Islam and Political Violence: Muslim Diaspora and Radicalism in the West
Shahram Akbarzadeh
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 1848851979
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
How do we engage with the pressing challenges of xenophobia, radicalism and security in the current political climate? The widely felt sense of insecurity in the West is shared by Muslims both within and outside Western societies. Growing Islamic militancy and the subsequent increased security measures by Western powers have contributed to a pervasive sense among Muslims of being under attack both physically and culturally. Islam and Political Violence brings together current debates on the uneasy and potentially mutually destructive relationship between the Muslim world and the West and argues that we are on a dangerous trajectory, strengthening dichotomous notions of the divide between the West and the Muslim world.
defeat the extremists alone … It will take the cooperation of many nations to stop the proliferation of dangerous weapons … and it surely takes a community of nations to gather intelligence about extremist networks, to break up financial support lines, or to apprehend suspected terrorists.6 Rumsfeld had appealed to America’s Europeans allies, many of which have remained highly critical of the US-led invasion of Iraq and the Bush Administration’s unilateralist tendencies, to help the US to achieve
no solution to this problem since most religious groups encourage or prescribe intrafaith marriages. Issues surrounding gender equality, inter-communal marriage, female education, the veil, seclusion, cliterectomy and circumcision remain the most divisive aspects of the debate about multiculturalism. This conflict which is not just about Islam, but about all faith-based communities, is actually getting worse rather than better as religion becomes increasingly the basis of modern identity and the
Islam/Muslim refers to a diversity of identities and social entities amongst Muslim minorities in the West. 114 ISLAM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE Roy emphasises the experience of becoming a socially marginalised Muslim minority in the West, as an important factor in what he describes as ‘de-culturalisation’ of Muslims in the West. By ‘de-culturalism’ Roy means the loss of Islam’s social context and thereby its social authority in the West. Thus despite the best efforts of first generation Muslim
respondents were asked the following question: ‘Is war is justified when other ways of settling international disputes fail?’ The results of the survey, reported in Table 3, show an interesting divide among Muslim countries. The agreement rates in the four South Asian and the Middle Eastern countries ranged from 58 per cent in Iran to 63 per cent in Egypt and 66 per cent in Pakistan and Turkey. The agreement rates for the respondents in the two Southeast Asian Muslim countries, namely Indonesia
began to reshape the basis of all the federated states. At the end of 1990, and again in 1992, Milosevic was reinstalled as president of the Serbian Republic. Kosovar Albanians largely boycotted the elections amidst the increasing furore of nationalism resulting from the collapse of communism, which also saw Slovenia and the Croatia elect nationalist leaders. The eight-member Presidency of Socialist Yugoslavia tended to support Milosevic’s ideas, but stalemates were common. In mid-June 1991,