Isis: The Origins of Violence Page #5

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And so, you...

the implication of that is

astonishing, that actually...

...the West is influencing Muhammad

himself.

And if the West can influence how

Muslims see Muhammad, then

the West can influence almost

anything.

And there are Muslims who are fine

with that.

But there are plenty of Muslims

who are not fine with that.

And one of them, seen here

under escort,

was an Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb.

He was charged with an

assassination attempt

on Egypt's President Nasser.

But Qutb had a message for Muslims

everywhere.

"Before the coming of Muhammad",

he said,

"Arabs had lived in a condition of

ignorance."

"Those were days of superstition,"

"when Pharaoh had ruled, not

the prophet."

"And laws were made by man,"

"not by God."

"Now," said Qutb, "there is a new

condition of ignorance.

"The pervasive influence of the West

has corrupted Islam..."

"..and threatens to destroy God's

final revelation to mankind."

Qutb was executed in 1966.

But his message still inspires

jihadists around the world.

"We must return to the pure

source," Qutb said,

"from which the first Muslims

derived their guidance,"

"the source that is free from any

mixing or pollution."

The 18th of November, 2015.

In Saint-Denis, police have hunted

down the terrorist

who masterminded the

Bataclan attacks.

In so many ways, what happened here

seems almost archetypally,

nightmarishly contemporary.

What gives what happened here its

particular quality of nightmare,

what makes it really unsettling is

the location.

Because if you keep on down this

street,

past where the, um, where the

terrorists were shot to death,

and you turn around the corner,

what you see is one of the

foundational sites,

not just of French history,

but of Western history as a whole.

It's the great origin point of

France,

of the Gothic,

and of the whole culture of

Mediaeval Europe.

It's the great cathedral of

Saint-Denis.

'It feels quite dislocating

'coming here from the site where one

of the masterminds

'of the Bataclan killings was

cornered,

'because these two people as well

were the victims of terrorists.'

'This is Louis XVI of France, and

this is his queen, Marie Antoinette,

'both of whom were guillotined in

the French Revolution.

'And their bodies originally were

dumped in a common grave,

'and their remains were then brought

here and reburied.'

'And, of course, in the

French Revolution,

'as in an Isis terror video...

...'beheading became a spectacle.'

'And it was a spectacle that was

designed to educate morally,

'to display what happened to

wrongdoers,

'and to affirm the values of the

people who were doing it.'

So these are lists of the kings of

France, in fact,

going all the way back to before

France even existed.

And a large number of them were

buried here,

and they were dug up in 1793

by the revolutionaries.

Their bodies were thrown into pits,

and lime was poured onto those pits

to dissolve

everything that remained of them.

And the aim of that was to create a

kind of year-zero,

it was to wipe the slate clean.

There was a kind of Christian idea

about this,

because they said that this was

the day of judgment on kings.

So there was an idea that the

apocalypse was being realised,

that the new Jerusalem was being

founded.

And that there was no place in this

new Jerusalem for the old order,

for the old royal order, and so it

just literally had to be erased.

There is this strain of

yearning for an apocalypse

that runs through Islam, as well as

through Christianity.

And so, I mean,

it seems odd to say that there could

be any kinship

between people in the

French Revolution and Isis.

But there is a thing, I think,

a sense in which both of them were

inspired by this idea of apocalypse,

by an idea... that a day

of judgment will come

when the righteous will be

fulfilled,

and the unrighteous will be

condemned.

And...

it sets up a kind of

unsettling train of thoughts,

because what it brings home is the

way in which values that I hold,

values that most people in the

West hold,

the very idea of human rights,

were born amid bloodshed.

And thinking that in the light of

Isis, you know,

having seen what I've seen in

Iraq...

you think, well, maybe

there are parallels there.

Because Isis, too,

claim that their acts of terror are

in a noble cause, that

by washing their victims in blood,

they are fertilising the ground for

the establishment

of a caliphate that will bring

order and happiness to the whole

of humanity.

And that basically is how...

the executioners of Louis XVI and

Marie Antoinette,

and many others in the

French Revolution,

justified what they were doing.

'What, then, do we know of our

enemy,

'whose apocalyptic yearnings are so

like our own?

'That they dream, like us, of seeing

their values

'triumph across the world,

'and they fear that they are

losing?'

'Democracy, the tolerance of other

religions,

'universal human rights.

'That millions of Muslims believe

in these,

'is precisely what makes Isis dread

that Islam is being corrupted.

'Makes them determined to scour

it clean.

'And this, in turn, is what makes us

determined to fight them.'

Paris, 2005.

Riots in the banlieue, the suburbs.

For France, a state of emergency.

If Isis had their way, this is the

shape of things to come.

France is home to the largest Muslim

population in Europe,

and the banlieue is where the

majority of them live.

It's here,

and in similar neighbourhoods all

over Europe and America,

that Isis feel they have discovered

the Achilles heel of the West.

Isis refer to the vast number of

Muslims living in the West

as the "grey zone."

Despite their setbacks on the

battlefield,

radicalising this grey zone remains

the core of Isis' strategy.

Their acts of terror are designed to

polarise,

to force Muslims in the West to

choose between their religion

and their country.

Between Sharia and democracy.

Between God's law and man's law.

Continents do not separate us

any more.

We live side-by-side.

Isis are fighting a battle for the

future of Islam.

What happens will determine the

future of us all.

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