Radical Islamism and Jihad
With polls
slated for December 30, the first two weeks of canvassing have already seen
eight deaths and dozens injured.....
A permanent
refugee population in Bangladesh, and possible alliances between various groups
of militants, could also have grave implications for the domestic security
situation in that country, similar to the volatility seen in Lebanon and...
For its part,
Tunisia oscillates between traditionalism and the fragility of democracy, with
the impulse for change measured by innovation and closures....
Note: As articles
on NewAgeIslam.com have pointed out again and again, instructions given in any
war lapse with the end of the war. The war-time verses in the holy Quran not
only instruct Muslims to kill, but also motivate them, announcing rewards for
fighting and punishment for not fighting, i.e., sitting at home, without any
valid excuse. All this is quire natural. But at the same time Muslims must also
understand that these verses were meant for those wars in the7th century CE and
cannot be applicable to us today in the 21st century, 14 centuries after the
wars that gave the Prophet and his companions’ victory, establishing Islam on
the face of earth. Now our job is simply to see that God’s universal and
eternal messages in Quran are available to all the people in their own
languages, so they can comprehend it and learn from it. The contextual verses
are a part of our glorious history and should be left there, so that we learn
from them how near-insurmountable obstacles the Prophet (saw) faced in
establishing Islam and leaving us his magnificent legacy. Violent extremists
among us have and will continue to use and misuse these contextual verses for
their own ends. Let us Muslims not fall in the trap. – Editor
When you consider how, after the Arabs’ humiliating defeat in the June war of 1967, all the secular ideologies that had then animated the public debate — such as pan-Arabism, Nasserism, Baathism, socialism — proved to be hollow and worthless, you begin to see a vacuum there....
Since the start of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2009, more than 27,000 people, mostly in the remote northeast, have been killed. Nearly 2 million others have been displaced....
All of which suggests that triumphalism over the end of ISIS, although tempting, is extremely premature. The original threat posed by the Islamic State’s physical “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria may indeed be gone, but the group’s activities and ideology remain a real challenge...
Official Iraqi statistics actually indicate that the number of its members killed in the war to restore areas they occupied since June 2014 exceeded 20,000. This is in addition to hundreds of prisoners held by Iraqi forces. Meanwhile, the international coalition sources estimate 80,000 members of ISIS were killed in Iraq and Syria....
What did the US planners get out of the war in Afghanistan? ....
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury
Armed jihadists belonging to Jamaat e Islami Bangladesh (JIB) and Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) have started attacking the leaders and activists of Awami League and its other front organizations. Agenda of JIB-BNP nexus is to push Bangladesh towards a civil war. According to numerous reports, Pakistani spy agency Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) is actively helping the JIB-BNP nexus in returning to power thus re-establishing Pakistan’s influence on Bangladesh....
But what has
come more bluntly in the analysis of the Pakistani media reports, which are
based less on proper journalistic investigation than on vociferous emotionalism
and a feeling of revenge, is the deep-rooted doctrine of ‘Ghazwat-ul-Hind’, an
Islamic expedition against India which is reported in one of the six most
authentic collections of Hadith compilations (Sunan al-Nasa’i). Orya Maqbool
Jaan, an ultra-puritanical Islamist writer who is a regular columnist with the
leading Urdu daily Jang, looks at the Indian surgical strike as the beginning
of the battle that the Prophet (pbuh) predicted to his companion, Hazrat Abu
Huraira (r.a) i.e. Ghazwat-ul-Hind…
Beyond spurring Jihadism, the 9/11 attacks seem to have polarized the religious scene in Iraq. Anbari and like-minded jihadists began to see rival Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, as enemies—a position that would become a notable aspect of the Islamic State’s ideology. Anbari viewed the Muslim Brotherhood’s embrace of political norms and its rejection of al-Qaeda as a betrayal....
There are other so-called clerics or extremist leaders who need to be tackled as well. But going beyond their role is the issue of the extent to which extremism has snaked its way into society and made inroads everywhere. Schoolchildren have been known to quote a simple Quranic verse on their exam papers and beseech examiners to give them passing grades on the basis of their piety. This obviously doesn’t help produce future doctors, physicists, teachers, lawyers or other professionals....
As long as the government overlooks Tehreek-e-Labbaik’s ideological motivations, it is difficult to construe nationwide arrests as a lasting solution. The current status of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws ensures that any religious outfit can allege blasphemy and stage violent sit-ins unpunished. In the event of such an occurrence, the state must decide between amending these laws to establish its writ, or continuing to surrender the rule of law to the demands of religious mobs....
With this event, Afghanistan was thrust into a new chapter of armed conflict. According to partial data compiled by the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM) from media reports, Afghanistan witnessed 421 incidents of suicide attacks between September 9, 2001, and December 31, 2008, resulting in 1,231 fatalities. Thereafter, between January 1, 2009, and September 30, 2018, UNAMA has recorded more than 654 suicide attacks resulting in 14,248 casualties 3,274 deaths and 10,974 injuries). ....
There was a strong smell of burning flesh in the air, reminding me inevitably of Manikarnika and Satkara, Hegel’s Haushaltung der Natur, reminding me that in death the killer and the killed were one, a thought that would come back later. The air was also thick, all the way, with flying bits of paper....
The history of Islam on the Horn of Africa dates back 1400 years. It came from the Arabian Peninsula through migration and trade, mainly from Yemen and Oman. In Somalia, during the 14th century many Somalis converted to Islam and gradually Islam became the dominant religion. Today, almost 100 percent of Somalis are Sunni Muslim and largely adhere to a Shafi'i version of the faith....
If you wanted to be safe in the province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa you had to be on good terms with Haq. Imran Khan’s party, Tehreek-e-Insaf, shelled out to him a generous grant of Rs300 million. Zahid Hussain, writing in Dawn in 2017, stated that Benazir Bhutto — who ignored Haq — had to pay the price with her life: The suicide bombers who killed her had stayed at Madrasa Haqqania and the “assassination plot was reportedly hatched at this institution”....
From London, the Political Islam as a movement began positioning to take its role in the Greater Middle East project and investing in the events following 9/11. So it began establishing IUMS, whose ostensible objective was to pander Western interests by adopting moderation and countering radicalism and extremism. This was their appropriate propaganda against all official religious institutions, in particular from Saudi Arabia, after focusing its arrows on the "Wahhabi Salafism" and accusing it of extremism and terrorism, especially later by Raysuni and his companions in the Political Islam movement....
There is certainly evidence of growing brutality. A video released by ISWAP showed the murder of a kidnapped aid worker, Hauwa Mohammed Liman. She was bound, forced to kneel and shot. A colleague, Saifura Hussaini Ahmed Khorsa, was murdered in September, three weeks after Nur’s death. ISWAP said the two Muslim women, a midwife and a nurse, deserved to die because they worked for the Red Cross...
While it may admittedly be impossible to prevent all attacks, there is no denying the fact that terrorism breeds in waters where democratic freedom is curtailed. Efforts being put in to eradicate poverty, promote sustained economic growth, good governance, rule of law, and respect for all religions, religious values, and beliefs is the only way to ensure we do not get terrorised into segregating the freedom of our citizens and avoid playing into the hands of the very forces we want to keep at bay....
I have no idea if the boys had been coached by their elders to play this gruesome charade for the camera, or whether they had thought of it on their own. In either case, the video is a telling reminder — if one was needed — of how far we have sunk as a society. Among the many awful things we have done to Pakistani children is the systematic brainwashing we have subjected them to....
'They have told me that mullahs had been reported in their neighbourhood going from house to house showing photos of family members on their phones, trying to hunt them down,' he told the Guardian. 'The family have had to move from place to place to avoid detection. Sometimes they can only operate after sundown. They have had to cover their faces when they go out in public. 'They have had to remove the rosary that hangs from their car rear-view mirror for fear of attack.’...
The Islamic State (ISIS) temporarily managed to win over disgruntled elements among the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban alongside youth from the remote districts in Afghanistan’s east soon after restructuring and renaming itself Islamic State in Khorasan (IS-K) in 2014. IS-K’s initial victories against the Taliban and the Afghan government on both the battle and propaganda fronts rang alarm bells in world capitals, particularly among the weaker neighbouring Central Asian states...
...I also felt a tsunami of love pouring forth from our world family. For the first time I felt this world family personally and the magnitude of this love overpowered hatred, anger, disbelief and shock. I knew this is who we truly are as human beings. I knew that those young men who became terrorists must have been disconnected from love, disconnected from their own true essence, and that enabled them to kill other human beings....