $10,000 to Windrush. Both firms trade as Tony Blair Associates (TBA).

From early on in their relationship PetroSaudi executives admitted they knew “very little” about Blair’s firms. In an email in August 2010, the company’s executives said they “would like to understand more about the structure and the relationship between Firerush, TB Associates and TB. In particular, the engagement letter mentions the provision of services by employees of Firerush which seems, like a number of concepts in the engagement letter, inappropriate given we are only looking to engage with TB.”

To allay concerns in November 2010, Varun Chandra, a former Lehman Brothers banker and director of TBA, told PetroSaudi that Blair was the “ultimate owner of all this and owns all the share capital” of all the companies. He told PetroSaudi it was not relevant which company got paid “given where the cash ultimately ends up”.
Chandra explained that Firerush executives handled the day-to-day conversations about “specific opportunities and making the arrangements to drive negotiations forward. Tony, procured by Windrush, is involved at higher level but on an ongoing basis, meeting with senior political leadership and business heads in order to discuss PetroSaudi at a strategic level and to speak highly of your management.”

PetroSaudi, he said, had already seen the benefit as “the man in charge of China’s economic policy is now supportive of working with PetroSaudi, and … he has spoken with CNPC [China National Petroleum Corporation] to ensure a proper working dialogue”.

By November 2010 TBA was hired and, according to the documents, Blair had found time to put PetroSaudi’s case to Lou Jiwei, the then chairman of the China Investment Corporation and now the nation’s finance minister.

 Lou Jiwei, centre, arrives for a G20 finance ministers’ and central bank governors’ meeting at the IMF on 15 April. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Questions could be raised about why Blair was allowed to promote the interests of the son of the then ruler of Saudi Arabia in China while also working as the Middle East peace envoy for the Quartet – the US, UN, EU and Russia. Blair had also faced criticism for halting a Serious Fraud Office inquiry in 2006, while prime minister, into alleged corruption over a multibillion-pound arms deal with Saudi Arabia. He denies any conflict of interest.

PetroSaudi had made it clear it wanted to hire Blair. In an internal 2010 document entitled “story for Blair”, PetroSaudi sold itself as a “vehicle of the Saudi royal family” that could count on the “full support from the kingdom’s diplomatic corps” and was set up by Prince Turki bin Abdullah and Obaid, who hailed from a “prominent business family”.

PetroSaudi’s pitch in the document was that it claimed “many countries will get a company in but then bully it around once it is there and has sunk billions of dollars in the ground. This will not happen with [PetroSaudi] because these nations do not want to get on the wrong side of the Saudi royal family.”

But access to the legendary Blair contacts book does not come cheap. In July TBA’s then chief operating officer, Mark Labovitch, emailed Mahony to say he had “discussed your strategy and objectives with Tony and believe strongly that we can add value to PetroSaudi’s business development … We would propose a retainer fee of $100,000 per month.”

The documents reveal that even before Blair’s company was hired, he was already promoting the oil firm. In late July 2010 Blair was in Shanghai to celebrate the planting of 1m trees in north-west China to combat climate change. A few days later, Labovitch emailed the London-based oil firm to say: “Tony has just been in China and informally sounded out a number of people.”

Tarek Obaid and Blair did meet privately in early July 2010, and apparently discussed a working relationship. A month later Blair’s company was on a retainer fee of $65,000 and a “success fee equal to 2%” of any deal that TBA brought to the company – which PetroSaudi admitted could “potentially be a very large sum”.

In the following months a picture emerges of corporate bonhomie underwritten by spiky internal exchanges over the cost of hiring the former prime minister, his apparent obsession with privacy and a whirl of phone calls with global leaders.

By August 2010, according to documents, PetroSaudi raised concerns internally that TBA’s proposed contract was “more appropriate to an investment bank (eg they can record our phone calls)”. In an email, Mahony described the contract offered by Blair’s lieutenants as “a very aggressive first draft with almost total limitation of liability for TB”. He wrote: “I should note that the aggressive starting position of his engagement letter most probably is cynically reliant on counterparties taking a passive approach to secure his services.”

But at the end of the month Blair was in the Chinese capital for the signing of a partnership agreement between Peking University and his Faith Foundation, and managed to squeeze in some time with the Chinese oil giants CNPC and China National Offshore Oil Corporation, as well as China’s supreme economic council, the National Development and Reform Commission.

Tony Blair gives a speech at Peking University in Beijing in 2012. Photograph: China Daily/Reuters

“The latter effectively ‘blessed’ your engagement with Chinese companies, and the former were both very keen to meet you and work out how you might collaborate,” Blair’s then chief operating officer told PetroSaudi. “We clearly articulated the benefits of partnership with you to them, which they grasped immediately.”

In November, Blair was back in Beijing to give a speech for his Faith Foundation. He also had a meeting with China’s vice-premier, Wang Qishan, who Blair’s firm told PetroSaudi was “crucial – inter alia in order to highlight the wider benefits of a partnership with PetroSaudi in terms of putting Chinese companies in pole position for Saudi infrastructure tenders”. Wang is now a member of the Chinese Communist party’s politbureau, the country’s highest decision-making body.

Blair’s relationship with PetroSaudi appeared to give him access to the Saudi elite. In December 2010 an executive of PetroSaudi said the company could arrange a dinner for Blair with Prince Turki. Blair’s office say this never took place.

The next month Blair’s office emailed PetroSaudi because he was keen to meet the King of Saudi Arabia and Prince Bandar, the secretary general of the country’s national security council, before the February 2011 Quartet meeting to discuss Middle East peace after the Egyptian revolution.

The West likes to think that 'civilisation' will defeat Isis, but history suggests otherwise

Robert Fisk in The Independent

Hitler set a bad example. He was evil. His regime was evil. His Reich was destroyed, the Nazis vanquished, the Fuhrer dying by his own hand in the ashes of the European nightmare. Bad guys lose. Good guys win. Morality, human rights, law, democracy – though with the latter, we should perhaps speak carefully – will always prevail over wickedness. That’s what the Second World War taught us.


We have grown up in a Western society that believes in such simple, dodgy, history lessons. The world’s major religions teach us about goodness, humility, family, love, faith. So why should we not – however liberal, agnostic, cynical – cling on to our fundamental belief that violence and torture and cruelty will never outlast the power and courage of the righteous?


Isis is evil. It massacres its opponents, slaughters civilians, beheads the innocent, rapes children and enslaves women. It is “apocalyptic”, according to the Americans, and therefore it is doomed. Better still, Ash Carter – the US Secretary of Defence who accused the Iraqis of running away from Isis – lectured the Iraqi Prime Minister last week. His message – I could hardly believe this naivety – was Hollywood-clear. “Civilisation always wins over barbarism.”

But does it? We only have to go back to the lie about the Second World War in my first sentence. Sure, Hitler lost. But our ally Stalin won. The 1917 Russian Revolution gave rise to one of the Gorgons of our age: Soviet dictatorship, the mass starvation leading the to death of millions, barbarism – on an Ash Carter scale – and evil incarnate ruled in Russia and Eastern Europe for more than 70 years, 40 of them after the Second World War.

The Romans kept “barbarism” at bay for almost a thousand years, but in the end the Goths, Ostrogoths and Visigoths – the Isis of their time – won. Unless you were opposed to Rome, in which case Roman barbarism – crucifixion, slavery, torture, massacre (the whole Isis gamut minus the videotapes) – was victorious for almost a thousand years.

Attila the Hun, the Scourge of God, destroyed almost everything between Persia and the Mediterranean. Ghengis Khan, an inevitable actor in this sordid drama, kept going until his death in 1227 – 30 years longer than Isis has so far ruled. His grandson Hulagu was invoked by General Angus Maude when he “liberated” Baghdad in 1917 and brought “civilisation” to Mesopotamia. Ash Carter should read Maude’s proclamation to the people of Baghdad: “Since the days of Hulagu, your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers, your palaces have fallen into ruins, your gardens have sunken in desolation and your forefathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage.” Pretty much like Isis, in other words. But, by Maude’s count, this “tyranny” lasted for around 700 years.

Now let’s go forward to the years immediately after we brought “civilisation” – again – to Baghdad, by illegally invading Iraq in 2003. Between daily trips to the city mortuary and visits to tents of mourning, angry families would tell us that the “freedom” we brought had given them anarchy. They hated the dictator Saddam who slaughtered his opponents – and who imposed 24 years of “barbarism” on his people – but at least he gave them security. If you have children, these people would tell us, you want them to come home from school. You do not want them to be murdered. So which do we prefer, they asked us? Freedom or security? Democracy or Saddam?

Fearful of the Shia-dominated Iraqi government, whose militias slaughtered them, and the corrupt Arab dictatorships, who suppressed them, many hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslims appear to have found security under Isis. Not the Shias, nor the Christians, nor the Yazidis. There is no “freedom”, as we would call it. But Sunni Iraqi men in Beirut, for example, regularly travel to and from the Isis Syrian capital Raqqa and report that – provided they don’t smoke or drink alcohol, their women are covered, and they do not oppose Isis – they are left alone: to do business, to visit families, to travel in safety. (Much the same applied under the Taliban in Afghanistan.)

ID cards are issued in Isis-land, the river police have newly-painted boats, taxes are raised, and yes, punishment is barbarous. But that does not mean the “Islamic Caliphate” is going to be conquered by “civilisation”.

And how can we believe that it will, when our own public-relations boss raves on about “British values” – and at the same time worships the venal, hypocritical, immensely wealthy and dangerous men who have helped to inspire Isis. I refer, of course, to those Saudis whose crazed Sunni Wahhabist cult has encouraged Isis, whose grotesque puritanism has led them to adopt a head-chopping extremism, which lies at the heart of Isis’s own “barbarism”. Sure, the Saudi state arrests Isis cells. But these same Saudis are now killing thousands of Shia Houthis in Yemen in a bombing campaign supported by our Western nations. And what does David Cameron do when the desiccated old king of this weird state dies? Money talks louder than “civilisation”. So he orders that British flags should be flown at half-mast. Now that’s what I call British values!

Poor old Dave. He loathes Isis but adores one of its elderly “facilitators”. Yet fear not. “Civilisation” may yet win over “barbarism”. My own suspicion is that Ash, Dave and the rest will try to buy up Isis, split them into factions and choose the “moderates” among them. Then we’ll have a new, liberal Isis – people we can do business with, the sort of chaps we can get along with, sins forgotten – and we can then establish relations with them as cosy as those the Americans maintained with Hitler’s murderous rocket scientists after “civilisation” conquered “barbarism” in the Second World War.

So much for “civilisation”.

The truth about evil

John Gray in The Guardian
When Barack Obama vows to destroy Isis’s “brand of evil” and David Cameron declares that Isis is an “evil organisation” that must be obliterated, they are echoing Tony Blair’s judgment of Saddam Hussein: “But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?” Blair made this observation in November 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, when he invited six experts to Downing Street to brief him on the likely consequences of the war. The experts warned that Iraq was a complicated place, riven by deep communal enmities, which Saddam had dominated for over 35 years. Destroying the regime would leave a vacuum; the country could be shaken by Sunni rebellion and might well descend into civil war. These dangers left the prime minster unmoved. What mattered was Saddam’s moral iniquity. The divided society over which he ruled was irrelevant. Get rid of the tyrant and his regime, and the forces of good would prevail.

If Saddam was uniquely evil 12 years ago, we have it on the authority of our leaders that Isis is uniquely evil today. Until it swept into Iraq a few months ago, the jihadist group was just one of several that had benefited from the campaign being waged by western governments and their authoritarian allies in the Gulf in support of the Syrian opposition’s struggle to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Since then Isis has been denounced continuously and with increasing intensity; but there has been no change in the ruthless ferocity of the group, which has always practised what a radical Islamist theorist writing under the name Abu Bakr Naji described in an internet handbook in 2006 as “the management of savagery”.

Ever since it was spun off from al-Qaida some 10 years ago, Isis has made clear its commitment to beheading apostates and unbelievers, enslaving women and wiping out communities that will not submit to its ultra-fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. In its carefully crafted internet videos, it has advertised these crimes itself. There has never been any doubt that Isis practises methodical savagery as an integral part of its strategy of war. This did not prevent an abortive attempt on the part of the American and British governments in August of last year to give military support to the Syrian rebels – a move that could have left Isis the most powerful force in the country. Isis became the prime enemy of western governments only when it took advantage of the anarchy these same governments had created when they broke the state of Iraq with their grandiose scheme of regime change.

Against this background, it would be easy to conclude that talk of evil in international conflicts is no more than a cynical technique for shaping public perceptions. That would be a mistake. Blair’s secret – which is the key to much in contemporary politics – is not cynicism. A cynic is someone who knowingly acts against what he or she knows to be true. Too morally stunted to be capable of the mendacity of which he is often accused, Blair thinks and acts on the premise that whatever furthers the triumph of what he believes to be good must be true. Imagining that he can deliver the Middle East and the world from evil, he cannot help having a delusional view of the impact of his policies.

“But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?” Tony Blair said of Saddam Hussein.Photograph: Reuters

Here Blair is at one with most western leaders. It’s not that they are obsessed with evil. Rather, they don’t really believe in evil as an enduring reality in human life. If their feverish rhetoric means anything, it is that evil can be vanquished. In believing this, those who govern us at the present time reject a central insight of western religion, which is found also in Greek tragic drama and the work of the Roman historians: destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within human beings themselves. In this old-fashioned understanding, evil is a propensity to destructive and self-destructive behaviour that is humanly universal. The restraints of morality exist to curb this innate human frailty; but morality is a fragile artifice that regularly breaks down. Dealing with evil requires an acceptance that it never goes away.

No view of things could be more alien at the present time. Whatever their position on the political spectrum, almost all of those who govern us hold to some version of the melioristic liberalism that is the west’s default creed, which teaches that human civilisation is advancing – however falteringly – to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left behind. According to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved.

Most western leaders reject the insight that destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within human beings

Paradoxically, this belief in the evanescence of evil is what underlies the hysterical invocation of evil that has lately become so prominent. There are many bad and lamentable forces in the world today, but it is those that undermine the belief in human improvement that are demonised as “evil”. So what disturbs the west about Vladimir Putin, for example, is not so much the persecution of gay people over which he has presided, or the threat posed to Russia’s neighbours by his attempt to reassert its imperial power. It is the fact that he has no place in the liberal scheme of continuing human advance. As a result, the Russian leader can only be evil. When George W Bush looked into Putin’s eyes at a Moscow summit in May 2002, he reported, “I was able to get a sense of his soul”. When Joe Biden visited the Kremlin in 2011, he had a very different impression, telling Putin: “Mr Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.” According to Biden, Putin smiled and replied, “We understand each other.” The religious language is telling: nine years earlier, Putin had been a pragmatic leader with whom the west could work; now he was a soulless devil.

It’s in the Middle East, however, that the prevailing liberal worldview has proved most consistently misguided. At bottom, it may be western leaders’ inability to think outside this melioristic creed that accounts for their failure to learn from experience. After more than a decade of intensive bombing, backed up by massive ground force, the Taliban continue to control much of Afghanistan and appear to be regaining ground as the American-led mission is run down. Libya – through which a beaming David Cameron processed in triumph only three years ago, after the use of western air power to help topple Gaddafi – is now an anarchic hell-hole that no western leader could safely visit. One might think such experiences would be enough to deter governments from further exercises in regime change. But our leaders cannot admit the narrow limits of their power. They cannot accept that by removing one kind of evil they may succeed only in bringing about another – anarchy instead of tyranny, Islamist popular theocracy instead of secular dictatorship. They need a narrative of continuing advance if they are to preserve their sense of being able to act meaningfully in the world, so they are driven again and again to re-enact their past failures.

Many view these western interventions as no more than exercises in geopolitics. But a type of moral infantilism is no less important in explaining the persisting folly of western governments. Though it is clear that Isis cannot be permanently weakened as long as the war against Assad continues, this fact is ignored – and not only because a western-brokered peace deal that left Assad in power would be opposed by the Gulf states that have sided with jihadist forces in Syria. More fundamentally, any such deal would mean giving legitimacy to a regime that western governments have condemned as more evil than any conceivable alternative. In Syria, the actual alternatives are the survival in some form of Assad’s secular despotism, a radical Islamist regime or continuing war and anarchy. In the liberal political culture that prevails in the west, a public choice among these options is impossible.

There are some who think the very idea of evil is an obsolete relic of religion. For most secular thinkers, what has been defined as evil in the past is the expression of social ills that can in principle be remedied. But these same thinkers very often invoke evil forces to account for humankind’s failure to advance. The secularisation of the modern moral vocabulary that many believed was under way has not occurred: public discourse about good and evil continues to be rooted in religion. Yet the idea of evil that is invoked is not one that features in the central religious traditions of the west. The belief that evil can be finally overcome has more in common with the dualistic heresies of ancient and medieval times than it does with any western religious orthodoxy.

* * *

A radically dualistic view of the world, in which good and evil are separate forces that have coexisted since the beginning of time, was held by the ancient Zoroastrians and Manicheans. These religions did not face the problem with which Christian apologists have struggled so painfully and for so long – how to reconcile the existence of an all-powerful and wholly good God with the fact of evil in the world. The worldview of George W Bush and Tony Blair is commonly described as Manichean, but this is unfair to the ancient religion. Mani, the third-century prophet who founded the faith, appears to have believed the outcome of the struggle was uncertain, whereas for Bush and Blair there could never be any doubt as to the ultimate triumph of good. In refusing to accept the permanency of evil they are no different from most western leaders.

Saint Augustine by Caravaggio.Photograph: The Guardian

The west owes its ideas of evil to Christianity, though whether these ideas would be recognised by Jesus – the dissident Jewish prophet from whose life and sayings St Paul conjured the Christian religion – is an open question. The personification of evil as a demonic presence is not a feature of biblical Judaism, where the figure of Satan appears chiefly as a messenger or accuser sent by God to challenge wrongdoers. Despite the claims of believers and advances in scholarship, not enough is known to pronounce with any confidence on what Jesus may himself have believed. What is clear is that Christianity has harboured a number of quite different understandings of evil.

A convert from Manicheism, St Augustine established a powerful orthodoxy in the fourth century when he tried to distance Christianity from dualism and maintained that evil was not an independent force coeval with good but came into the world when human beings misused the gift of free will. Reflecting Augustine’s own conflicts, the idea of original sin that he developed would play a part in the unhealthy preoccupation with sexuality that appears throughout most of Christianity’s history. Yet in placing the source of evil within human beings, Augustine’s account is more humane than myths in which evil is a sinister force that acts to subvert human goodness. Those who believe that evil can be eradicated tend to identify themselves with the good and attack anyone they believe stands in the way of its triumph.

Augustine had an immense influence, but dualistic views in which evil exists as an independent force have erupted repeatedly as heretical traditions within Christianity. The Cathar movement that developed in parts of Europe in the 13th century revived a Manichean cosmogony in which the world is the work not of a good God but instead of a malevolent angel or demi-urge. A rival heresy was promoted by the fourth century theologian Pelagius, an opponent of Augustine who denied original sin while strongly affirming free will, and believed that human beings could be good without divine intervention. More than any of the ancient Greek philosophers, Pelagius put an idea of human autonomy at the centre of his thinking. Though he is now almost forgotten, this heretical Christian theologian has a good claim to be seen as the true father of modern liberal humanism.

In its official forms, secular liberalism rejects the idea of evil. Many liberals would like to see the idea of evil replaced by a discourse of harm: we should talk instead about how people do damage to each other and themselves. But this view poses a problem of evil remarkably similar to that which has troubled Christian believers. If every human being is born a liberal – as these latter-day disciples of Pelagius appear to believe – why have so many, seemingly of their own free will, given their lives to regimes and movements that are essentially repressive, cruel and violent? Why do human beings knowingly harm others and themselves? Unable to account for these facts, liberals have resorted to a language of dark and evil forces much like that of dualistic religions.

Aiming to exorcise evil from the modern mind, secular liberals have ended up constructing another version of demonology

The efforts of believers to explain why God permits abominable suffering and injustice have produced nothing that is convincing; but at least believers have admitted that the ways of the Deity are mysterious. Even though he ended up accepting the divine will, the questions that Job put to God were never answered. Despite all his efforts to find a solution, Augustine confessed that human reason was not equal to the task. In contrast, when secular liberals try to account for evil in rational terms, the result is a more primitive version of Manichean myth. When humankind proves resistant to improvement, it is because forces of darkness – wicked priests, demagogic politicians, predatory corporations and the like – are working to thwart the universal struggle for freedom and enlightenment. There is a lesson here. Sooner or later anyone who believes in innate human goodness is bound to reinvent the idea of evil in a cruder form. Aiming to exorcise evil from the modern mind, secular liberals have ended up constructing another version of demonology, in which anything that stands out against what is believed to be the rational course of human development is anathematised.

The view that evil is essentially banal, presented by Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), is another version of the modern evasion of evil. Arendt suggested that human beings commit atrocities from a kind of stupidity, falling into a condition of thoughtlessness in which they collude in practices that inflict atrocious suffering on other human beings. It was some such moral inertia, Arendt maintained, that enabled Eichmann to take a leading part in perpetrating the Holocaust. Arendt’s theory of the banality of evil tends to support the defence of his actions that Eichmann presented at his trial: he had no choice in doing what he did. She represented Eichmann as a colourless bureaucrat performing a well-defined function in an impersonal bureaucratic machine; but the Nazi state was in fact largely chaotic, with different institutions, departments of government and individuals competing for Hitler’s favour. Careful historical research of the kind that David Cesarani undertook in his book Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (2004) suggests that Eichmann was not a passive tool of the state, but chose to serve it. When he organised the deportation and mass murder of Jews, he wasn’t simply furthering his career in the Nazi hierarchy. What he did reflected his deep-seated antisemitism. Eichmann took part in the Holocaust because he wanted to do so. In this he was no different from many others, though his crimes were larger in scale.

No doubt something like the type of evil that Arendt identified is real enough. Large parts of the population in Germany went along with Nazi policies of racial persecution and genocide from motives that included social conformity and obedience to authority. The number of doctors, teachers and lawyers who refused to implement Nazi policies was vanishingly small. But again, this wasn’t only passive obedience. Until it became clear that Hitler’s war might be lost, Nazism was extremely popular. As the great American journalist William Shirer reported in his eyewitness account of the rise of Hitler, The Nightmare Years:

“Most Germans, so far as I could see, did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their splendid culture was being destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work were being regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation … On the whole, people did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous tyranny. On the contrary, they appeared to support it with genuine enthusiasm.”

When large populations of human beings collude with repressive regimes it need not be from thoughtlessness or inertia. Liberal meliorists like to think that human life contains many things that are bad, some of which may never be entirely eliminated; but there is nothing that is intrinsically destructive or malevolent in human beings themselves – nothing, in other words, that corresponds to a traditional idea of evil. But another view is possible, and one that need make no call on theology.

What has been described as evil in the past can be understood as a natural tendency to animosity and destruction, co-existing in human beings alongside tendencies to sympathy and cooperation. This was the view put forward by Sigmund Freud in a celebrated exchange of letters with Albert Einstein in 1931-32. Einstein had asked: “Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?” Freud replied that “there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies”.

Freud suggested that human beings were ruled by impulses or instincts, eros and thanatos, impelling them towards life and creation or destruction and death. He cautioned against thinking that these forces embodied good and evil in any simple way. Whether they worked together or in opposition, both were necessary. Even so, Freud was clear that a major threat to anything that might be called a good life came from within human beings. The fragility of civilisation reflected the divided nature of the human animal itself.

The crowd at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin salute Hitler’s arrival at the stadium. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

One need not subscribe to Freud’s theory (which in the same letter he describes as a type of mythology) to think he was on to something here. Rather than psychoanalysis, it may be some version of evolutionary psychology that can best illuminate the human proclivity to hatred and destruction. The point is that destructive behaviour of this kind flows from inherent human flaws. Crucially, these defects are not only or even mainly intellectual. No advance in human knowledge can stop humans attacking and persecuting others. Poisonous ideologies like Nazi “scientific racism” justify such behaviour. But these ideologies are not just erroneous theories that can be discarded when their falsehood has been demonstrated. Ideas of similar kinds recur whenever societies are threatened by severe and continuing hardship. At present, antisemitism and ethnic nationalism, along with hatred of gay people, immigrants and other minorities, are re-emerging across much of the continent. Toxic ideologies express and reinforce responses to social conflict that are generically human.

Mass support for despotic regimes has many sources. Without the economic upheavals that ruined much of the German middle class, the Nazis might well have remained a fringe movement. Undoubtedly there were many who looked to the Nazi regime for protection against economic insecurity. But it is a mistake to suppose that when people turn to tyrants, they do so despite the crimes that tyrants commit. Large numbers have admired tyrannical regimes and actively endorsed their crimes. If Nazism had not existed, something like it would surely have been invented in the chaos of interwar Europe.

* * *

When the west aligned itself with the USSR in the second world war, it was choosing the lesser of two evils – both of them evils of a radical kind. This was the view of Winston Churchill, who famously said he would “sup with the devil” if doing so would help destroy “that evil man” Hitler. Churchill’s candid recognition of the nature of the choice he made is testimony to how shallow the discourse of evil has since become. Today, no western politician could admit to making such a decision.

In his profound study On Compromise and Rotten Compromises, the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit distinguishes between regimes that rest on cruelty and humiliation, as many have done throughout history, and those that go further by excluding some human beings altogether from moral concern. Describing the latter as radically evil, he argues that Nazi Germany falls into this category. The distinction Margalit draws is not a quantitative one based on the numbers of victims, but categorical: Nazi racism created an immutable hierarchy in which there could be no common moral bonds. Margalit goes on to argue – surely rightly – that in allying itself with the Soviet Union in the struggle against Nazism, the west was making a necessary and justified moral compromise. But this was not because the Nazis were the greater evil, he suggests. For all its oppression, the Soviet Union offered a vision of the future that included all of humankind. Viewing most of the species as less than human, Nazism rejected morality itself.

There should be no doubt that the Nazis are in a class by themselves. No other regime has launched a project of systematic extermination that is comparable. From the beginning of the Soviet system there were some camps from which it was difficult to emerge alive. Yet at no time was there anything in the Soviet gulag akin to the Nazi death camps that operated at Sobibor and Treblinka. Contrary to some in post-communist countries who try to deny the fact, the Holocaust remains a unique crime. Judged by Margalit’s formula, however, the Soviet Union was also implicated in radical evil. The Soviet state implemented a policy of exclusion from society of “former persons” – a group that included those who lived off unearned income, clergy of all religions and tsarist functionaries – who were denied civic rights, prohibited from seeking public office and restricted in their access to the rationing system. Many died of starvation or were consigned to camps where they perished from overwork, undernourishment and brutal treatment.

Considered as a broad moral category, what Margalit defines as radical evil is not uncommon. The colonial genocide of the Herero people in German South-West Africa (now Namibia) at the start of the 20th century was implemented against a background of ersatz-scientific racist ideology that denied the humanity of Africans. (The genocide included the use of Hereros as subjects of medical experiments, conducted by doctors some of whom returned to Germany to teach physicians later implicated in experiments on prisoners in Nazi camps.) The institution of slavery in antebellum America and South African apartheid rested on a similar denial. A refusal of moral standing to some of those they rule is a feature of societies of widely different varieties in many times and places. In one form or another, denying the shared humanity of others seems to be a universal human trait.

An Islamic State fighter in Raqqa, Syria. Photograph: Reuters

Describing Isis’s behaviour as “psychopathic”, as David Cameron has done, represents the group as being more humanly aberrant than the record allows. Aside from the fact that it publicises them on the internet, Isis’s atrocities are not greatly different from those that have been committed in many other situations of acute conflict. To cite only a few of the more recent examples, murder of hostages, mass killings and systematic rape have been used as methods of warfare in the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Rwanda, and the Congo.

A campaign of mass murder is never simply an expression of psychopathic aggression. In the case of Isis, the ideology of Wahhabism has played an important role. Ever since the 1920s, the rulers of the Saudi kingdom have promoted this 18th-century brand of highly repressive and exclusionary Sunni Islam as part of the project of legitimating the Saudi state. More recently, Saudi sponsorship of Wahhabi ideology has been a response to the threat posed by the rise of Shia Iran. If the ungoverned space in which Isis operates has been created by the west’s exercises in regime change, the group’s advances are also a byproduct of the struggle for hegemony between Iran and the Saudis. In such conditions of intense geopolitical rivalry there can be no effective government in Iraq, no end to the Syrian civil war and no meaningful regional coalition against the self-styled caliphate.

But the rise of Isis is also part of a war of religion. Nothing is more commonplace than the assertion that religion is a tool of power, which ruling elites use to control the people. No doubt that’s often true. But a contrary view is also true: politics may be a continuation of religion by other means. In Europe religion was a primary force in politics for many centuries. When religion seemed to be in retreat, it renewed itself in political creeds – Jacobinism, nationalism and varieties of totalitarianism – that were partly religious in nature. Something similar is happening in the Middle East. Fuelled by movements that combine radical fundamentalism with elements borrowed from secular ideologies such as Leninism and fascism, conflict between Shia and Sunni communities looks set to continue for generations to come. Even if Isis is defeated, it will not be the last movement of its kind. Along with war, religion is not declining, but continuously mutating into hybrid forms.

Iraqi Yazidis, who fled an Islamic State attack on Sinjar, gather to collect bottles of water at the Bajid Kandala camp in Kurdistan’s western Dohuk province. Photograph: Ahmad al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images

Western intervention in the Middle East has been guided by a view of the world that itself has some of the functions of religion. There is no factual basis for thinking that something like the democratic nation-state provides a model on which the region could be remade. States of this kind emerged in modern Europe, after much bloodshed, but their future is far from assured and they are not the goal or end-point of modern political development. From an empirical viewpoint, any endpoint can only be an act of faith. All that can be observed is a succession of political experiments whose outcomes are highly contingent. Launched in circumstances in which states constructed under the aegis of western colonialism have broken down under the impact of more recent western intervention, the gruesome tyranny established by Isis will go down in history as one of these experiments.

The weakness of faith-based liberalism is that it contains nothing that helps in the choices that must be made between different kinds and degrees of evil. Given the west’s role in bringing about the anarchy in which the Yazidis, the Kurds and other communities face a deadly threat, non-intervention is a morally compromised option. If sufficient resources are available – something that cannot be taken for granted – military action may be justified. But it is hard to see how there can be lasting peace in territories where there is no functioning state. Our leaders have helped create a situation that their view of the world claims cannot exist: an intractable conflict in which there are no good outcomes.