Warning: For the purposes of this report, which is pedagogical in essence and which is addressed to readers who do not necessarily need to go into historical details, the issue of categorizing what is commonly referred to as Islamic extremism has been oversimplified.
Although it is not the purpose of this report to situate what is referred to as Islamic extremism within the global and international revival trend of national extremism, it has to be stressed from the onset that no analysis of the phenomenon will be meaningful unless it is framed within this trend. In fact, in Europe, in the USA, in Asia, in the Middle East including Israel of course, and everywhere else, political extremism has been gaining ground. In all these parts of the world it has also taken fanatical religious forms.
As to what is referred to as Islamic extremism, it can be broken up into two major categories in Europe each corresponding to different origins. The first category is remote controlled and is made to serve foreign and global interests of some Islamic movement. The second category is home-grown and may be said to be the political expression of the dissatisfaction of some Muslim communities, especially youth, with their lot in the very countries in which they were born and bred. The latter category has, however, in many cases fallen under the influence and manipulation of activist ideologists of the first category.
In fact, many European-born Muslims have been recuperated by global extremism essentially because of the misery of the Islamic education they got in some mosques and through some widespread literature which has been targeting them for the last few years, especially after the US troops have entered Saudi Arabia after the break out of the first Gulf war and the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. Both categories have, however, been brought into play to add weight and pressure on the decision making processes in various political, economic, geo-strategic, ideological and social crises both in the West and in countries of an Islamic tradition.
Because no appropriate Islamic education is provided in European countries to young Muslims and to Muslim children, extremist Imams with political agendas took over the task and oriented them to schools in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other countries where they were not taught only perverted versions of Islam but also how to manipulate weapons and plastic and how to wage street terrorist acts. Because faulty focuses have been made in religious education in countries of Islamic tradition and because the interpretation of the founding texts and exegesis were made the exclusivity either of an institutionalized clergy or left within the hands of some self-declared clerks, biased versions of Islam developed to comfort and to justify political models and actions.
Further, because the political performance of some Islamic parties was denied by the invalidation of democratically won elections (Algeria, for example), the myth of democratic alternatives in non Western countries was wiped out. When populations grew dissatisfied with these political actions and models, other ones were sought in the founding texts. Some of these turned out to be more fundamentalist than others.
Much of the Islamic education youth get in such schools in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia averred to be based on the idea that the rest of the world despises them, hates them and seeks opportunities to humiliate them and to alienate the rights of their countries of origin. Illustrations to support these ideas are easily found in the type of involvement of Western countries in the internal and regional economic, political and cultural affairs of Islamic countries as well as in the double standards in the global behavior of the West towards democratic experiences of the rest of the World. In fact, the chronic support of the USA to the State of Israel, the denial to the Palestinian people of the right to defend itself and to bear arms to recuperate its territories, the intervention of the West in Afghanistan, the presence of the US army in Saudi Arabia which many Muslims perceived as the worst form of humiliation and of spoliation, the Iraq wars, the wars of Chechnya, the threats to Yemen, to the Sudan and such other actions all contributed in developing strong and bitter feelings against the West and especially against the USA. Likewise, the insistence of the USA and other Western countries to export their own political and socio-economic and cultural models and to impose them on the rest of the world has further intensified these feelings. These different forms of intervention in the internal affairs of Islamic peoples are everywhere perceived as imperialistic hegemony that has to be stood against and removed. Various forms of resistance, among which religious fundamentalism, developed simultaneously everywhere there are Muslims. Later, these resistance movements developed coordination mechanisms and eventually unified as they radicalized especially since 1996. It is at this period that non Arab fighter organizations such as the Uzbek, Eastern Turkistan and Turkish and Kurd fighters organized themselves respectively under the leadership (emirate) of Tahir Khan and Mohamed Turkistani. It is also at this time that Bin Laden, Abu-Abdallah Es-sadeq (Lybia), Abu Abdellah Echarif (Morocco), Ayman Dhawahiri (Egypt), Abu-Mesaab Zerqaoui (Palestine) and others rose fighting groups throughout the Arab region and paid allegiance to Mullah Mohamed Umar. These groups meant to oppose resistance to the regimes in power for their alleged betrayal of Islam and their coalition with the West and the USA.
The humiliation of occupation has brought Muslims from all parts of the world to Iraq. Muslims from Arab countries, from all European countries, from Asia and from the Americas joined – are joining – the fighters of freedom to remove the humiliation. Many of them desert the standing armies of their countries which they blame for not supporting an Islamic country. Many are willing to die as Kamikazes.
Extremist ideologists exacerbate feelings by the analyses they make of the social, cultural and economic situation of Muslims in Western countries. These analyses present Muslims as an excluded group pushed to live at the margin of society and as second or third class citizens. These analyses further exacerbate the gaps between Western culture and ways of life and those of the countries of origin of Muslims in those countries. They convince Youth that being French born, Dutch born or British born should not mean giving up the customs and ways of life of one’s ancestors. Conflict is thus created and cultivated to points that make any dialogue or any rational assessment of situations impossible. The only alternative that these youth are given is to oppose violence both to their own countries of birth and to their countries of origin. This is how you end up having British born citizens staging terrorist acts against their own countrymen, for example!
This category of extremism is comforted by the attitudes of many Western political leaders, political analysts and advisors and sociologists who have failed to listen, to hear and to understand the many calls and cries of despair of Muslim Western born youth who did try to express themselves peacefully by marching against some political decisions of their governments, by requesting more integration and more social equity and justice and by founding specific trends in the various forms of art and means of collective communication and expression. If there were answers to their requests, they did not hear them. Worse, every time there were movements requesting some sort of dialogue, governments had talks with people who did not really represent youth and those who had or thought had reason to be discontented.
Such responses of governments confirmed to the discontented Muslim youth that there was not any true policy – or intention – to have them integrated in mainstream Western culture and that what was meant by integration was actually keeping them separated from the rest of the population living in the ghettos that had been set up for them since their grand or grand-grand fathers were brought to the West.
The case is therefore complex and multifold. The complexity of the case encompasses:
1 – the foreign policies of powerful Western countries that seek to establish a new international law that would remove the equality standards on which the UN has been operating since its creation,
2 – the type of social integration policies and communication strategies which Western countries propose to immigrants and to the Western born generations of the sons and daughters of immigrants. In fact, these strategies failed to create the conditions for the satisfaction of the psychological, emotional, cultural, political, social and economic needs and aspirations of these populations. The failure has resulted in severe disappointments and disillusionments which extremist ideologies knew how to exploit. The communication insensitivity of key political figures who talk of “crusades” and of “evil ideologies”, when talking of Islam further gapped the schism which extremists wanted to create and furthered difficulties to install a true dialogue among various groups involved,
3 – the violence of the procedures through which economic, cultural and political Western globalization is being enforced upon non Western countries and non Judeo-Christian communities,
4 – devious understandings of Islam and selective readings based on misquotations, reductions and misinterpretations of Islamic scriptures which some self declared clerics are imposing on Muslims,
5 – the competition among some internal ideological forces within the Arab-Islamic spheres which seek economic and political domination and leadership over Arab and Islamic countries, and finally
6 – the end of the polarity of Western ideologies through which the world was halved into satellites of US or USSR obedience.
Whose responsibility is this all, then?
It is everyone’s. It is Arab and Muslim countries’ who have failed to insure freedom of speech, democratic rule, economic equal opportunity, respect of ethnic diversity and universal education to all.
The responsibility is also Western countries’ who have failed to establish appropriate communication channels to link up Westerners and immigrants of all origins.
The responsibility is also that of the intellectuals and the intelligentsia of the world – Western, Arab and Muslim alike – when they failed to create observatories to check the rise of various forms of extremism and oppose to them appropriate social models and coherent, credible and powerful discourses.
The responsibility lies also with political and union organizations which failed to involve youth in politics, to educate them in true democratic culture, and to equip them against extremist indoctrination and recruitment.
Theologians, both Muslims and Judeo-Christians are also responsible because – in best cases – they have failed to understand the aims of fundamentalist ideologies which generated extremist political action and – in worst cases – they nurtured and cultivated feelings of hatred, xenophobia, ethnocentrism and self-righteousness.
And finally, the responsibility lies within what is perceived by Arab and Muslim populations as a double standard in the discourse and in the policies adopted and promoted in international relations by leading Western democracies.
The responsibility being therefore shared, the search for and implementation of solutions should therefore also be a shared responsibility.
To read the first chapter click here. To read the second Chapter Click here.
The book, Reflections on the formation of Western opinions, stereotypes and attitudes about Islam and Arabs, published in 2005 is based on a series of reports on Cross Culture seminars the author had conducted at LangCom during academic year 2004-2005. Over two hundred participants from various American universities and many Moroccan university students and English language teacher trainees from ENS Rabat took part in these seminars.
The seminars were a rare opportunity for both Moroccan and American participants to exchange ideas, opinions and attitudes about Islam, Arabism, and the various stereotypes that have come to be associated with them especially after the 9/11 aftermath and the two Gulf wars. They have also been an exceptional occasion for the participants to share thoughts and feelings about the various concepts associated with globalization, westernization and the new challenges of the communication era. The chapters are thus to be read as reports of these seminars.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Morocco World News’ editorial policy
