Countering Extremism: Haras Rafiq on Ideology & War
War is a deeply physical act, but ideologies are the muscle behind them. In this interview, I spoke to Haras Rafiq, CEO of Quilliam International – and one of the world’s foremost…
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War is a deeply physical act, but ideologies are the muscle behind them. In this interview, I spoke to Haras Rafiq, CEO of Quilliam International – and one of the world’s foremost…
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The first one is to believe in the 'otherisation'. The otherisation states that anybody who is looking at the world through their lens is on one group, and everybody outside of this world view is another. And they are different and separate.
— Haras RafiqISIS and Al Qaeda don't radicalise anybody, what they do is tip people over the edge. The online phenomenon just speeds it up.
— Haras RafiqEvery single individual in the world, including you and I, have a grievance or a problem at any given moment in time. When you and I go to sleep tonight in our own beds, you'll be thinking about a problem that's affecting you and I'll be thinking about a problem that's affecting me.
— Haras RafiqSalman Abedi, Khalid Masood, Khuram Butt, all of these people and the people in ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab… We tend to think sometimes that they are extremism. But the reality is they didn't breed extremism. Islamist extremism bred them.
— Haras RafiqIslamism is an ideology that is imported from Europe in the 1930s onwards. It was fascism and communism that were imported by Qutb, who became the ideologue of modern day Islamism. He wrote a book called 'milestones' – equivalent (and sharing many similarities) to Das Kapital or Mein Kampf.
— Haras RafiqOur definition is extremism is the desire to enforce illiberal views which are in a dichotomy to the liberal values that we all adhere to in a Liberal secular democracy; and you can have non-violent or violent extremism.
— Haras RafiqIt's almost like we have the left eye covering itself up and saying, 'nothing to see here, nothing to do with Islam', and the right eye bursting a blood vessel saying, 'it's all Islam, it's all Muslims', and Islamists saying that the divine inspiration for them is from above.
— Haras RafiqThe question I always ask them is '…what has our foreign policy got to do with Muslims travelling thousands of miles to go and kill other Muslims in Iraq and Syria?'
— Haras RafiqSalman Abedi, Khalid Masood, Khuram Butt, all of these people and the people in ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab… We tend to think sometimes that they are extremism. But the reality is they didn't breed extremism. Islamist extremism bred them.
— Haras RafiqExtremism is the desire to enforce illiberal views which are in a dichotomy to the liberal values that we all adhere to in a Liberal secular democracy; and you can have non-violent or violent extremism.
— Haras Rafiq