I want to commend you for arriving at the first sentence of this article. I have the distinct feeling that some of my readers may not want to open up this article, simply because of their discomfort around thinking deeply or forming a definite opinion about something attributed to a particular religion. Hopefully now that you’re here, I can get you to the last sentence as well.
I recognize this is a very complex and nuanced subject, but my intention for this article is to create a simple explanation about the historical and motivational underpinnings of Islamic extremism. I want to give you the opportunity, if you have not already done so, to have the temerity hold a solid, coherent opinion about it amid the prevalent risks of being accused of ‘Islamophobia’—one of the most successful catch-phrase psyops since the inception of the term ‘antisemitic.’
It is worth noting that the ruling class devotes a tremendous amount of time and energy—and money—to blur and obfuscate how we think about their tools of manipulation and domination. Islamic Extremism is indeed a major tool that is being used to shape geopolitical events and the perceptions we hold about them. It is funded and fostered in order to create large-scale division, war, and chaos. As we know, the ruling class’s prime directive is at play here: Ordo ab Chao, out of chaos comes order.
This is not to say that the ruling class invented or even fomented Islamic extremism in the beginning. In fact the ruling class invents very little, if anything. What they are very good at is infiltrating movements and collective ideologies that have amassed power in the world, whether well-intentioned or otherwise, in order to distort, manipulate and ultimately control them to serve their own purposes.
The Muslim Brotherhood
I believe it is fair to use the inception of the Muslim Brotherhood to give us a good grasp of the ideological roots of Islamic Extremism. The Muslim Brotherhood was started by Hassan Al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher and Islamic scholar who established the organization in March 1928 in the city of Ismailia, Egypt. Al-Banna created the group as an Islamic revivalist and social reform movement aimed at countering British imperial influence and the secularization of society. He championed the idea that Islam is not just a religion, but a comprehensive way of life that should govern all aspects of personal and political life through the implementation of Sharia (Islamic law).
It has been documented that Al-Banna was angered by the abolition of the Muslim Caliphate in Turkey in 1924. He was also none too pleased to see his Muslim brethren in Egypt beginning to embrace alcohol, dancing and going on cruises. What others around him saw as a rather natural evolution of their nation towards a more modern liberal/pluralistic society where the nation-state defined the rules without religious influence, Al-Banna saw as a degradation of Muslim society that desperately needed to be reversed. In fact, he believed that Islam should be aggressively promoted in non-Muslim countries all over the world.
Al-Banna’s vision that gave rise to the Muslim Brotherhood was that the Caliphate, a political state headed by a ‘caliph’—a religious leader who is considered a ‘successor’ of the Prophet Muhammad—would be re-established in Muslim states with the goal of eventually expanding from there. It must be noted that rather than having set, well-established borders like the nation-states we have today, the Caliphate was seen to have frontiers that could expand as the power and influence of the Caliphate expanded.
What is perhaps not widely known is the extent to which the Muslim Clerical establishment, as well as the Orders of Muslim mystics, rejected Al-Banna’s vision—not because they were against the expansion of Muslim influence in the world, but because they felt his words and actions did not reflect a deep understanding of Islam. Middle Eastern scholar Ed Husain, who himself was once an Islamic extremist and has now denounced all forms of extremism, paraphrases the response that Al-Banna received from them when he was on a mission to recruit them to his cause:
“You’re going to be dangerous, you’re too polarized, that is not the way of the prophet Mohammed. You’ve got to be calmer, you’ve got to accept reality for what it is, and change yourself first, and then change follows, and it’s not our business to confront America.”
Islam vs. Islamism
Now here is where I would like to make an important distinction. While Islam is a global religion practiced by over two billion people, Islamism is a political ideology that aims to use that religion to guide public laws, education, and government institutions. Estimates suggest that only about 10% to 15% of the world’s Muslims are Islamists. Further, only a small fraction of Islamists actually support any violence or extremism in the name of their religion.
If we look at Islam in terms of the majority who practice it across the world, we see exactly what we see in other religions and spiritual traditions: a particular paradigm that involves specific beliefs and practices that help the practitioner cultivate a relationship with the divine. By and large, I believe Muslims want to be free to practice their faith and are more than willing to afford that same freedom to followers of other religions and spiritual traditions. That is one reason they would want to live in pluralist Western nations rather than fundamentalist Muslim nations.
Broad and generalized anger and hatred towards Muslims by the native population in Western nations is comprehensible, but it is significantly misplaced. Mass Muslim immigration, a perceived gradual ‘shariafication’ in places like the UK, and examples of ‘tolerance’ from law enforcement and political figures towards Islamic violence and immoral behavior in Western countries is not to be blamed on everyday Muslims. It must be understood that the hidden hands of the ruling class are the mechanisms by which this is proliferating in some Western nations, in an intentional effort to destabilize the cohesion of nation states in order that they can maintain the power that has been slipping away from them in recent years.
Like any spiritual community, practitioners of Islam differ from person to person as to how they practice their faith and their duty in the world. Those whose beliefs rest on fear, ignorance and low self-esteem may ultimately seek to use their faith to gain some measure of control in the world where they have failed to find control over their own lives. That is the profile of those who would be lured by the distorted principles of Islamic Extremism that justify participation in works of violence in the name of Allah. Please be assured, the world does not have a problem with Islam, it only has a problem with those powerful few who would distort the principles of Islamic faith in order to convince naive, ignorant people that any act of violence against other human beings could be divinely ordained.
Afterword
This was a difficult article for me to write, and part of my motivation was a video I saw, promoted by a friend of mine, of a Western woman in the US shouting down two Muslim women, telling them to go back to their country, telling them she ‘knows why they are really there.’ The simple response from the Muslim women filming the scene was that they are nice people, and why would she have any problem with them. So I wrote this article to create a context by which I was helping to support the flow of love between Western people and Muslims, and alert people to the oft-promoted suggestion that Islam and violence go hand in hand. I would love to hear from my readers in the comments about whether this article succeeded in its mission.