Militant Islam: Encyclopedia II - Militant Islam - Militancy as the defining attribute

Militant Islam - Militancy as the defining attribute

Militant Islam - No one doctrine

As scholars of this movement have carefully outlined, in a very great variety of works up to and through the 1970s, there is little tactically in common in the various movements that seek to apply Islam as a solution, or use its terms to rationalize their solutions, to issues in the modern Islamic World. The only two objective things that can be said about all of militant Islam is: (a) they are militant and employ force or violence directly, either in offense or defense (b) they justify this using the rhetoric of Islam, e.g. that of jihad.

This is a common and frequent phenomena in the history of Islam. The tarika, in addition to spreading Islam to Africa and adapting it to local conditions (the al-urf or custom of each region), had a role to play in resisting colonialism - this is the origin of Islam as a militant and "underdog" faith to motivate resistance to some ruling authority which is not Muslim or adhering to Islam. The Ottoman Empire was marked by such conflicts, and the British Empire, as there were typically a number of Muslims in rebellion against either at any one time, using Islam to justify their actions.

Olivier Roy, a French policy advisor to President Jacques Chirac, characterizes the goal of modern militant Islam as to re-establish a Caliphate, or a single common government for Muslims all over the world. This might resemble world government or the Roman Catholic hierarchy in certain respects, but since most Muslims are Sunni and reject the role of a formal clergy (unlike the Shia who embrace it) this seems to be unlikely.

Militant Islam - More than fundamentalism

Islamic fundamentalism is not, by definition, militant. In general, Islamic fundamentalists may have some degree of agreement or sympathy for Islamic militants, as there is likely to be some overlap of views between them. However, just an one may hold leftist views without advocating revolutionary Marxism, there is a glaring difference between the two groups.

The use of the term fundamentalism to decry and disdain religion as a solution to problems of the modern secular world, and to describe an insensibly wide variety of movements which could be said easily to include Baptist, Mennonite, Quaker, Orthodox Jewish, Zionist, Wahabist, and many others, came into fashion in the 1980s. It had then, and still has, no integrity as an academic term, as the fundamentals in play in each such movement are different: all they have in common is resistance to a secular global political monoculture that seemed to be in ascendance at that time.

Militant Islam - More than radical

The use of the term radical came into use likewise, earlier, in the 1960s, to characterize anyone whose opinion was not in line with those reported in mass media or held by major political party leaders. This too had little consistency and implied nothing about actions taken.

The term Islamist was at first used to describe those who took Islam to be, as it always was, a political philosophy - but was quickly co-opted by those who attached the above labels to invent the terms radical Islamist, fundamentalist Islam and Islamofascist, none of which have much merit other than making it clear that those who use it to defame the movement must dislike extreme solutions, reference to old books, or strong central government with religious leanings, respectively. In general these terms shed more heat than light.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Militancy as the defining attribute", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki