Global Radical Islam: Muslims have time to break silence
The atrocities committed to the innocent people of Islamic Radical Groups have been terrified lately by the whole world. It would seem that radical Islamists had abducted their religion – or used to find answers to personal or political decision-making. In a recent study published by the London Economics and Peace Institute (IEP), Muslim countries Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria are ranked at the top of the global terrorism index from 162 countries. Radical Islamic terrorism does not only extend to Muslim states. Western countries and their citizens are often subjected to the creation and death of a disorder. Now a part of Western Muslims travel to Muslim war regions to participate in jihad, holy war, unfaithful and Islamic minority groups. Recently reported about 50 Finnish Muslims – both Islamic and immigrant – joined the terrorist Isis organization ( the Islamic State/ IS) In Syria, attention was drawn to a peaceful Nordic country. In western media, Islamicism has become a suspect of hatred, intolerance and violence. Muslims are considered to be retrograde people who subjugate women, minority groups, and are exposed to collective violence. The debate in Western media has focused on the proportionality of Islam and liberal democracy. How is the threat of political Islam taken up? Part of the media has gone so far that radical Islam has been proclaimed the Western Fourth Warrior after the Second World War and the Cold War. Coarse generalization, although some of the observations are true.
Islam is, like Judaism and Christianity, a monotheistic religion. It has five pillars: faith, prayer, fasting, charity, and Muslims who are capable of participating at least once in their lifetimes, pilgrimage to Mecca. The Sacred Book of Faith The Qur’an gives various instructions on how to encounter injustice and oppression. At the same time, the book treats the death of one innocent man to the destruction of all mankind. Political interpretations and the harnessing of Islam for their own purposes stain the whole religion. There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, which exceed one fifth of the world’s population. They do not only live in Muslim countries from Morocco to Indonesia but also in Europe and North America. Muslims as a religious group can not blame the actions of a small brainwashed and violent radical minority. If we study the history of other world religions, we find that similar intolerance and violence have also been practiced in their name. Yet the radical Islamic problem in the world is currently unique and unparalleled. If we look at the present state, they suffer from similar patterns of failure in the construction of state order, the institutions of liberal democracy and the citizenship of those countries. In many Muslim countries, alongside the public school system, there are uncontrolled non-governmental religious schools, which creates theoretical tensions between Muslim and state citizenship. It eats the credibility of the state in the eyes of many religious educated students. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the rise of the Taliban movement and Nigeria’s Boko Haram is an indication of the profound crisis in the legitimacy of nation states in Muslim countries. the building of liberal democratic institutions and their citizenship. In many Muslim countries, alongside the public school system, there are uncontrolled non-governmental religious schools, which creates theoretical tensions between Muslim and state citizenship. It eats the credibility of the state in the eyes of many religious educated students. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the rise of the Taliban movement and Nigeria’s Boko Haram is an indication of the profound crisis in the legitimacy of nation states in Muslim countries. the building of liberal democratic institutions and their citizenship. In many Muslim countries, alongside the public school system, there are uncontrolled non-governmental religious schools, which creates theoretical tensions between Muslim and state citizenship. It eats the credibility of the state in the eyes of many religious educated students. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the rise of the Taliban movement and Nigeria’s Boko Haram is an indication of the profound crisis in the legitimacy of nation states in Muslim countries. It eats the credibility of the state in the eyes of many religious educated students. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the rise of the Taliban movement and Nigeria’s Boko Haram is an indication of the profound crisis in the legitimacy of nation states in Muslim countries. It eats the credibility of the state in the eyes of many religious educated students. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the rise of the Taliban movement and Nigeria’s Boko Haram is an indication of the profound crisis in the legitimacy of nation states in Muslim countries.
It is clear that Muslims in the world do not form a coherent ethnic, linguistic or national group. They live in post-colonialism in countries that are different from their historical, cultural, political and economic circumstances. They are too diverse to fit into a category and they have their own conflicts of external and internal interests. There are over 50 Muslim majority countries in the world, often called the Muslim world – though such a classification is politically motivated. Countries such as Turkey, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia are difficult to get into one of the compartments. Although Islam emerged on the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century, the vast majority of Muslims now live outside the ”Arab world” of 22 states. The main religion of the region is Islam and the main Arabic language does not cover tribes, the dissatisfaction of ethnic groups and minority religions in the Arab world. Two centuries after the death of the last Islamic prophet, the Arabs have captured and extradited their regime from the Iberian Peninsula west to India in the east. The spread of Islam to non-Arab countries was guarded by armed might. Later, religion became a local to Islam. All the world’s Muslim world, including the Arab world, had been subjected to the European colonial regime before its independence from the 20th century. The Western nation states and liberal democracy took power, based on the industrial revolution. However, the colonialist Arab and Muslim countries did not become States of solid national identity comparable to European nation states.
States remained mostly closed and patriarchal, especially in Arab countries. Legislation, freedom of expression, and democratic accountability were ignored under the command of arbitrary rulers. The history of Arabs is twofold. On the other hand, they were conquerors of non-Arab countries, on the one hand, and foreign powers. Weakness and hatred in the Arabic streets after the humiliation of the West by Israeli humiliation and fantasies return to the former Islamic kingdom as a result of the covert hiding attempts of the rulers to overcome the failure of rational education, democratic governance, freedom, economic development and social equality. Arab politics in general and political Islam are particularly linked to the Arab-Islamic empire. The Creation in Islam emerged after the death of the last Prophet of Islam and focused on the power of the caliphate after the death of the fourth caliph, the supreme religious leader. The bloody battle led to the separation of Shiites and Suns, which has its political heritage in the present Middle East; Iran, Pakistan and elsewhere. The time of the Ottoman Empire and the power of the European colonial administration in Arabia transformed the fertile soil of Wahhabism, the puritanistic form of Islam, to the birth of today’s Saudi Arabia in the 18th century. The emergence of Wahhabism has negative consequences for Islamic plurality and tolerance in other parts of the world. The rise left its shadowy Arab-Islamic liberal rationalist legacy, which was manifested by the mu’taziliites in the 800-1000 century in the present Iraqi territory.
Wahhabi Islam also greatly influenced the identity and politics of the conquered non-Arab Muslims. The key players of today’s Islamist organizations share a common feature with Wahhabism or, more broadly, Salafism: they strive to Islamize secularists and democratic institutions with the full submission of the believers to the jihad, the holy war against unbelievers and the liberal Muslims. They are allied to the umma, a global Islamic community led by one of the caliphs – not to the nation states. This Islamic version nullifies the histories, cultures and indents of the non-Arabs and seeks ways to return to the medieval religious empire. It harms many non-Arab Muslim countries by influencing people’s perceptions of their own culture, identity, and values in relation to the Arabs. Critics of Orientalism, Western Balkans and Leftists overlook this aspect of Arabian cultural imperialism in South Asia and other non-Arab countries where Arabs are seen solely as victims of the European colonial regime.
Authoritarian governance, corruption, violence against women, religious and other minority groups, and the poor positioning of the humanitarian development scale are characterized by a large majority of the Muslim world today. Since the post-Cold War wave of democracy since the 1990s, the ruling elites of these countries have invariably used Islam to gain democratic legitimacy. Decades of underprivileged Islamist parties have reorganized themselves into serious repression in many countries where poor governance is more a scapegoat. The Western-backed jihad against the Conquest of Afghanistan in Afghanistan served as a global laboratory for violent radical Islam. Jihast groups such as Al Qaida, the Taliban movement, Boko Haram and Isis, are based on Wahhabi ideology, one of the world’s strongest global political Islamic brands. Even though most Muslims have turned their back on dictatorship towards formal democracy, for millions of Muslims, religious identity seems to be more weightier than belonging to a nation state. Politicalization of Islam and Islamization of politics have strengthened the individual Sunni interpretation of Islam over other diverse interpretations such as Shi’ah, Sufiity and Ahmadijia. The rise of uncontrolled madrasas , religious colleges, for example under the control of former military dictators in South Asia has laid the foundation for militaristic Islam.
Muslim rulers, mainly monarchs, kings, militia dictators and recent formal democracies, use Palestinian suffering under Israel to divert attention from bad governance and corruption. Many Muslim governments fail to guarantee the state’s basic tasks, security, justice, health and education. Islamists in Muslim countries, in Europe and North America, are appalled when Muslims are killed by a Jewish, Christian or Hindu state, but they close their eyes when a Muslim is killed by a non-Muslim or another Muslim. Radical Islamists are a small minority of Muslims in the world. In Muslim-majority countries, Muslims themselves oppose radicalism and fight against its toxic effects, both for the rights of women and minority groups and for pluralist democracy. Islamic radicalism puts Muslims in the western world often a multifaceted cultural background in a difficult position. Identifying faith and combining terrorism makes them easy targets for racial intolerance, discrimination and marginalization, even though most of them are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. Most of them abstain from local and national policies. Identifying faith and combining terrorism makes them easy targets for racial intolerance, discrimination and marginalization, even though most of them are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. Most of them abstain from local and national policies. Identifying faith and combining terrorism makes them easy targets for racial intolerance, discrimination and marginalization, even though most of them are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. Most of them abstain from local and national policies.
In the name of Islam and the Muslims, enough has been done around the world. The question is: Who represents the world’s Muslims? Is there a constituent part of a small minority of jihadi radicals and their seemingly educated religious leaders, or a majority of the Muslims who love peace in the world? The answer is ”No violent radicals”. There are brave Muslim writers, artists and activists in the world who heroically oppose radical Islam in all its forms in their daily lives. Some lucky, like Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani girl, a spokesperson for education and a 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner, pass the Western media screen. Muslims as a religious group rarely protest the atrocities that radicals target both non-Muslims and other Muslims in the name of their religion. Most of the world’s Muslims are moderate. It is time for secular lilies to break silence, raise their voices, and protest against the horrors they make in their name. They should form a peaceful social movement and put pressure on state governments for far-reaching far-reaching educational and political reforms in order to build rationalist, pluralist nation states with liberal democracy and comprehensive nationality.
Translated by: Johanna Sillanpää
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The author is an expert on civil society, education and international development. MR Doftori is the former editor of the Dhaka University in a Bangladeshi newspaper and a member of Finland’s PEN.
