Roots Of Religious Extremism, The: Understanding The Salafi Doctrine Of Al-wala' Wal Bara'

Roots Of Religious Extremism, The: Understanding The Salafi Doctrine Of Al-wala' Wal Bara' PDF Author: Bin Ali Mohamed
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 1783263946
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
One of the issues in contemporary Islamic thought which has attracted considerable attention amongst Muslim scholars and within the Muslim community is the valid and appropriate attitude of Muslims to relationships with non-Muslims. A major source of confusion and controversy with regards to this relationship comes from the allegation that Muslims must reserve their love and loyalty for fellow Muslims, and reject and declare war on the rest of humanity — most acutely seen through the Islamic concept of Al-Wala' wal Bara' (WB) translated as “Loyalty and Disavowal”, which appears to be central in the ideology of modern Salafism.This book investigates the dynamics and complexities of the concept of WB within modern Salafism and aims to understand the diverse interpretation of this concept; and how modern Salafis understand and apply the concept in contemporary religious, social and political settings. The book discovers that the complexities, diversities and disputes surrounding the concept in modern Salafism often revolve around issues of social, political and current realities.The significance of this book lies in the fact that comprehending modern Salafis' conception of WB, its realities and complexities has become an urgent priority in the lives of Muslims today.

Roots Of Religious Extremism, The: Understanding The Salafi Doctrine Of Al-wala' Wal Bara'

Roots Of Religious Extremism, The: Understanding The Salafi Doctrine Of Al-wala' Wal Bara' PDF Author: Bin Ali Mohamed
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 1783263946
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
One of the issues in contemporary Islamic thought which has attracted considerable attention amongst Muslim scholars and within the Muslim community is the valid and appropriate attitude of Muslims to relationships with non-Muslims. A major source of confusion and controversy with regards to this relationship comes from the allegation that Muslims must reserve their love and loyalty for fellow Muslims, and reject and declare war on the rest of humanity — most acutely seen through the Islamic concept of Al-Wala' wal Bara' (WB) translated as “Loyalty and Disavowal”, which appears to be central in the ideology of modern Salafism.This book investigates the dynamics and complexities of the concept of WB within modern Salafism and aims to understand the diverse interpretation of this concept; and how modern Salafis understand and apply the concept in contemporary religious, social and political settings. The book discovers that the complexities, diversities and disputes surrounding the concept in modern Salafism often revolve around issues of social, political and current realities.The significance of this book lies in the fact that comprehending modern Salafis' conception of WB, its realities and complexities has become an urgent priority in the lives of Muslims today.

Bad Faith

Bad Faith PDF Author: Neil J. Kressel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This book journeys to the heart of religious extremism and analyzes the nature of religious militancy. Kressel, who has spent decades researching genocide, terrorism, and anti-Semitism, brings to bear the insights of psychology and social science on this significant and critical problem.

The Roots of Religious Extremism

The Roots of Religious Extremism PDF Author: Mohamed Bin Ali
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781783263929
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
One of the issues in contemporary Islamic thought which has attracted considerable attention amongst Muslim scholars and within the Muslim community is the valid and appropriate attitude of Muslims to relationships with non-Muslims. A major source of confusion and controversy with regards to this relationship comes from the allegation that Muslims must reserve their love and loyalty for fellow Muslims and reject and declare war on the rest of humanity most acutely seen through the Islamic concept of Al-Wala' wal Bara' (WB) translated as "Loyalty and Disavowal," which appears to be central in the ideology of modern Salafism. This book investigates the dynamics and complexities of the concept of WB within modern Salafism and aims to understand the diverse interpretation of this concept; and how modern Salafis understand and apply the concept in contemporary religious, social and political settings. The book discovers that the complexities, diversities and disputes surrounding the concept in modern Salafism often revolve around issues of social, political and current realities. The significance of this book lies in the fact that comprehending modern Salafis' conception of WB, its realities and complexities has become an urgent priority in the lives of Muslims today.

The Root Causes of Terrorism

The Root Causes of Terrorism PDF Author: Mahmoud Masaeli
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443869317
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Fifteen years after the tragic events of 9/11, bombs are still exploding and innocent people are being killed by terrorist groups in both western and Islamic societies. Most of these sinisterly threatening events are motivated by religious claims, or are taking place in religiously affected places. Is religion the main cause of terrorism, or does terrorism still arise because of leaders who brainwash and coach future terrorists so that they kill under the banner of religion? The religious imagination seems to hold here an influential power in the creation of ‘delusion’ to orient the ‘bigot’ believers toward fulfilling their religious duty against those who are religious in a different way or are not religious at all. Religion, in this sense, is tightly allied with political aspirations. In spite of the religious justification of the act of killing, ‘enlightened’ religious leaders and religious-minded people believe and argue that religion is a source of love and affection. Therefore, the sacred texts of religious tradition must be read from a ‘humanist’ perspective because the ultimate message of religion is about the appreciation of the principle of humanity. This is a growing attitude among many religious people today who believe that God is merciful and compassionate, and never orders resentment, violence, and killing of innocent people. In addition, no true religious tradition appreciates self-serving interpretations promoting violence against others. If religion disregards love, affection, and compassion as its essence, it drops into the dire vortex of ideological dogma, as it is in the case for the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, and Al-Shabab. Therefore, any interpretation that admits violence and killing would be a mere provincial reading of the religious texts agitated by purposeful intentions aimed at political goals. This book investigates and addresses the root causes of terrorism from a religious studies perspective. The themes analysed and discussed here mainly include a range of religious and philosophical issues such as religious violence in scriptural monotheism, radical interpretations of religious texts, militancy and sacrifice, apocalypticism and terrorism, and religious terrorism today. The book brings together new approaches adopted by the authors to not only trace the causes of terrorism in various religious interpretations and realms, but also reach a common definition of the main religious causes beyond diverse perspectives, and advance solutions against religious-inspired terrorism.

The Roots of Violence

The Roots of Violence PDF Author: Andreas Aceranti
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781719828741
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 103

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Book Description
We have tried to explain the terrorist events of the last few years.So much hate and violence disguised as a religious war.We can think of these terrorists as well as the poor, both culturally and economically, forced to the margins of society, with nothing to lose.But this is not the case: often they are young, rich, healthy, with a job, a future. We need another explanation for these gestures, something is missing in our reasoning.The common denominator of the attackers is faith, religion.The monotheistic religions of Judeo-Christian-Islamic matrix derive part of their cohesive strength from contempt for other religions.We asked ourselves, these fundamentalists, religious extremists, who have a strong faith: do they also have a strong moral conscience?The questions that arise are multiple:what we mean by respect for life; for the moral conscience;are people of faith responsible for their actions?Does religion lead us to ignore the contempt we feel for other religions?The term "Terrorism" comes from the French Terrorisme, which defined the regime of terror during the French Revolution (1789-1799) with a connotation totally different from that we use today. It was used in 1937 by the League of Nations to define "criminal acts directed against a state and whose ends or whose nature is apt to cause terror to certain personalities, groups of people or the public". According to the US Department of Defense the term refers to: "a calculated use of illegal violence or threats to incite terror, with the intent of forcing or intimidating governments or corporations in pursuit of objectives that are generally political, religious or ideological". The definition we find today in dictionaries defines Terrorism as a method of violent struggle, with which one tries to subvert the political and social order of a given government.However, this only explains the meaning of the word itself, in fact terrorism is much more than a simple definition. Terrorism is an existing reality, but also imaginary and collective. The aim of those who terrorism is to destroy any sensitive objectives such as: political representatives, religious, symbols or buildings of major importance, populations and ethnic groups, to stop revolutionary and protesting movements. Terror represents the extreme form of fear. Terror is its strong point, in fact, an act of violence with terrorist purpose, as well as causing numerous victims, aims primarily to instill fear to those who are spectators of these events (the fear that the event may be repeated). Often the attacks are spectacular events: the use of bombs, vehicles, heavy weapons, the fulfillment of these in very crowded places, are all tactics to get maximum visibility. Such events attract the attention of the media and politicians who for personal interests contribute, with the often-erroneous disclosure of the news, to publicize the work of the bombers disseminating the messages and threats that accompany every terrorist act.To talk about terrorism, it is necessary that there are some characteristics that are present at the same time:1. presupposes the spectacularization of pain and therefore presupposes a public dimension that is expressed using various modern ways;2. presupposes a reiteration and planning of terrorism actions that arouses the strategy of tension;3. usually aims to claim a territory, an intimate space, also virtual or figurative, which is supposedly violated. The University of Maryland has collected information on more than 125,000 terrorist attacks in the Global Terrorism Database.Worldwide, between 1970 and 2013, there were 125,000 attacks of which more than 45 variables were investigated, and 2900 attacks year and more than 7 each day.

Fighting Words

Fighting Words PDF Author: Hector Avalos
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615921958
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 444

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Book Description
Is religion inherently violent? If not, what provokes violence in the name of religion? Do we mischaracterize religion by focusing too much on its violent side?In this intriguing, original study of religious violence, Prof. Hector Avalos offers a new theory for the role of religion in violent conflicts. Starting with the premise that most violence is the result of real or perceived scare resources, Avalos persuasively argues that religion creates new scarcities on the basis of unverifiable or illusory criteria. Through a careful analysis of the fundamental texts of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, Dr. Avalos explains how four scarce resources have figured repeatedly in creating religious violence: sacred space (e.g., the perception by three world religions that Jerusalem is sacred); the creation of holy scriptures (believed to be privileged revelations of God's will); group privilege (stemming from such beliefs as a chosen people or predestination, which also creates a group of outsiders); and salvation (by which concept some are accepted and others rejected). Thus, Avalos shows, religious violence is often the most unnecessary violence of all since the scarce resources over which religious conflicts ensue are not actually scare or need not be scarce.Comparing violence in religious and nonreligious contexts, Avalos makes the compelling argument that if we condemn violence caused by scarce resources as morally objectionable, then we must consider even more objectionable violence provoked by alleged scarcities that cannot be proven to exist. He also examines the Nazi Holocaust and the Stalinist Terror, which have been attributed to the pernicious effects of atheism or secular humanism. By contrast, Avalos pinpoints underlying religious factors as the cause of these horrific instances of genocidal violence.This serious philosophical examination of the roots of religious violence adds much to our understanding of a perennial source of widespread human suffering.Hector Avalos (Ames, IA) is associate professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University, the author of five books on biblical studies and religion, the former editor of the Journal for the Critical Study of Religion, and executive director of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion.

The Great Partnership

The Great Partnership PDF Author: Jonathan Sacks
Publisher: Hodder Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780340995259
Category : Faith and reason
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Writing with his usual grace and fluency, Jonathan Sacks moves beyond the tired arguments of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens, to explore how religion has always played a valuable part in human culture and far from being dismissed as redundant, must be allowed to temper and develop scientific understanding in order for us to be fully human. Ranging around the world to draw comparisons from different cultures, and delving deep into the history of language and of western civilisation, Jonathan Sacks shows how the predominance of science-oriented thinking is embedded deeply even in our religious understanding, and calls on us to recognise the centrality of relationship to true religion, and thus to see how this core value of relationship is essential if we are to avoid the natural tendency for science to rule our lives rather than fulfilling its promise to set us free.

America's Secret Jihad

America's Secret Jihad PDF Author: Stuart Wexler
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619027410
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
The conventional narrative concerning religious terrorism inside the United States says that the first salvo occurred in 1993, with the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. This narrative has motivated more than a decade of wars, and re–prioritized America's domestic security and law enforcement agenda. But the conventional narrative is wrong. A different group of jihadists exists within US borders. This group has a long but hidden history, is outside the purview of public officials and has an agenda as apocalyptic as anything Al Qaeda has to offer. Radical sects of Christianity have inspired some of the most grotesque acts of violence in American history: the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing that killed four young girls; the "Mississippi Burning" murders of three civil rights workers in 1964; the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, the Atlanta Child Murders in the late 1970s; and the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.America's Secret Jihad uses these crimes to tell a story that has not been told before. Expanding upon the author's ground–breaking work on the Martin Luther King, Jr. murder, and through the use of extensive documentation, never–before–released interviews, and a re–interpretation of major events, America's Secret Jihad paints a picture of Christian extremism and domestic terrorism as it has never before been portrayed.

Roots of Political Islam

Roots of Political Islam PDF Author: Leslie Terebessy
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 46

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Book Description
Fanaticism is not unheard of in Islam. Neither is it restricted to Islam. Fanaticism appears in many forms, political, economic and religious. A fanatic is a lunatic. A lunatic is placed in lunatic asylum. But what does one do with a fanatic? Is re-education the answer? Is re-education possible? Manifestations of fanaticism encompass extreme creeds, for example egalitarianism, Nazism and Islamism. Religious fanatics encompass ISIS, Boko Haram and related movements. Fanaticism emanates from a profound animosity to reason. Anti-rationalism is based on the assumption of an irreconcilable antagonism between reason and revelation. Fanatics share the rejection of reason. They are propelled by rage and emotion. They are motivated by whim and are past reason. They perceive persons that disagree with them as enemies. They are a threat to the community and should be treated as such. Fanaticism may transform a religion into a cult. Religious fanatics focus on persons rather than God. The spectre of extremism emerges periodically in the course of time. Extremism is propelled by fanaticism. It is driven by ethnocentrism, racial supremacy, as for example in Nazism and fascism. Islam is a monotheistic faith. It is an extension of the Judeo-Christian faith. It teaches trust in Allah, kindness to parents and orphans, fair treatment of females and captives, acceptable financial transactions, as well as peace and reconciliation. But the knowledge of Islam was deformed by a range of factors. These encompass political pressures. After the death of the prophet there was a power struggle. A sequence of internecine wars followed. The division between the shias and the sunnis emerged in the struggle for succession.Political Islam emerged with the craving of Muslim rulers to embark on wars of expansion, propelled by a craving for booty and presented as "spreading Islam." Accommodating ulema were ready to furnish the required reinterpretation of revelation to transform Islam as a religion of peace into a religion of war. The reinterpretation of revelation required a corruption of exegesis and with it a corruption and deformation of the teaching of revelation. The corruption of the methodology took the form of the adoption of the teaching of abrogation. The result was political Islam. Traditional Islam emerged from the desire of the ruling elites to protect themselves from rebellion by their subjects. Hence, traditional Islam - that preserves the status quo - was stripped of the teachings on justice, ethics and reason. This was reflected in Bukhari. Eventually, Bukhari supplanted revelation as chief reference and guidance. The result was a fatalistic outlook and the acceptance of the teaching of predestination, which cemented the Muslims' acceptance of rulers no matter what the rulers perpetrated. Fanaticism is the coin on whose reverse side is anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism. Anti-rationalism possesses an extended past in Islam. Fanaticism reflects anti-rationalism, a part of fanaticism. Ibn Taymiyyah wrote a book against reason. There is evidence of irrationalism in jurisprudence. An example is the replacement of revealed rulings on adultery and apostasy by rulings based on traditions. Was this in harmony with the teaching of tauhid? Does revelation permit replacing the rulings of Allah with the rulings of men? What does the Quran say about "judging" by what Allah did not reveal? Additional evidence of irrationalism or the breakdown of reason is apparent in exegesis, both political and traditional. Examples of a breakdown of reasoning include the assertion that tradition is "revelation." But there is no support in the Quran for the teaching of "dual revelation." Further examples of a breakdown of reason encompass the perceptions that tradition "judges," "abrogates," and even "supersedes" parts of revelation.

Weapon of Peace

Weapon of Peace PDF Author: Nilay Saiya
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108474314
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This book shows that attempts to repress religion produce the very violent religious extremism that states seek to avoid.