There is something very deliberate about terror attacks on religious groups on their holiest day of their year. The successors to Al-Qaeda in Iraq during the height of the insurgency — including Daesh — made it their specialty. Sri Lanka’s multiple bombings on the morning of Easter Sunday were this strategy written in blood. Joy turns into mourning, and praise into despair.
But such attacks often, in the long term, have the opposite effect to that intended. National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ) — the group believed to have carried out the attacks — and their like may describe them as “martyrdom operations,” but they create martyrs in the true sense of the word: Not dying in commission of some atrocity or in battle, but at the hands of aggressors because of one’s faith. Jesus warned his followers in the Gospels that they would suffer for their faith.
Tertullian, one of the leading theologians of the 3rd century church in North Africa, wrote that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” He was not writing glibly, but from direct personal experience. Indeed, the more the early church was persecuted, the more it grew.
If it is indeed the group responsible, these attacks were a new direction for NTJ. Their previous activities seem to have been limited to vandalism of Buddhist temples. The massive escalation of activities is therefore notable, and strongly indicates at least inspiration by Daesh, if not direct advice or support.
It is a curious feature that, in a country in which Christians make up only 7.4 percent of the population, and Muslims are also a minority of 9.7 percent, Islamist terrorists still target Christians — fellow peoples of the book. Perhaps they think Christians are a soft target but, more likely, given that the attacks also targeted hotels frequented by Western tourists, they regard Christians as a symbol of the West. Attack Christians, the theory goes, and one is attacking the West. It is common in Islamist literature to refer to Christians as “Crusaders,” drawing on the cultural memory of Western Christian outsiders attacking Muslim lands (and forgetting that the indigenous Christians of those lands often suffered just as much at their hands).
This is a misnomer that the West is struggling to grapple with. To start with, the majority of Christians do not live in the West, but in the Global South. The three churches targeted on Sunday were Roman Catholic, whose Pope may live in Europe, but is Argentinian. Accidents of history have meant that the churches most globally known were spread by European missionaries — but, while the Western church is declining, the church in the Global South expands at a dizzying pace.
And yet Western states are often the most active in promoting religious freedom, and protesting in particular against the persecution of Christians. The British government is currently conducting a review into its approach to the persecution of Christians. The West is caught on the horns of a dilemma: It wishes to support persecuted Christians wherever they are found, but if it does so too vocally, or too exclusively, it may actually lend ammunition to the persecutors.
The essential issue is that it is not just tactics that spread between groups and across borders, but ideas
Peter Welby
The essential issue is that it is not just tactics that spread between groups and across borders, but ideas. The NTJ could have learned the merciless tactic of suicide bombings against multiple targets from any number of sources. But the choice of targets and the method of attack are ideological as well as tactical. They send a message, even if it is a message that seems out of place in Sri Lanka. This international ideology is a connection that works both ways: Just as perpetrators may be inspired (and trained) by groups far away, so may those groups seek to gain some of the perverted glory that such attacks generate among fellow extremists. Daesh has already claimed responsibility for Sunday’s bombings, but this should not be taken as anything more than circumstantial evidence that the group was actually involved.
The ideological element of Islamist terrorism needs to be stressed over and over against those who claim that grievance drives such actions. In November 2016, Sri Lanka’s justice minister told the Parliament that the majority of Sri Lankans who had travelled to Syria to fight for Daesh and similar groups were from the “well-educated elite.” If they had a sense of grievance, they understood it in ideological terms: That there was a conspiracy against the global Ummah, which could only be addressed by the re-establishment of a “caliphate” and the implementation of pure Sharia law.
If Sunday’s bombers were inspired by grievances, what possible connection could they have to Sri Lanka’s Christian minority? If they were inspired by an ideology, and a global ideology at that, then such a target makes much more sense.
In the internet age, extremist ideologies spread like germs. Terrorism is an idea before it is an act. It is hard to see who is infected until the carrier starts showing symptoms, at which stage it is often too late. The way to defeat them is through inoculation: Ensuring that they do not find a receptive host. This requires concerted international effort.
This effort will, of course, encompass the security response. But security alone deals with symptoms, not causes. At heart, the response needs to be as ideological as the disease: Defeating the idea that there is a conspiracy against Islam or that it can be resolved through establishing forms of Islamic government derived from the historic understanding of a world vastly different from today’s reality.
• Peter Welby is a consultant on religion and global affairs, specializing in the Arab world. He is based in London, and has lived in Egypt and Yemen. Twitter: @pdcwelby
