IN today’s article I will try to discuss the discourse of ‘terror’ by looking at four incidents that happened very close to the beginning of Ramadan. They are:

• May 22, 2017 – The Manchester Arena suicide bombing that took 23 young lives after an Ariana Grande concert.
• May 23, 2017 – The seizure of the city of Marawi in Southern Philippines by the Maute Group and other militant groups that have pledged alliance to the Islamic State (ISIS).
• May 24, 2017 – The Kampung Melayu bombings in Jakarta that killed three police officers and two suicide bombers.
• May 26, 2017 – The Minya attack in Egypt where masked gunmen ambushed a Coptic Christian convoy and killed at least 28 men.

To be clear, these are not representative examples, nor were they the most deadly. For that, one will have to include the Kabul and Al-Faqma Ice Cream parlour attacks.

Nevertheless, these four cases help to reveal how many discourses on terrorism were wrong to just emphasise on the ‘universal’ but not the ‘particulars’.

The two grand narratives

By universals, I refer to the adoption of a grand, if not singular, variable in trying to make sense of a string of happenings.

Two themes can be observed when the attacks involved some form of Islamist militancy. Either the problem is Islam, or the transnational ‘terrorist-insurgent-pseudo state’ hybrid, ISIS.

On the latter, even though ISIS revel in such ‘adulation’ and would claim credit for every attack, including those that are highly unlikely to be theirs, we know the answer is a definitive “No”.

For instance, for the four cases I listed, even as ISIS has claimed credit for all of them, its fingerprints can only be definitively found in two (the Manchester and Minya attack). For the rest, it is more likely the groups responsible drew the rhetorical and symbolic strength of ISIS as the world’s foremost terrorist organisation. 

Thus, it is unlikely that terrorism will vanish when ISIS is destroyed (it may soon be) as they are not the sole perpetrators of terror, nor can we be certain the vacuum created will not be filled by other groups.

After all, we do have settings like Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq where weak governments are fighting a civil, if not sectarian war. There, ‘terror’ is a part of war strategy rather than a ‘thing’ in itself.

But if it’s not just ISIS, what then? Islam?

I don’t think what is intended to be a short article here can do justice to such a complex question, nor is that the focus of this article. Unfortunately, gross simplifications often require detailed arguments to counter.

I will just say this. Religion’s relation to terrorism is akin to nationalism’s relation to fascism. Fascism demands a specific form of nationalism, as jihadist terrorism demands a specific form of religiously-denominated worldview, and these ideologies do not evolve out of vacuums.

No direct or even indirect causal relations exist for religion or nationalism to function as the stopgap measure. In other words, just as we cannot ban nationalism to curb fascism (if not nation-states will fall apart), banning one religion with billions of followers is unfair nor feasible.

To stop the inquiry at religion is neither an intellectual nor policy-worthy response.

Rebellion and terror

So if the universals cannot give us a more sensible understanding of such violence, we have no choice but to deal with the ‘particulars’ of each incident.

For starters, one can observe the two attacks in Southeast Asia operate within contexts that differed greatly from the attack in Egypt or Manchester.

While now undeniably tied to transnational influences in terms of resources, ideology, and actors (links that were established since Jemaah Islamiyah, or JI, was still active), they are as much a part of a long-waging rebellion.

For instance, the Mindanao conflict that has lasted five centuries now is actually the world’s second oldest persisting conflict.

Similarly, the struggle for some form of ‘Islamic’ nationhood lasted almost as long as the Indonesian republic, starting with Kartosoewirjo’s Darul Islam rebellion in 1949 which spun a handful of ideological heirs inheriting its conflict capital – JI being one of them, though they were never as organised as their Filipino counterparts.

Unfortunately, the historicity of such conflicts tends to be dismissed, if not disregarded as the language of the ‘war on terror’ swept across the world post-September 11.

The targets in the two attacks are also very telling. The Maute group seized a town which has a mainly-Muslim population rather than terrorising the many other ‘kafir’, Christian-majority towns in the Philippines. This is basically insurgency tactics where conquering territory is more important than inflicting random civilian deaths, not unlike what other insurgent groups, such as the Maoist New People’s Army (NPA), would do.

The Kampung Melayu attack appears to be deliberately targeting the police, which is also part of a pattern (see here and here) in Indonesia. Attacking the security forces is often always a part of a war strategy. After all, they are seen as the bastion protecting the very state the militants want to topple.

Revenge also constitutes a motive, as security analyst Sidney Jones pointed out. The killing of Santoso and wounding of Isnilon Hapinon, both prominent leaders of the militants, have led to further outpour of violence by the militants.

Terror as strategy and rebellion

A vastly different scenario can be said about the two ISIS-related cases. For Egypt, it would appear that this follows a strategy of targeted violence against Coptic Christians in a bid to replicate the sectarian fault lines in Iraq where ISIS metastasises the best.

This is, of course, buttressed by long-held prejudices against the Coptic Christians and claims that they were complicit in the coup that toppled an Islamist government in exchange for a secular, military one.

On the Manchester bombing, the perpetrator has a profile that fit Olivier Roy’s description of the new jihadists in Europe, the decultured second generation immigration who drank, partied and often had a criminal history but abruptly converted to Islam with a zeal even those within the faith community found scary.

Their acts of violence, while may seem to fit into ISIS’s strategy, is more a personal death wish rather than revolutionary state-building.

After all, a state, or caliphate in this case, can’t just have their committed members continue blowing themselves up. Who’s going to do the state building then?

Complexity not for its own sake

Speaking about the complexity of terrorism in a world inundated by ‘terror’ is not to point out complexity for its own sake. It is to come to terms that the issue, while easy to frame in civilisational terms, cannot be tackled as so. 

Avoiding the particularities of each situation also mean avoiding the many difficult questions underlying the manifestation of such grotesque forms of violence.

For Egypt, it questions the collateral of nation-(re)building under an oppressive, semi-authoritarian regime.

For Indonesia, especially in light of the recent Jakarta gubernatorial elections, it questions how the Pancasila was gradually and continuously eroded by a religiously-denominated exclusivist ideology; something not unfamiliar to Malaysia as well.

For the Philippines, it raises the question why peace agreements (be it the 1976 Tripoli Agreement or the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro) resulted not in demilitarisation but rather the sprouting of more radical and violent splinter groups?

And for Britain, it would need to confront the difficult question of whether the ideal of multiculturalism, which in reality have created insulated, disadvantaged, counter-cultural echo chambers, has failed.

In none of these cases, single-minded thinking is helpful.

After all, the last time the world wanted to start a war to end all wars, that didn’t work out too, no? – June 14, 2017.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.