Daily Times

Islamist militants want to establish their cherished ‘Islamic khilafat’ through jihad against the governments siding with the ‘infidel’ Americans. They draw their inspiration from the teachings of Ibn Taimiyya, Farraj and Qutb on how the ulema (clergy) have failed to rise and call for jihad against the government declaring the rulers as infidel lackeys of the west.

One of the major reasons for the revival of religious extremism and terrorism is that in each religion there are puritans who want to keep a cultural and religious status quo, and resist any change particularly when it appears to be foreign. Many scholars have used the term Islamists for the extremists. Humeira Iqtidar, in her paper ‘Secularism beyond the state: the state and the market, explained: “Islamists are defined as those among Muslim revivalists who focus on taking over the state — they certainly seem to take the state, both as an idea and as a material object, very seriously.”

They are asking for more Islamic laws and a lifestance in accordance to the Islamic code as practiced in the seventh century. According to Charles S Liebman, religious extremism in all religions is the natural outcome of the fact that “religion claims absolute truth about ultimate reality. It knows the route one must follow to live one’s life in accordance with that which is ultimately right and ultimately just… The search for stricter or harsher interpretation of the law is consistent with the desire to assure one’s self and others that one is indeed living in accordance with what one is commanded to do rather than simply in accordance with what one would like to do.”

That explains why the Islamists are afraid of change and are fighting the proverbial ‘windmill’ like Don Quixote. The world, as Thomas Friedman stated, is now flat because of information flow, thanks to digital technology and optic fibre. In each country, foreign ideas, culture and political debates are beamed into the sitting rooms of the people. The internet has broken all barriers. Knowledge is being democratised. All this is scary for retrogressive conservative forces. They are fighting back, declaring that globalisation of culture is a threat to religion and religious tradition. Even some of the leftists and liberal activists in Pakistan are resisting the change and instead of moving on with the changing times want to remain attached to antiquated theories and systems. Olivier Roy explained that Muslim ‘neo-fundamentalism’ “looks at globalisation as a good opportunity to rebuild the Muslim ummah (Muslim community) on a purely religious basis, not in the sense that religion is separated from culture and politics, but to the extent religion discards and even ignores other fields of symbolic practices. Neofundamentalism promotes the decontextualisation of religious practices.” We have seen that along with the petro-dollars of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf kingdoms cultural and religious influences are also coming to the country, decontextualising the local culture. Saudi-funded mullahs and even some educated people are influenced by Wahhabi thinking and they denigrate local cultural practices because they are not practices in Arabia.

A question is often raised then: when there are extremist strands in all religions why are Muslims extremists profiled as terrorists? The major reasons are that Muslim terrorists are more in number, they are spread all over the world, are more organised, are more violent and, above all, al Qaeda and now Islamic State (IS) have given them a global agenda. Unlike others who have local issues, Muslim extremists have the al Qaeda and IS manifesto to establish Islamic supremacy over the world. There is a debate raging among Muslims as to whether the Salafi explanation about the permanent jihad by the individual is correct or whether jihad has to be a collective action declared by an Islamic state. Olivier Roy maintains that [w]hatever the complexity of the debate among scholars since the time of the Prophet (PBUH), two points are clear: jihad is not one of the five pillars of Islam (profession of faith, prayer, fasting, alms’ giving [zakat] and pilgrimage [Haj]) and it is therefore a collective duty (fard kifaya) under given circumstances. However, the radicals, since Sayyid Qutb and Mohammad Farrag, explicitly consider jihad a permanent and individual duty (fard ayn).”

The Arab countries in West Asia fall into two categories: one, ruled by tribal kingdoms and, two, the countries that are in the eye of the storm i.e. Iraq, Syria and Libya. The common thing in the Arab kingdoms and these three countries is that all had in place dictatorship over their people that denied them their political rights. The oil rich Gulf kingdoms led by Saudi Arabia have tried to appease their people by doling out a small amount of oil income but the growing inequality in these kingdoms and the accumulation of oil wealth in the hands of a few members of the ruling elite, lack of human rights and social repression in decision-making have led to widespread discontent and anger among the people. This anger is manifested in the occasional terrorist acts within these countries and has led many disgruntled youth to join terrorist groups like al Qaeda and IS.

This brings us to the crucial question asked frequently about how long terrorism will continue. The French Scholar Maxime Rodinson was of the following view: “Islamic fundamentalism is a temporary, transitory movement, but could last another 30 or 50 years — I do not know how long. Where fundamentalism is not in power it will be an ideal, [but] as long as the basic frustration and discontent persists that leads people to take extreme positions. You need long experience with clericalism to finally get fed up with it — look how much time it took in Europe!”

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The writer can be reached and at ayazbabar@gmail.com. He is author of What’s Wrong With Pakistan?