Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization

by Reza Aslan

an uncompromising belief in the infallible, inerrant, and absolutely liter...

Fundamentalists regarded the Bible as one sustained historical narrative—from the creation of the world to its imminent destruction—in which every single word ...

In other words, not only is the Bible without error, but its myths and fables must be...

Ultimately, the term “evangelical” is a self-designation, one that, according to polls conducted by Gallup and the Princeton Religion Research Center, more than a third of all Americans apply to themselves.

There are, however, a few common traits that unite this kaleidoscopic collection of Christians under a single collective identity. The first is an uncompromising adherence to a set of fundamental doctrines that include belief in the literalism and inerrancy of the Bible; emphasis on an unmediated

relationship with Jesus Christ; a zealous devotion to the conversion of others; and a cosmic worldview in which, to quote George Marsden, “the universe is divided into two—the moral a...

Just as vital to the vigor of the evangelical movement in America is its fervent religious nationalism—the conviction that the United States is “a Christian nation,” appointed by God to establish

Christian values throughout the rest of the world.

the United States’ conduct in both Iraq and Afghanistan—the evangelizing soldiers, the humiliation of Muslim prisoners forced under torture to eat pork and curse Muhammad, the Crusader rhetoric of the military officers and political leaders—has not only validated the Jihadist

argument that these wars are “a new Crusader campaign for the Islamic world” conducted by “the Devil’s army,” it has provided Jihadists with the opportunity to successfully present themselves as the last line of defense against the forces that seek to “annihilate Islam.”

In Jihadism, however, both words have been stripped of their historical context, so that infidel has come to mean anyone who is not a Muslim, while hypocrite means any Muslim who is not a Jihadist.

Both groups are designated as “unbelievers;” both are marked for death.

Jihadism is a puritanical movement in the sense that its members consider themselves to be the only true Muslims. All other Muslims are impostors or apostates who must repent of...

As an exclusively Sunni movement, Jihadism reserves particular contempt for the Shi’a (approximately 15 to 20 percent of the Muslim world and centered around Iran, Iraq, and the Levant), whom the Jihadists regard not as Muslims but as rawafidah, or “rejectionist...

Jihadists refer to suicide terrorism as “martyrdom operations.” This is not a euphemism but an earnest attempt to infuse death with a sense of cosmic significance. It seems not to matter that, on the topic of suicide, the Qur’an is absolutely clear: “Do not kill yourself; if someone does so [God] shall cast him into Hell” (4:29–30). Nor does it seem important that countless sayings (Hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad refer to the gruesome punishment that awaits those who take their own lives: “Whoever purposely throws himself from a mountain and kills himself, he will forever be falling into the fire of Hell, wherein he will abide eternally; whoever drinks poison and kills himself with it, he will forever be carrying his poison in his hand and drinking it in the fire of Hell, wherein he will abide eternally; whoever kills himself with an iron weapon, will forever be carrying that weapon in his hand and stabbing his abdomen with it in the fire of Hell, wherein he will abide eternally.” The Qur’an is equally unambiguous in its injunction against killing women, children, the elderly, protected minorities, and, most significantly, other Muslims.

The truth is, there is no religious argument in Islam for the crime of murdering Muslim children at play. And so, for the most part, Jihadists do not bother making one. Instead, they put forth a simple proposition: The universe is divided into two. On one side are “the people of heaven;” on the other, “the people of hell.” There is no middle ground. If you are not on one side, then you are on the other. If you are not us, then you are them. If you are them, then it does not matter whether you are a soldier or not, a child or not, a Muslim or not. In a cosmic war one is either with God or against God. No one is innocent.

Over the centuries, numerous fatwas, or religious declarations, have been issued by Muslim clerics denouncing the practice of takfir as a usurpation of God’s judgment (the practice has no basis in the Qur’an). In 2005, one hundred seventy of the world’s leading clerics and religious scholars, representing every sect, schism, and school of law in Islam, gathered in Amman, Jordan, to issue a joint fatwa “to reaffirm that there is no [such thing as] takfir” and that no Muslim is allowed to label any other Muslim an apostate for any reason.

Practitioners of takfir usually justify the doctrine by referencing the writings of one of Islam’s most revered legal theorists, Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah. Born in 1263 C.E, ibn Taymiyyah is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest thinkers in Islamic history, a philosopher and theologian whose immense oeuvre—he wrote more than three hundred individual works—and famed piety led his disciples to give him the title of Shaykh al-Islam, an honor reserved only for the most supreme legal authorities.

Ibn Taymiyyah was reared in a family of prominent religious scholars. Both his father and his grandfather belonged to the Hanbali School of Law, the most conservative of the four schools in Sunni Islam (the other three are the Hanafi, the Maliki, and the Shafi’i). A diligent student who had memorized the Qur’an before he was nine years old, ibn Taymiyyah joined his father and grandfather as a Hanbali cleric at the astonishingly young age of nineteen—though, significantly, only after he had spent a number of years under the tutelage of major scholars from the other three schools of law, an unusual practice at the time, especially for someone from such an ultraconservative background.

Baghdad (the name means “the gift of God,” in Persian)

was the wealthiest and, with approximately one million inhabitants, most populous city in the world. It was also the most learned; it is said that every citizen in Baghdad was expected to know how to read and write. While Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, a steady stream of scholars and artisans from every corner of the world, of every religion and ethnicity, flowed into Baghdad to study medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and the arts. A corps of royal scribes worked day and night translating the accumulated knowledge of the Western world from Greek, Latin, Syriac, Sanskrit, and Persian into Arabic, the lingua franca of the arts and sciences.

texts were transferred from ancient scraps of parchment and papyrus onto fresh sheets of paper, made in Baghdad’s very own paper mill (the first paper mill in the world), and placed inside the legendary Library of Baghdad—known in Arabic as bayt al-hakma or “the House of Wisdom”—where they were preserved for future generations. (Were it not for the work of these scribes, the world might well have lost track of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Euclid, Plotinus, and the rest of the foundation of Western philosophy, much of which was translated into European languages from Arabic.) Algebra was invented in the Library of Baghdad; so was the...

In 1258, the Mongol army, led by Genghis’s grandson Hülegü Khan, arrived at the gates of Baghdad. As per Mongol custom, Hülegü sent an emissary to the Abbasid caliph, al-Mustasim, giving him the option of laying down his arms and surrendering the city. When the caliph refused, Hülegü’s army forced its way through Baghdad’s fortified walls and unleashed a brutal punishment upon its inhabitants. The Mongols burned everything. The books in the Library of Baghdad were flung into the Tigris, turning the waters black with ink. Al-Mustasim’s family was massacred, down to the last child. The caliph himself was wrapped in a rug and kicked to death. No one was spared. Hülegü’s army rounded up Baghdad’s scholars, scribes, and artisans and chopped off their heads. The bodies they left to be picked clean by the birds. The heads they piled into a giant pyramid in the center of the city. The stench of decay carried for miles. By the time the Mongols’ thirst for blood had been sated, Baghdad had been practically depopulated.

What made this fatwa extraordinary was that it violated the most basic tenet of Hanbali doctrine, established by the founder of the Hanbali school, Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780–855 C.E.), which stated that the leader of the Islamic state, whether a caliph, a sultan, or an imam, had been placed in his exalted position by God and thus had to be obeyed

regardless of his actions or his piety. “Jihad is valid with the imams, whether they act justly or evilly,” ibn Hanbal declared. “The Friday worship, the two Feasts, and the Pilgrimage (are observed) with [the sultans], even if they are not upright, just, and pious. Taxes are paid to [the caliphs], whether they deal justly or wickedly.” For ibn Hanbal, social order had to be maintained at all costs. No matter how “un-Islamic” the actions of a Muslim leader may appear, his rule must be followed. Ibn Taymiyyah disagreed with his master. To live freely and justly as Muslims required a leader

committed to Islamic guidance, he argued. If that leader failed in his duty to uphold Muslim principles and did not abide by Islamic law, then he was not really a Muslim but a kafir; his rule was invalid. Ibn Taymiyyah declared that it was incumbent upon all Muslims under the rule of an impious leader to rebel. Employing the practice of takfir, he even went so far as to argue that any Muslim who was willing to abide by the rule of the kafir leader was himself a kafir. There was precedent fo...

against the leadership of the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan. The Kharijites believed that the leader of the Muslim community must be blameless and without sin. He must exceed all other Muslims in his piety and learning; otherwise he had no right to lead the community and must be removed from power by any means necessary. Ibn Taymiyyah was certainly no Kharijite, but he agreed that it was the obligation...

He also drew inspiration from the Kharijites in p...

geographical division of the world into realms of belief (dar al-Islam) and unbelief (dar al-kufr), with the former in constant pursuit of the latter. But although he lived on the Anatolian frontier, where Christian and Muslim forces continued to clash with one another long after the Crusades had ceased, ibn Taymiyyah focused his attention strictly on the enemy living inside dar al-Islam—that is, on his fellow Muslims who did not adequately follow Islamic law; on those he co...

claiming to be Muslims were, in ibn Taymiyyah’s view, apostates against whom it was incumbent upon all Muslims to declare jihad. “To fight the Mongols who came to Syri...

Ibn Taymiyyah reconceptualized jihad as an “individual obligation” (fard ’ala l’ayn), overturning centuries of consensus among his fellow legal scholars that jihad must be a “collective obligation” (fard ’ala l-kifaya)—a defensive struggle against oppress...

Jihad, for ibn Ta...

was an offensive weapon that could be employed, on one’s own and without guidance, to propagate Islam, to purify it and make it ...

By the end of the fourteenth century, when the Ottomans began reclaiming Muslim lands from Mongol rule, the great Shaykh al-Islam had been more or less forgotten, until six hundred years later, in the tumultuous

political landscape of postcolonial Egypt, when ibn Taymiyyah’s stark division of the world into spheres of belief and unbelief, his bold use of takfir against the Muslim rulers of his day, and his elevation of jihad into a form of devotion was dramatically resurrected by a group of radical Islamists in an attempt to overthrow the Egyptian government and launch a revolution across the Arab world.

“The Neglected Duty” laid out, for the first time, the aspirations of the nascent Jihadist movement. Chief among these was the reestablishment of the Caliphate, which had been abolished after World War I by the founder of the modern secular state of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. For a great many Muslims, the destruction of the Caliphate had permanently fractured the worldwide community of faith, the ummah, which the Prophet Muhammad had established fourteen centuries before, into

competing nation-states. As Sayyid Qutb, perhaps the most influential of all Jihadist ideologues, claimed, with the end of the Caliphate, the Muslim community had essentially reverted to a state of jahaliyyah—the time of ignorance and idolatry that existed before the introduction to Islam.

The takfir ideology had been slowly spreading through the Jihadist camps like a virus, binding the various organizations together under a single collective identity and allowing them to divide the whole of the world into camps of belief (them) and unbelief (everyone else). Takfir became a tool to distinguish the Jihadist fighters from those they had left behind in their home countries: if you did not support the jihad in Afghanistan, you were a kafir; if you cooperated with Arab governments, you were a kafir; if you took religious advice from the clerical institutions, you were a kafir.

(The word “terrorism” is derived from the Latin terrere, which means “to make someone tremble.”)

These Muslim cosmic warriors legitimize their attacks against both military and civilian targets, against both Muslims and non-Muslims, by dividing the world into what bin

Laden calls “two separate camps, one of faith … and one of infidelity”: al-wala’ wal-bara’. They rely on the doctrine of takfir to justify the slaughter of women and children, the elderly and the ill.

whatever military success the United States and its allies have had in disrupting al-Qa’ida’s operations and destroying its cells has been hampered by the failure to recognize and confront the social movement—Jihadism—of which al-Qa’ida is merely the most militant manifestation.

Though the word “al-Qa’ida” is almost always rendered in English as “the base”—something concrete and conquerable, something that can be defended or assailed—“al-Qa’ida” more properly means “the rules” or

“the fundamentals” and is used by Arabic speakers primarily to refer to the basic teachings or creed of Islam.

The threat of terrorism from militant groups like al-Qa’ida may never fully dissipate. As is the case with any international criminal conspiracy, it may take years, perhaps decades, of cooperation among the military, intelligence, and diplomatic apparatuses of nation-states around the globe to

put an end to their activities.

But to adequately confront the social movement that Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri inspired a decade ago will require more than military might. It will require a deeper understanding of the social, political, and economic forces that have made Golbal Jihadism such an appealing phenomenon, particularly to Muslim youth. Whatever the War on Terror means, this is an ideological battle that will take place not in the streets of Baghdad or in the mountains of Afghanistan but in the suburbs of Paris, the slums of East London, and the cosmopolitan cities of Berlin and New York. It is a battle t...

Liberation Theology sought to redefine the Gospel story in purely sociopolitical terms, as a means of fighting back against the ruthless, U.S.-backed regimes in countries such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala. Yet when these regimes responded to the Liberation Theology movement with

indiscriminate and unrestrained state-sanctioned violence, when soldiers began raping and murdering nuns with impunity and executing priests during Mass, when it became clear that the international community would do nothing to curb the brutality (Ronald Reagan actively supported the actions of these regimes, calling Liberation Theology “a threat to U.S. national security”), the Christian revolutionaries felt they had no choice but to turn to violence themselves.

What ultimately led to the deradicalization of the Liberation Theology movement—or, for that matter, the environmental movement, the antiglobalization movement, the feminist movement, the black power movement, and so on—was the gradual co-option of their members’ grievances into mainstream society.