Let’s deny Isis its binary struggle – and celebrate the grey zone

The grey zone is where I want to live. Islamic State hates it, that place between black and white, where nothing is ever either/or and everything is a bit of both. Those who have studied the organisation tell us “the grey zone” – Isis’s phrase – is high on the would-be warriors’ to-eradicate list, along with all those other aspects of our world that so terrify them: women, statues of the past, the pleasures of the present.Specifically, the grey zone refers to the sphere of coexistence where Muslim and non-Muslim might live together. That’s anathema to the frightened young men ofIsis, who yearn for a world divided on binary lines, with room for only two categories – them and the infidel. Such a world would be as clean and neat as computer code, with Isis the ones and the rest of us reduced to zeros.

No wonder a city such as Paris – indeed, the very idea of a city – appals them. Such places are all about mixing, like with unlike. The modern city, whether Paris or Beirut, scares them because it suggests that human beings might just be able to rub along, those who are Muslim and those who are not, living in the same places, visiting the same shops, watching the same football matches, listening to the same music.

“Refugees welcome” scares them. It undermines their insistence that the west has an ingrained hostility to Muslims and could never be their home. Isis despises empathy and longs instead for polarity and conflict. They want atrocities such aslast week’s in Paris – or today’s siege in Mali – to sow fear and loathing, so that non-Muslim majorities turn on their Muslim neighbours until the latter conclude the only place they can ever truly belong is the caliphate. One or the other, either/or. In the Isis mind, ambiguity, like a hybrid identity, is weakness and decadence.

In this last, trembling week, the grey zone has sometimes seemed to be shrinking. Not in the way Isis planned, but rather, under internal pressure. Our own debate about what to do next, about how to deal with a force that we struggle to describe, let alone understand, has polarised too, as it often does at moments of great strain. We’re losing sight of the grey.

Take what has been a perennial element of these conversations since 12 September 2001. Are terror attacks such as these “blowback” for western foreign policy? Stop the War rushed to make that point, too quickly even for its own tastes: within hours of the attacks, it had posted a blog headlined “Paris reaps whirlwind” of western action, only to take it down soon afterwards. Meanwhile, others slam such talk as a sophisticated form of victim-blaming or even western self-hatred, in which everything is always our fault, a worldview that strips Isis of moral agency and responsibility.