Militant Islam

Militant Islam is a contentious term, often used by Western political commentators to describe the ideologies of groups viewed as participating in Islamic terrorism. In fact, these two terms share many of the same shortcomings. Muslims opposed to violent political agitation, and especially liberal movements within Islam, find their implicit association of Islam with militancy and aggression to be unacceptable. However, the term has been used so widely in the print and broadcast media that some elaboration of it is necessary.

Related Topics:
Islamic terrorism - Muslims - Liberal movements within Islam - Islam

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Groups advocating Islam as a political movement are invariably responding to complex political and historical situations, usually with deep roots in the local environment. For example, the rise of the conservative Jamaat-e-Islami party in Bangladesh would not have been possible without widespread public reaction against the corruption of the secular Awami League government in that country. But this complex local political history is completely lost in the simplistic reductionism of terms like Muslim fundamentalism, which ultimately explains little by blaming a multitude of problems common to less developed countries (including violence and lack of democracy) on religion.

Related Topics:
Islam as a political movement - Jamaat-e-Islami - Bangladesh - Awami League - Muslim fundamentalism

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In fact, the application of the term Islamic militancy is so broad that it encompasses any kind of revolutionary movement in any Islamic country. Invariably, this means that it lumps together such a variety of nationalist, marxist and ethnic movements that it has no longer has any real ideological content. The only defining characteristic it has is that it is militarism in a Muslim context; the problem is that this explains very little.

Related Topics:
Nationalist - Marxist - Ethnic

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The members of such groups are more likely to see themselves as freedom fighters rather than terrorists, as the political origins of such groups in Israel and Palestine, Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, Chechnya and most recently post-Saddam Iraq are often rooted in political demands for statehood and nationalist self-determination. In Muslim majority societies, these nationalist sentiments invariably are mixed with a feeling of Muslim identity, and this produces the ideology of pan-Islamism or Islamism. The most international of these groups, Al-Qaida also has its origins in a particular nationalist struggle; namely, rebellion against the royal family of Saudi Arabia. The Saudi regime is perceived as being too closely associated with American foreign policy, particularly through its support of the US liberation of Kuwait during the first Gulf War. Since Al-Qaida's ideology is one of pan-Islamic nationalism and solidarity, the Saudi regime was thereafter seen as insufficiently Islamic; although such a view is bewildering to Westerners, who cannot imagine anything more 'Islamic' than the country's Wahhabi brand of Islamic law. To Al-Qaida in particular, the world is viewed as a struggle between their Islamic ideology and a secular Western ideology. Some observers suggest that this view of the world has, ironically, been strengthened by the War on Terror.

Related Topics:
Freedom fighters - Terrorists - Israel - Palestine - Afghanistan - Chechnya - Iraq - Pan-Islamism - Islamism - Al-Qaida - Saudi Arabia - Kuwait - Wahhabi - War on Terror

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