The shadow of the caliphate

WHEN Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the restoration of the Muslim caliphate a year ago this month, the call for Muslims to come to fight for, and build, his Islamic State (IS), was heard not just in the collapsing Arab heartland, but also in Muslim communities as disparate as China, the Philippines and Australia. More than half the world’s Muslims live in Asia, so the rise of a violent and swaggeringly self-confident strain of global jihadism is bound to disrupt the region. Pre-existing groups of jihadists have been emboldened by the success of IS in establishing and defending its domain in large parts of Iraq and Syria. Asian governments worry that young people are being radicalised by IS propaganda, encouraged to travel to the caliphate or inspired to make bloody mischief at home. Of the thousands of Asians who have fought with IS, many will return home, bringing with them the ideology, networks and know-how of murderous terrorism.

The danger is perhaps most acute in Afghanistan and Pakistan, countries already torn by terrorism and insurgency. But there is also cause for alarm in the volatile post-Soviet republics of Central Asia, where political Islam is an alternative to nasty authoritarian regimes, and an estimated 2,000-4,000 people are among the 20,000 foreigners who have joined IS. China has strived in the past few years to root out extremism among members of the mainly Muslim Uighur minority in the vast western region of Xinjiang, and to blame global jihadism. It has estimated that 300 Uighurs have travelled to Iraq and Syria. But China’s countermeasures seem only to have sharpened resentment at what Uighurs see as colonial oppression by the Chinese state and its ethnic-Han majority.

Even in South-East Asia, where the numbers of IS recruits seem quite modest (some 500 Indonesians, 100 Filipinos, 50 Malaysians and a handful of Singaporeans), the question of how to respond to IS has political repercussions. In the Philippines, for example, peace between the government and Muslim rebels on the island of Mindanao is threatened by extremist groups that have pledged fealty to IS. Even in democratic Malaysia the introduction in April of new anti-terrorism legislation, including provisions for detention without trial, has angered not just Islamists but also a range of opposition politicians. Many see it as a pretext to restore powers granted by the colonial-era Internal Security Act, which was at times abused for political ends and was lifted only in 2012. Governments everywhere grapple with an impossible calculation: if they underestimate the threat, they expose their people to terrorist attacks; if they exaggerate it, their heavy-handed reactions may further strengthen the terrorists’ cause.

Concerns about the influence of IS have grown even in peaceful countries far from the main battlefronts. At a regional conference on “countering violent extremism” in Sydney this month, Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, denounced its “brazen claim to universal dominion”. He lamented that “the tentacles of the death cult have extended even here,” recalling a bloody siege at a café in Sydney last December by an apparently deranged gunman with IS sympathies. Several dozen Australians are reported to have joined IS or Jabhat Al-Nusra, a Syrian rival affiliated to al-Qaeda. Controversially, Australia plans to strip citizens with dual nationality who are “known terrorists” of their Australian passports.

A few days before Mr Abbott spoke, Lee Hsien Loong, Singapore’s prime minister, had devoted part of his keynote speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual security forum, to the problem of IS. The public talk focused on China’s expansion in the South China Sea, but much of the backroom talk was about the gathering jihadist threat. Most striking was Mr Lee’s sobering assessment that this was a struggle that would last for generations. Looking forward 50 years, he suggested that jihadist ideology would surely have been seen to fail, or at least to have “weakened its hold on the imagination of troubled souls”. But he noted that Soviet Communism, “another historical dead end”, survived for 70 years before it collapsed. And that, for all its pretensions to absolute truth, was not a creed rooted in religion.

In comfortable, well-off Singapore, Malay Muslims are a largely well-integrated minority. But it was nonetheless a target for Jemaah Islamiah, a regional jihadist group whose spiritual leader, Abu Bakar Basyir, once linked to al-Qaeda, has pledged allegiance to IS. Jemaah Islamiah, guilty of terrorist atrocities in Indonesia, also planned bombings in Singapore shortly after the September 11th attacks in America. And even in Singapore, the internet is producing fanatics. Recently the authorities arrested a 17-year-old, radicalised online, and detained a 19-year-old student who was planning to join IS or, failing that, to assassinate government leaders at home. Singapore knows that it is both a rich country full of attractive targets for terrorists and a “little red dot” surrounded by largely Muslim Indonesia and Malaysia. IS has said it wants to establish a wilayat, a province of the caliphate, in South-East Asia. “Pie in the sky”, scoffed Mr Lee. But he worried that IS could establish a base in some ungoverned space in the region.

What do they see in IS?

The difficulty is global: everywhere, efforts to fight extremism make the governments behind them even more of a target. Both Australia and Singapore are contributing to the coalition fighting IS in the Middle East. And, as all over the world, governments are becoming more vigilant at home and stepping up “deradicalisation” measures by working with moderate Muslims to counter jihadist propaganda. That is not easy, however. Propaganda—especially the astute use of the internet and social media—is IS’s forte. As both Mr Lee and Mr Abbott suggested, the appeal IS holds for “troubled souls” is incomprehensible to the leaders of prosperous modern states. And it is hard to marshal good arguments against a point of view you do not begin to understand.