Tony Abbott has been widely reported as declaring Islam needs reform, but it's not Muslims who are his main target. The institution he's really keen to change is the Liberal Party - and the reform he wants begins at the top. Jeff Sparrow writes.

"It's not culturally insensitive to demand ... respect for Western civilisation. Cultures are not all equal."

That's former prime minister Tony Abbott writing for the Daily Telegraph.

He's been widely reported as declaring that Islam needs reform. But, of course, it's not Muslims who are Abbott's main target. The institution he's really keen to change is the Liberal Party - and the reform he wants begins at the top.

After losing the leadership to Malcolm Turnbull, Abbott promised to engage in no sniping. He's kept that pledge only to the extent that the campaign he's now running involves less sniping and more overt sabotage.

In his recent interview with Sky News, he declared that he would have won the next election and then defended all his most controversial policies (with the exception of the Prince Phillip knighthood). He said:

I think it's important to correct the record when the record has been falsified. I did a bit of that last week, but I'm not in the business of replaying events ... but it's important I defend the legacy of the Abbott government. If I defend the legacy of my government, I'm helping the foundations of the Turnbull Government.

Except that, of course, the Turnbull Government laid its foundations by distinguishing itself from its tremendously unpopular predecessor. That's why, ever since the spill, the Labor Party has tried to associate the current and former PMs, an endeavour that Abbott seems determined to assist.

The inevitability of a conflict between the old and new is why most defeated leaders leave parliament, where their mere presence serves to destabilise. Joe Hockey acknowledged as much when he accepted the post of ambassador to the US.

"If I was going to stay," he explained, "it'd be overwhelmingly about getting even with people that brought me down."

That's the context in which Abbott just announced he'd like to stick around. He told Sky:

I've had literally thousands and thousands of messages of support and encouragement since mid-September. I've had a lot of people talk to me as I get around the electorate and still, to some extent, around the country. The message that I'm getting from them, overwhelmingly, is that I still have a contribution to make to our public life.

A recent column by Abbott's close friend and supporter, Greg Sheridan, spelled out the next step. Abbott should be in cabinet, Sheridan said: his elevation would enable the Liberal Party to unite its liberal and conservative streams.

Of course, Sheridan knows as well as Turnbull that, once Tony the camel gets his nose in the tent, his hairy body will soon follow.

What's this got to do with Islam and Western civilisation?

Now that the incantation about stopping the boats has lost its magic, Abbott can list very few achievements from his term in office. But he sees national security as a natural strength for him and a natural weakness for Turnbull. Abbott writes in the Tele:

My government boosted funding to police and security agencies, passed four sets of legislation with more power to arrest and detain terror suspects, and committed to stripping terrorists who are dual nationals of their citizenship.

The implied contrast is between his government, which took all those stern measures, and the current mob, who wouldn't have had the bottle.

The problem for Abbott is that Turnbull's response to Islamic State is more-or-less in line with that from Australia's allies. Dumped defence minister Kevin Andrews might want to send ground troops to Syria but no one much else does. Andrews' call for a ground war was effortlessly swatted away by Turnbull's allies, leaving the Liberals' conservative faction looking isolated and irrelevant and a bit batty.

Hence Abbott's careful formulation in his Telegraph article. He writes:

Australian jets are bombing terrorist targets in the Middle East and our soldiers are advising and training the Iraqi army. At best this is containing the death cult - but not destroying it.

He then walks back, ever so slightly, the rebuke by adding: "PM Turnbull is talking to our allies about what else we might do."

There's a limit to how far Abbott can go in debating defence policy, partly because he can't be too explicit in his attacks on Turnbull, and partly because a call for Australia to make a unilateral deployment in Syria would sound unhinged.

Hence the rhetoric about Islam needing reform.

It's all hokum of course. As Kristina Keneally points out, there's something more than a little bizarre to hear an argument about the necessity of an Islamic reformation coming from a man who trained for the priesthood. She says:

I know it was some time ago that you were in the seminary, but surely you remember that the Reformation created Protestantism. You and I are members of the unreformed strain of Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church. You and I and our 1.2 billion fellow Catholics around the world have had no reformation. We are part of a church that has steadfastly refused to embrace, in both internal structures and theological development, modern concepts like democracy or gender equality.

Which is not to equate contemporary Catholicism with the Spanish inquisition so much as to suggest that the modern world cannot be explained by airily invoking a few catchphrases from fourth form history.

The Islamic State; the Taliban; Al Qaeda: these are not ancient organisations with an unbroken lineage going back to the Middle Ages. They're new groups, emerging in the 21st century to impose themselves on nations with very different recent histories.

Take a look, for instance, at Mohammad Humayon Qayoumi's photos of Afghanistan in the 1960s: the women he portrays are wearing miniskirts and studying medicine.

To understand the difference between the Kabul of those images and the Kabul once again menaced by the Taliban, you have to study the last decades in Afghanistan and the process by which secularism in that country discredited itself. The invocation of some eternal essence of Islam explains nothing. As Jason Wilson says:

This demand for reformation has nothing to do with defeating ISIS. In one sense it is a know-nothing cliche, passed from hand to grubby hand in the increasingly bold Islamophobic right. But that doesn't make it any less dangerous. That's because in another sense, it's a political project - in both electoral and broader sense - which attempts to manufacture the kind of fear and insecurity that drags the national political spectrum to the right, and heightens the appeal of rightwing candidates.

That's what Abbott's doing now.

He knows quite well the meaninglessness of bluster about Western civilisation. Do we respect Ancient Athens for democracy or denounce it for slavery? If Western culture means Goethe, it also means Auschwitz: surely we don't defend both, do we?

But precisely because the rhetoric's empty, it puts Turnbull in a difficult spot. If he says nothing, he's allowing Abbott to set the agenda. But when Turnbull distances himself from Abbott's defence of Western values, he fuels fears among grassroots conservatives that the PM's not really a Liberal at all.

How far Abbott can get with this strategy remains to be seen. No matter how much he proclaims himself satisfied with his record as PM, his colleagues remember how consistently unpopular Abbott proved with the public. It would surely require a massive dive in Turnbull's polling for Abbott's wing of the Liberals to foist their man back in the top job.

In the meantime, let's remember that a recent survey showed Muslims were three times more likely to experience racism than other Australians. Shamefully, the tactics Abbott's employing in his mission of revenge are likely to fan such sentiment further.

Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and broadcaster, and an honorary fellow at Victoria University. His Twitter handle is @Jeff Sparrow.