https://thewire.in/communalism/terrorism-is-a-political-phenomenon-to-blame-it-on-islam-is-wrong
Ever since the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Islamophobia in the world in general and India in particular has received a fresh impetus. A common refrain, which you are quite likely to hear even from those who are not self-proclaimed anti-Muslims is, “All Muslims are not terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.”
The insinuation implicit in this belief is that there is something such and fundamentally wrong with Islam per se, which predisposes Muslims towards becoming brutal terrorists. In fact, even the brutal beheadings of captives by ISIS terrorists like Jihadi John are, in popular Islamophobic perception, attributed to them being Muslims and not to the individuals’ perversity.
Indiscriminate use of a term like ‘Islamic terrorism’ has created an impression in the minds of a large number of people that terrorists who happen to be Muslims exist because Islam, somehow ‘approving’ of terrorism, drives them inexorably towards it.
The notion is so widespread that even scholars are not immune from it. An Israeli scholar Shmuel Bar, for example, while admitting that terrorism is not an Islamic phenomenon, still provocatively and misleadingly titled his study ‘The Religious Sources of Islamic Terrorism’.
This is a dangerous misconception – a vicious myth that is rooted as much in ignorance as in prejudice. Terrorism as we find it today simply did not exist in the early days of Islam when its religious concepts were crystallised for posterity. Hence, there is no question of there being any support for the modern phenomenon of terrorism in the Qur’an or the Hadis, a record of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Prophet.
Had there been any religious sanction for terrorism as we understand it today, someone was bound to have discovered it sometime in the past. There is no reason to believe that some people discovered them only in the 20th century and have gone berserk
Ever since the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Islamophobia in the world in general and India in particular has received a fresh impetus. A common refrain, which you are quite likely to hear even from those who are not self-proclaimed anti-Muslims is, “All Muslims are not terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims.”
The insinuation implicit in this belief is that there is something such and fundamentally wrong with Islam per se, which predisposes Muslims towards becoming brutal terrorists. In fact, even the brutal beheadings of captives by ISIS terrorists like Jihadi John are, in popular Islamophobic perception, attributed to them being Muslims and not to the individuals’ perversity.
Indiscriminate use of a term like ‘Islamic terrorism’ has created an impression in the minds of a large number of people that terrorists who happen to be Muslims exist because Islam, somehow ‘approving’ of terrorism, drives them inexorably towards it.
The notion is so widespread that even scholars are not immune from it. An Israeli scholar Shmuel Bar, for example, while admitting that terrorism is not an Islamic phenomenon, still provocatively and misleadingly titled his study ‘The Religious Sources of Islamic Terrorism’.
This is a dangerous misconception – a vicious myth that is rooted as much in ignorance as in prejudice. Terrorism as we find it today simply did not exist in the early days of Islam when its religious concepts were crystallised for posterity. Hence, there is no question of there being any support for the modern phenomenon of terrorism in the Qur’an or the Hadis, a record of the words, actions, and the silent approval of the Prophet.
Had there been any religious sanction for terrorism as we understand it today, someone was bound to have discovered it sometime in the past. There is no reason to believe that some people discovered them only in the 20th century and have gone berserk
