THE world has woken up to the threat the Islamic State (previously, the Islamic State of Syria and al-Sham) poses to countries in the Middle East and beyond. The response, a military one, is under way. But the experience of the last 13 years tells us that this will end up providing little more than tactical respite. Irrespective of the outcome of this intervention, the next IS-type outfit will be ready to raise its head sooner or later.

Why? Because the assortment of Sunni Islamist militants, for all their internal differences, have managed to hold their own in the narrative war they are fighting against the Westphalian system. Their narrative has not come out on top — but they don’t need it to. As long as they can keep the space confused and average Muslim country citizens mildly sympathetic, ambivalent or indifferent, or reluctant to reject them outright, the Islamists keep their currency.

Not only have they managed this — pick up any poll in the Muslim world and look at the numbers that ‘do not oppose’ one of these outfits (even if they say they oppose their actions) and it’ll add up to millions — but the Westphalian states they are challenging seem incapable of finding a counter.

Even in Pakistan, we’ve been reluctant to accept the potency of the Islamist message for many. Too often, the world has focused on its dogmatism and barbarism to discredit it. But this misses why they are able to exist despite these despicable traits.

The Islamists have prevented a united challenge to their narrative.

I have spent some time distilling the commonalities among the narratives of the various Islamist militant outfits that have grabbed the headlines since 9/11. They converge on a cocktail which deliberately conflates a specific interpretation of religious orthodoxy (Islamist groups don’t agree with each other on the interpretations but all agree on the supremacy of the orthodox narrative), anti-Americanism, and governance failures in Muslim countries.

Unpacked, you are talking about the potency of the message that ‘jihad is a religious duty’ when Muslim societies are occupied by outsiders; Western civilisation is the real evil that lords over a global structure that suits it and forces divine laws to be subservient to its model of running the world; specifically, the US occupies a number of Muslim lands (directly or indirectly); and rulers of Muslim countries — who play to America’s tunes — force Muslim societies to live in injustice. This is nothing short of a war against us persecuted, deprived Muslims.

Sadly, there seems to be just enough in here for most in the Muslim world not to want to reject the narrative. With the majority of the Muslim world rhetorically and emotionally tied to the principle of the hypothetical ‘Islamic state’, with their own states — many of them West-allied — blaming the West for most of their everyday problems, and with the prevailing sense of injustice, the Islamists have managed to prevent a united challenge to their narrative.

Does this mean the Muslim world is radicalising en masse? No. At its core, the Muslim world remains moderate. But this is the problem: even moderates see enough in some aspect of the Islamist narrative not to reject it.

What of the counter-narrative? It doesn’t really exist. I am at a loss as to where and how it will come about and convinced it can’t come from the West since everything the West has to offer in its defence has already been ostracised: liberal democracy, tolerance, Western monetary aid to countries, etc. Ditto for the liberal elite in Muslim countries seen as defending their interests above all else — and who present their defence through liberal idioms from Western textbooks that hurt their case even further.

It won’t come from the moderate religious space — I speak here of the Al Azhars and Javed Ghamdis of the world — even though, theoretically, it has a much better chance of success given that it can challenge the Islamist narrative by poking holes in their logic of divinity, and historical references they rely on — and misrepresent.

But the reality is that this space is too divided and Muslim states that can work to bring them together too competitive among themselves and discredited within their societies to achieve this.

Then there’s the idea that the Islamists will fail since they have no solutions. Correct. And therefore it isn’t surprising that populations where Islamists have the least support tend to be ones that have had the misfortune of being ruled by them. But for this to work, you would have to allow them to rule enough people for long enough that they self-destruct. So there you have it: the various militant outfits put together represent an existential threat for the Muslim world. Yet there are few good answers on our side.

The writer is a foreign policy expert based in Washington, DC.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2014