Islamic terrorism
Islamic terrorism (also known as Islamist terrorism or radical Islamic terrorism) refers to terrorist acts with religious motivations carried out by fundamentalist militant Islamists and Islamic extremists.[1][2][3]
Incidents and fatalities from Islamic terrorism have been concentrated in eight Muslim-majority countries (Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, and Syria),[4] while four Islamic extremist groups (Islamic State, Boko Haram, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda) were responsible for 74% of all deaths from terrorism in 2015.[5][6] The annual number of fatalities from terrorist attacks grew sharply from 2011 to 2014 when it reached a peak of 33,438, before declining to 13,826 in 2019.[7]
Since at least the 1990s, these terrorist incidents have occurred on a global scale, affecting not only Muslim-majority countries in Africa and Asia, but also Russia, Australia, Canada, Israel, India, the United States, China, the Philippines, Thailand, and countries within Europe. Such attacks have targeted both Muslims and non-Muslims,[8] with one study finding 80% of terrorist victims to be Muslims.[9][10] Another study finds 90% of terrorist victims to be of the Muslim faith.[11] In a number of the worst-affected Muslim-majority regions, these terrorists have been met by armed, independent resistance groups,[12] state actors and their proxies, and elsewhere by condemnation by prominent Islamic figures.[13][14][15] Journalists have also become targets of Islamic terrorism, particularly for the depiction of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, with the Charlie Hebdo shooting being protested by millions in France.
Justifications given for attacks on civilians by Islamic extremist groups come from their interpretations of the Quran,[3] the hadith,[16][17] and sharia law.[3] These include retribution by armed jihad for the perceived injustices of unbelievers against Muslims;[18] the belief that the killing of many self-proclaimed Muslims is required because they have violated Islamic law and are disbelievers (takfir);[19] the overriding necessity of restoring and purifying Islam by establishing sharia law, especially by restoring the Caliphate as a pan-Islamic state (especially ISIS);[20] the glory and heavenly rewards of martyrdom;[17] the supremacy of Islam over all other religions.[Note 1]
The use of the phrase "Islamic terrorism" is disputed. In Western political speech, it has variously been called "counter-productive", "highly politicized, intellectually contestable" and "damaging to community relations", by those who disapprove of the characterization 'Islamic'.[23][24][25] It has been argued that "Islamic terrorism" is a misnomer for what should be called "Islamist terrorism".[26]
History
Pre-20th century
Others such as Ibn Warraq claim that from the beginning of Islam, "violent movements have arisen" such as the Kharijites,[32] Sahl ibn Salama, Barbahari, Kadizadeli movement, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, etc., "seeking to revive true Islam, which its members felt had been neglected in Muslim societies, who were not living up to the ideals of the earliest Muslims".[33] The 7th century Kharijites, according to some, started from an essentially political position but developed extreme doctrines that set them apart from both mainstream Sunni and Shi'a Muslims. The group was particularly noted for adopting a radical approach to takfir, whereby they declared Muslim opponents to be unbelievers and therefore worthy of death,[34] and also by their strong resemblance to contemporary ISIL.[35]
1960s–1970s
During the era of the anti-colonial struggle in North Africa and the Middle East, and coinciding with the creation of Israel in 1948, a series of Marxist-Leninist and anti-imperialist movements swept throughout the Arab and Islamic world. These movements were nationalist and revolutionary, but not Islamic. However, their view that terrorism could be effective in reaching their political goals generated the first phase of modern international terrorism. In the late 1960s, Palestinian secular movements such as Al Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) began to target civilians outside the immediate arena of conflict. Following Israel's victory over Arab forces in 1967, Palestinian leaders began to realize that the Arab world was unable to defeat Israel in the battlefield. At the same time, lessons drawn from the Jewish struggle against the British in Palestine and revolutionary movements across Latin America, North Africa and Southeast Asia, motivated the Palestinians to turn away from guerrilla warfare towards urban terrorism. These movements were secular in nature, though their international reach served to spread terrorist tactics worldwide.[36] Moreover, the Arab Cold War between mostly US-aligned conservative Islamic monarchies (Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan) and Soviet-aligned secular national-revolutionary governments (Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Libya, Iraq) inspired a growth of religiously motivated Islamic movements in the Middle East, supported by Saudi Arabia, which came into conflict with the predominant secular (Nasserist and Ba'athist) nationalist ideologies at the time.[36][37]
The book The Revolt by Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun militia and future Israeli Prime Minister, influenced both Carlos Marighella's urban guerrilla theory and Osama bin Laden's Islamist al-Qaeda organization.[38] Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman in the book Rise and Kill First asserted that Hezbollah's 1983 campaign of coordinated terrorist attacks against American, French and Israeli military installations in Beirut drew inspiration from and directly mirrored the Haganah's and Irgun's 1946 bombing campaign against the British: both succeeded in creating an atmosphere of widespread fear which eventually forced the enemy to withdraw.[39] Bergman further asserts that the influence of Israeli-sponsored terrorist operations on the emerging Islamists was also of operational nature: the Israeli proxy Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners had carried out multiple deadly truck bombings in Lebanon long before the emergence of Hezbollah. An Israeli Mossad agent told Bergman: "I saw from a distance one of the cars blowing up and demolishing an entire street. We were teaching the Lebanese how effective a car bomb could be. Everything that we saw later with Hezbollah sprang from what they saw had happened after these operations."[40]
The year 1979 is widely considered a turning point in the rise of religiously motivated radicalism in the Muslim world. Several events (the Soviet-Afghan War and unprecedented support from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the US for anti-Soviet jihadists; the Iranian Revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq War as well as Khomeini's active support for Shia groups resisting the Israeli occupation of Lebanon; the Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca and subsequent Wahhabization of the Saudi government; and the Egypt–Israel peace treaty that was highly unpopular in some sections of the Muslim world) are thought to be crucial for the proliferation of Islamist terrorism in the next decade.[41]
According to Bruce Hoffman of the RAND Corporation, in 1980, 2 out of 64 terrorist groups were categorized as having religious motivation while in 1995, almost half (26 out of 56) were religiously motivated with the majority having Islam as their guiding force.[42][36]
1980s–1990s
The Soviet–Afghan War and the subsequent anti-Soviet mujahedin war, lasting from 1979 to 1989, started the rise and expansion of terrorist groups. Since their beginning in 1994, the Pakistani-supported Taliban militia in Afghanistan has gained several characteristics traditionally associated with state-sponsors of terrorism, providing logistical support, travel documentation, and training facilities. Since 1989 the increasing willingness of religious extremists to strike targets outside immediate country or regional areas highlights the global nature of contemporary terrorism. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, are representative of this trend.[36]
2000s–2010s
According to research by the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, between 11 September 2001 and 21 April 2019, there were 31,221 Islamist terrorism attacks, in which at least 146,811 people were killed. Many of the victims were Muslims, including most of the victims who were killed in attacks involving 12 or more deaths.[43][44][45]
2010s
According to the Global Terrorism Index, deaths from terrorism peaked in 2014 and have fallen each year since then until 2019 (the last year the study had numbers for), making a decline of more than half (59% or 13,826 deaths) from their peak. The five countries "hardest hit" by terrorism continue to be Muslims countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria and Somalia. [Note 2]
Refutations, criticisms and explanations for decline
Refuting Islamic terrorism
Along with explaining Islamic terrorism, many observers have attempted to point out their inconsistencies and the flaws in their arguments, often suggesting means of de-motivating potential terrorists.
Princeton University Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis argues that although bin Laden and other radical Islamists claim they are fighting to restore shariah law to the Muslim world, their attacks on civilians violate the classical form of that Islamic jurisprudence. The "classical jurists of Islam never remotely considered [jihad] the kind of unprovoked, unannounced mass slaughter of uninvolved civil populations".[230] In regard to the September 11 attacks Lewis noted,
Similarly, Timothy Winter writes that the proclamations of bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri "ignore 14 centuries of Muslim scholarship", and that if they "followed the norms of their religion, they would have had to acknowledge that no school of mainstream Islam allows the targeting of civilians."[234]
Researcher Donald Holbrook notes that while many jihadists quote the beginning of the famous sword verse (or ayah):
... they fail to quote and discuss limiting factors that follow,
showing how they are (Holbrook argues) "shamelessly selective in order to serve their propaganda objectives."[16]
The scholarly credentials of the ideologues of extremism are also "questionable".[47] Dale C. Eikmeier notes
Michael Sells and Jane I. Smith (a professor of Islamic Studies) write that barring some extremists like al-Qaeda, most Muslims do not interpret Qur'anic verses as promoting warfare today but rather as reflecting historical contexts.[235][236] According to Sells, most Muslims "no more expect to apply" the verses at issue "to their contemporary non-Muslim friends and neighbors than most Christians and Jews consider themselves commanded by God, like the Biblical Joshua, to exterminate the infidels."[235]
In his book No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, Iranian-American academic Reza Aslan argues that there is an internal battle currently taking place within Islam between individualistic reform ideals and the traditional authority of Muslim clerics.[237] The struggle is similar to that of the 16th-century reformation in Christianity, and in fact is happening when the religion of Islam is as "old" as Christianity was at the time of its reformation.[238] Aslan argues that "the notion that historical context should play no role in the interpretation of the Koran—that what applied to Muhammad's community applies to all Muslim communities for all time—is simply an untenable position in every sense."[239]
Despite their proclaimed devotion to the virtue of Sharia law, Jihadists have not always avoided association with the pornography of the despised West. The Times (London) newspaper has pointed out that Jihadists were discovered by one source to have sought anonymity through some of the same dark networks used to distribute child pornography—quite ironic given their proclaimed piety.[240] Similarly, Reuters news agency reported that pornography was found among the materials seized from Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound that was raided by U.S. Navy SEALs.[241]
Despite the fact that a founding principle of modern violent jihad is the defense of Islam and Muslims, most victims of attacks by Islamic terrorism ("the vast majority" according to one source—J.J. Goldberg)[242] are self-proclaimed Muslims. Many if not all Salafi-Jihadi groups practice takfir—i.e. proclaim that some self-proclaimed Muslims (especially government officials and security personnel) are actually apostates deserving of death.
Furthermore, the more learned salafi-jihadi thinkers and leaders are (and were), the more reluctance they are/were to embrace takfir (according to a study by Shane Drennan).[243] The late Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, "the godfather of the Afghan jihad", for example, was an Islamic scholar and university professor who avoided takfir and preached unity in the ummah (Muslim community). The Islamic education of Al-Qaeda's number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was early and much more informal—he was not a trained scholar—and al-Zawahiri expanded the definition of kafir to include many self-proclaimed Muslims. He has maintained that civilian government employees of Muslim states, security forces and any persons collaborating or engaging with these groups are apostates, for example.[243]
Two extreme takfiris -- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Sunni jihadist leader in Iraq, and Djamel Zitouni, leader of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA) during the Algerian civil war—had even broader definitions of apostasy and less religious knowledge. Al-Zarqawi was a petty criminal who had no religious training until he was 22 and limited training thereafter. Famous for bombing targets other jihadis thought off limits,[244] his definition of apostates included all Shia Muslims and "anyone violating his organization's interpretation of Shari'a".[243] Djamel Zitouni was the son of a chicken farmer with little Islamic education. He famously expanded the GIA's definition of apostate until he concluded the whole of Algerian society outside of the GIA "had left Islam". His attacks led to the deaths of thousands of Algerian civilians.[243]
Evidence that more religious training may lead to less extremism has been found in Egypt. That country's largest radical Islamic group, al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya — which killed at least 796 Egyptian policemen and soldiers from 1992 to 1998 — renounced bloodshed in 2003 in a deal with the Egyptian government where a series of high-ranking members were released (as of 2009 "the group has perpetrated no new terrorist acts"). A second group Egyptian Islamic Jihad made a similar agreement in 2007. Preceding the agreements was program where Muslim scholars debated with imprisoned group leaders arguing that true Islam did not support terrorism.[245]