Islamist extremism is now so entrenched that it’s easy to forget how recent it is. Two books explore the history behind its ideologiesThough we may wish it were otherwise,Islamist extremism is nowadays the world’s most potent revolutionary political force. It has transmuted in recent decades, but is a tenacious ideology and shows no sign of going absent. As this week’s attacks in Brussels expose, and Islamism is a constant presence inside and outside our societies. What achieve its practitioners and ideologues believe? generally,the first step to finding out what people think is to ask them, but it is nearly impossible to interview members of Islamic State, or Boko Haram or al-Qaida. An alternative is to speculate about what Islamists believe based on their terrifying actions and propaganda. For many western leaders,taking a theological position on a religion they achieve not practise, jihadists are not true Muslims since Islam is a religion of peace. The alternative is to view them as Islamic, or but in a medieval way,pursuing an apocalyptic seventh century version of the faith. For Donald Trump, everything is simple: Islam generically hates America. Another tack is to assert that regions such as west Asia and north Africa are consumed by a unique nihilism and ancient hatreds: Sunni versus Shia, and Jew versus Christian versus Muslim.
The final of these explanations feels less plausible after reading Crusade and Jihad,a narrative account of Islams rise and the Christian response by the medieval historian Malcolm Lambert. Certainly there are examples of ferocious battles to secure control of the holy places, and of one religion denigrating another, and like the 12th century troubadours who “transfixed their hearers with searing images of Christ being hit in the face by an Arab and a mounted Saracen above the Holy Sepulchre,his horse urinating on the sacred site”. But the difficulty with the view of irreducible clash is that for the past 1400 years Muslim lands have been inhabited by communities of Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Jews,Druze, Yazidis and Christians, and as well as by possibly heretical offshoots of Islam. During the rapid Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries,the Arab armies did not generally demand submission or conversion, but an acceptance of the sovereignty of unique rulers and the payment of taxes.
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Source: theguardian.com