Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization

by Reza Aslan

By transforming the countless cultures of the Arab and Muslim world—from Morocco to Malaysia—into a single, homogeneous, and historically inevitable enemy, the Clash of Civilizations, insofar as it has served as the ideological underpinning for the struggle against Jihadism, is a blatant assertion that the War on Terror is in fact a war against Islam. After all, this was never conceived of as a war against terrorism per se. If it were, it would have included the Basque separatists in Spain, the Christian insurgency in East Timor, the Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist rebels in eastern India, the Jewish Kach and Kahane underground in Israel, the Irish Republican Army, the Sikh separatists in the Punjab, the Marxist Mujahadin-e Khalq, the Kurdish PKK, and so on. Rather, this is a war against a particular brand of terrorism: that employed exclusively by Islamic entities, which is why the enemy in this ideological conflict gradually and systematically expanded to include not just the persons who attacked America on September 11, 2001, and the organizations that supported them, but also an ever-widening conspiracy of disparate groups such as Hamas in Palestine, Hizballah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the clerical regime in Iran, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Chechen rebels, the Kashmiri militants, the Taliban, and any other organization that declares itself Muslim and employs terrorism as a tactic.