Islamic extremist terrorism is terrorism that is claimed by its supporters and practitioners to be in furtherance of Muslim goals with a putative basis in Qu'ranic teaching and obligation. Such activity includes country-specific agitation against secular (or insufficiently Islamic) governments as well as a broader movement to establish a pan-Islamic caliphate. Violence perpetrated by Islamic extremists has included airline hijacking, kidnapping and assassination, and suicide bombing. Victims have included Muslims and non-Muslims, military personnel and civilians.
Where such terrorist activity is of essentially political nature it is often termed Islamist terrorism, especially by social scientists and political commentators. In the vernacular, Islamic terrorism remains common, while popular media and most Western governments employ Islamic extremism, sensitive to the charge that Islamic alone may be construed as a smear against the faith.
Islamic extremist terrorism is not synonomous with all terrorist activities committed by Muslims. Nationalist, and occasionally Marxist-Leninist organizations, in the Muslim world often derive inspiration from secular ideologies and are not well described as either Islamic extremist or Islamist.
Ideology and theology edit
Islamic extremist terrorism first emerged as a notable phenomenon in the 1970s.
The terrorist phenomenon has also been located within a broader Islamic revivalist movement. Such organizations were often characterized as Islamic fundamentalist, which began to give way in the 1980s to Islamist. Neither term is necessarily pejorative, encompassing progressive activism and political manouvering. At the same time, both terms are largely inventions of the Western academy and are generally
Islamic states with a Sharia base have existed from the foundation of the faith but modern attempts to initiate or re-impose such systems are often treated as a seperate, revivalist phenomenon. Activity in this regard ranges from Western labels (often of an academic origin) such as "fundamentalist", "extremist" or "Islamist"
Islamic terrorists claim they are defending Islam and the Ummah (the Muslim community). Islamic terrorists also claim that their aggression is in retaliation for putative Israeli and the American aggression against Muslims.
The members of some groups are more likely to see themselves as freedom fighters rather than terrorists, as the political origins of such groups in Israel/Palestine, Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, Chechnya and most recently post-Saddam Iraq are often connected to demands for statehood and nationalist self-determination. Opponents of this view claim that it is wrong to kill civilians to further a political cause.
In an interview with The American Conservative magazine, Robert Pape, author of the book Dying to Win, said "The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign — over 95 percent of all the incidents — has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw." [1]
Some supporters of Palestinian terrorism have claimed that citizens of Israel are legitimate military targets because Jewish adolescents are required by law to serve in the country's military. Other writers have cited Islamic scriptures as justification for killing Jews and Christians. [www.israelnewsagency.com/al-quaedaterrorismus10012.html] This justification does not address the killing of innocent Muslims from extremist Islamic terrorism.
Islamist ideology, specifically of the militant breed, often positions itself in opposition to Western society. The United States, specifically, is greatly opposed by most Islamist terrorists, scholars, and leaders. In addition to criticizing the United States for what they see as immoral secularism, many Islamists claim that Western society is actively anti-Islamic. The cultural products of western societies, and specifically of the United States, are often criticized by Islamists for the same reasons.
The lack of authoritarian restrictions on free speech is a common Islamist criticism of western democracies. Islamists have claimed that such unrestricted free speech has led to the proliferation of pornography, immorality, secularism, homosexuality, feminism, and many other ideas that Islamists often oppose.
Islamists are often opposed to the (practitioners of) Christianity and Judaism. Some Islamists identify what they see as a historical struggle between Christianity and Islam, dating back as far as the Crusades, among other historical conflicts between practitioners of the two respective religions. Many of the existent Islamist terrorism groups have as their central cause a Jihad (holy war) against Christians and Jews. An example is Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda, which is also known as 'International Islamic Front for Jihad Against the Jews and Crusaders'. Most militant Islamists oppose Israel's policies, and often its existence.