Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization

by Reza Aslan

Indeed, when it comes to dealing with a social movement, society has only two options: either it can address the members’ grievances, thereby making the movement irrelevant, or it can deflect those grievances and further radicalize the movement.

It is ironic that the bulk of European governments’ antiradicalization efforts has been focused, almost myopically, on mosque surveillance—since 2002, the German police have raided more than three hundred mosques, with little to show for their efforts than the resentment and distrust of Germany’s Muslim population—because Jihadists do not gather in mosques.

Because Jihadism cannot compete intellectually with the traditional ulama, it is compelled to deny the very authority upon which the law and practice of Islam are founded.

This subversive rejection of Islamic law and clerical precedent

in favor of a direct, unmediated experience of faith, in which every believer is an imam, is incredibly attractive, especially in Europe, where young Muslims are already distanced from the traditional institutional centers of their religion and w...

they form their collective identities in direct opposition to the formal religious authorities of their community. When it comes to religious instruction, they are mostly self-taught. They rarely understand Arabic, are not educated in Islamic law, and tend to be suspicious of those who do have Islamic credentials. They consider too much intellectualism as spoiling the emotional immediacy of their simple and unconditional faith.

(The official British inquiry into the 7/7 attacks concluded that there was little evidence that Khan, Tanweer, and Hussain were big Internet users.) That is because the overwhelming majority of participants in social movements comprise what sociologists refer to as “free riders”—people who share the movement’s grievances, who associate with the movement’s goals, and who have absorbed the movement’s symbols into their own identities, but who do not take part in the movement’s actions.

Theirs is a “pop-culture Jihadism,” akin to the radical student movements of the 1960s, the punk rock subculture of the late 1970s, or the grunge “anticulture” movement of the 1990s.

a great many of Europe’s young Muslims are becoming increasingly frustrated by what they consider to be unreasonable and inconsistent demands for them to fully subsume their Muslim identity into the national identities of their adopted countries.

nearly 80 percent of Muslims around the globe came to believe that the United States seeks to “weaken and divide the Islamic world,” while almost two thirds thought the purpose of the War on Terror is to “spread Christianity in the region.”

According to a 2006 poll by the

Pew Global Attitudes Project, 70 percent of Egyptians, 70 percent of Indonesians, 73 percent of Pakistanis, 85 percent of Jordanians, and 88 percent of Turks (all U.S. allies) held an unfavorable view of the United States.

If the War on Terror was meant to be an ideological battle for the hearts and minds of Muslims, there should no longer be any que...

was in Egypt, the cultural capital of the Arab world and the country in which Condoleezza Rice first announced the Bush Doctrine to the region, that the experiment in democracy promotion was most visibly put to the test.

The world held its breath, waiting for a cue from the United States as to how to respond, not just to Mubarak’s sudden crackdown but also to the sweeping political changes that were taking place throughout the region. There was, understandably, enormous apprehension on the part of leaders both in the United States and around the globe about recognizing militant groups such as Hamas and

Hizballah, whose ideological platforms so blatantly contradicted American interests in the region. However, there was also a sense that if the Muslim Brotherhood could succeed in transforming itself from an opposition movement into a political party, perhaps it could provide an example to other Islamist groups to put down their weapons and pick up ballots instead. The answer the world had been waiting for came with Secretary Rice’s subsequent visit to Cairo the following year, in 2006. Standing next to Mubarak, she praised him for his “democratic” reforms,

making no mention of either the canceled elections or the arrests of Mubarak’s opponents. Later, after Rice was already on her way back to Washington, Mubarak boasted that the secretary “didn’t bring up difficult issues or ask to change anything or to intervene in political reform…. She was convinced by the way that political reform and the implementation of democracy are being done in Egypt.” In fact, Rice had come to Cairo for only one purpose: to persuade Mu...

The message was clear. By refusing to engage the democratically elected leaders in Lebanon and Palestine, and by looking the other way as its allies in Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia reverted to their despotic behavior, the United States was telling the world that the promi...

As it turned out, this was precisely the message that Ayman Zawahiri had broadcast to the Muslim world in a videotaped speech lambasting the Muslim...

Islamist groups for trusting the United States in the first place and taking part in elections. “Anyone who calls for Islam while presenting [a system of] infidelity, such as democracy … is a kafir,” Zawahiri wrote in his widely circulated book, a critique of the Muslim Brotherhood entitled The Bitter Harvest: The Brotherhood in Sixty Years. “Wh...

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the experience of “democracy,” as...

promoted these past few years, has created widespread hostility throughout the Middle East not only toward the United States but toward democracy itself. The very word “democracy” has been tainted by the blatant hypocrisy and diplomatic bungling of the Bush administration; by the transformation of the War on Terror into a cosmic war; by the extent of anguish, misery, loss, and death that have resulted from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; by the bald violation of American values a...

come what may; by the unfulfilled aspirations for social and political reform in the Middle East. Indeed, for many in the region, democracy has become a byword for chaos and confli...

he barely made mention of democracy and had very little to offer beyond the barest of platitudes for the one issue that poll after poll in nearly every Muslim majority state indicates is the biggest concern of Muslims: the lack of political rights.

on this one issue, President Bush was right: only through genuine democratic reform can the appeal of extremist groups be undermined and the tide of Muslim militancy stemmed.

It will require vigorous and sustained pressure on U.S. allies in the region (that is, those nations that receive billions of American dollars in economic and military aid every year) to concede to the growing demands of their populations for a voice in government, to put a stop to arbitrary imprisonments and the silencing of

political opponents, and to allow for greater political participation, especially by religious nationalist groups that are willing...

the solution to peace and prosperity in the region remains more democracy, not less.

when peaceful voices are silenced, violence becomes the sole source of political expression.

Jihadists view political participation as an act of apostasy, Islamist parties throughout the Middle East have shown that, given firm political rules to abide by and a fair chance to govern, they can evolve into responsible political actors committed to democratic ideals of human rights, women’s rights, government accountability, the rule of law, pluralism, and judicial reform.