One of the biggest mistakes we make — as individuals, as societies — is the failure to identify who our real enemies are. When things fall down in our lives, we cast around for someone to blame, often failing to hold ourselves to account.
Within political and religious groups, this manifests as puritanism, cannibalism or the single narrative. For instance, when dissenting members are called out as inauthentic or compromised, or when the media is charged as the source of all problems.
Since 9/11, as well as more recent, atomised attacks in Europe and the UK, our judgment about what is against us has also been clouded.
It is not Islam, no matter what politicians and commentators say. To believe them is to take seriously the notions that it is ever possible to 'fight' religion as if it were a nation-state, that religion holds a single interpretation, that the only legitimate victims of religious violence are white and non-Muslim, and that human motivation is simple and direct.
We know this as blindness from what it does not — or refuses to — see. In Marawi, where a battle goes on between Philippine government forces and self-identified Islamists, a Muslim lawyer rescued 42 Christians from a burning building. In the exodus from the city, Muslims reportedly taught Christians Muslim prayers, in the hope that these can be credentials for passage. Such stories aren't unusual.
During a spate of assaults on Coptic Christians in Egypt earlier this year, Muslim neighbours provided sanctuary: 'Anything that happens to you happens to us.' In Mosul, Iraq last month, Muslim volunteers helped restore a Chaldean church wrecked by ISIS occupiers.
These are not feel-good stories; to reduce them as inspirational would relegate the work of peace to those most at risk of harm. But they do present a vision of a world that defies the cynicism and malice propagated by fundamentalists — both the brutal and genteel kinds.
It should always give us pause that Islamist terrorists and anti-Muslim agitators have something in common: pursuit of hegemony. Their resistance to evidence that Muslims and non-Muslims can peaceably live together gives something away. What if this is in fact what we are up against?
"The idea that we may never have all the means necessary to prevent every attack is unsettling. But casting around for a more concrete avatar upon which we can direct our fevered anxieties will not make us less anxious."
It does not