Naheed Mustafa is a writer and broadcaster who covers Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The news started tentatively. It was Monday morning in Sydney, Australia and something was going on but it wasn't quite clear what. There was a man, in a café, and he had hostages. Grainy photos showed him with a bandana tied around his head. Then there was a black flag, with Arabic writing, held up in the window by two of the hostages.
The speculation ramped up to a thousand. This was a terrorist attack. It was in response to Australia's involvement in Syria. Professional pundits – and armchair ones – began breaking down the lone wolf attacker phenomenon and global jihadism. Someone mentioned shariah law. At this point virtually nothing was known about the hostage taker, his reasoning, or his demands. The police in Sydney were clear that they knew very little – including the hostage-taker's motivations. At one point he issued several demands including that his actions be recognized as an attack on behalf of ISIS.
As time wore on, information began trickling out. The gunman was a long-time resident of Australia. Man Haron Monis was a self-proclaimed cleric of Iranian origin; he was some kind of faith healer; he'd had a long list of run-ins with the law; he was currently out on bail (he was accused of helping kill his ex-wife); he'd sent hate mail to the families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan; he had also been charged with dozens of counts of sexual assault.
Fast-forward to some 16 hours later and Mr. Monis, along with two hostages, was dead.
In the case of Man Haron Monis, it's fairly clear this was a person with a long list of troubles. His online rantings were directed at the government, at Australia's Muslims, as well as the broader society. He adopted a religious persona and used Islam as a way to lash out not just at Australians in general but at those Muslims he didn't consider religious enough.
While Mr. Monis is an outlier in that he was already notorious (and clearly disturbed) and known to authorities, the events in Sydney speak to a broader problem with the way we talk about terrorism in that we conflate seeming religious orthodoxy with a propensity to commit violence.
One consequence of this linear thinking is that it shapes how authorities set about countering extremism within Muslim communities. Take Canada, for instance. A key aspect of its counterterrorism strategy is to do work in "vulnerable" communities. For Muslims, that means outreach by the RCMP and CSIS into mosques and Islamic schools to create links with community leaders and youth.
The idea is to make connections with communities and show Canadian Muslims, especially young people, that they have a place in Canadian society. The thinking is that when or if there is a problem, given the trust that's been built, Muslim Canadians will reach back out. That's all well and good but the perception among many people within Canada's various Muslim communities is that countering extremism is now somehow a communal burden, specifically for those who represent the religious segment of the Muslim population. All this despite the fact that the vast majority of religious Muslims are not only not violent but are actively law-abiding citizens.
Muslim Canadians, especially young people, have adapted to a culture of surveillance and there's no place fear of surveillance is more palpable than in the mosque. Extremist talk and ideas are met with zero tolerance and so extremism is pushed out to the fringes where it festers. A perfect example was Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, the Ottawa shooter. A clearly troubled person, his zealousness made other mosque-going Muslims uncomfortable and so they felt they had to push him out. In an environment where guilt by association can lead to serious legal problems, no one wants to be the guy that knows a guy who did something.
This paradox underscores a key problem for religious Muslims: they are expected to be interveners and safeguard security and, at the same time, are symbols of the problem itself. The discussion after an event like the siege in Sydney invariably turns to the connection of Islam to terrorism, the so-called lone wolf phenomenon, and how to counter extremism. The least helpful thing we can do is assume vulnerable communities have all the answers.