I have always thought that Western estimates of the number and importance of the Shia have not been accurate. This is partly because of the range of Shia sects, some of which resemble the Sunni to a remarkable extent, others appearing more or less outside the pale of Islam altogether. It is also because of the importance of the doctrine of taqiya, or of concealment of the faith because of the fear of persecution, that the number of Shia in a given situation is not appreciated until conditions are favourable to them. We now know that significant numbers of Shia are to be found not only in Iran and South Asia but in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen and Turkey. Many of the features of Shia resurgence resemble the Sunni, for example, their enthusiasm to enact and implement their form of sharia in its entirety. In other respects, Shia is different: much higher store is set by the virtues of martyrdom, for example. Their view of the positive value of suffering is quite unparalleled in Sunni Islam. This is linked to another core doctrine which is the concealment and the expected revealing of the True Imam or Mahdi. In the Shia resurgence these two characteristics are often seen together. The martyrdom of the faithful in fighting the infidel and seeking justice for believers hastens the parousia of the absent Imam. There is, therefore, both an implicit and, at least some of the time, an overt eschatological element to Shia resurgence. The significance of this is that things may be said or action undertaken which appear to outsiders as rash or foolhardy but which is designed to hasten the coming of the Imam, the vindication of believers and the establishing of justice here on earth.

We should not imagine that these resurgent forms of Islam or Islamism are present only in Muslim-majority countries. They are affecting, more and more, the lives of people and of nations in many other contexts, whether that is in India, with its Muslim minority as large as the population of some Muslim countries; the Philippines, where there is a long-running conflict with Islamist extremists in Mindanao; China, which worries about the infiltration of radical Islam from its west; or Russia and the situation on its southern flank. In the Western world too, these resurgent forms, prone to extremism and adoption of violence, are present and influential. Particularly in isolated and segregated communities of immigrant origin among the young who may be European or American-born, in universities and prisons, through the internet and on the margins of mosque-life (if not at its centre) and in madrassas, they are ubiquitous as a radicalising and alienating presence.

In such a situation, programmatic secularism, with its pale shadow of values derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, for which it cannot give an account, provides thin gruel for any attempts to check and reverse the trend to radicalisation. On the one hand, it is unable to provide a strong moral and spiritual framework which is needed in addressing a comprehensive social, political and economic ideology explicitly claiming to derive from a particular spiritual tradition. On the other, such secularism may itself, as Peter Hitchens has shown in his book The Rage Against God, be unable to resist moving towards totalitarianism in its disregard for conscience (especially of believers), its lack of commitment to the family and to the rights of parents to bring up their children without excessive state intervention, to freedom of belief and the right to manifest one's beliefs in daily work and life.