As a sociologist, particularly interested in the sociology of religion and trying to analyse the difficult situation at hand, it is increasingly becoming clear that the war with the radicals is a war of scriptural hermeneutics and the worldviews that emerge out of these. An academic review of the pamphlet left by the members of al Qaeda and Tehrik-i-Taliban Punjab after their killing of Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti clearly shows how there is a mammoth task for contemporary Muslim religious scholars and social scientists to rise to the occasion and try to provide the real meaning behind scriptural definitions and interpretations of terms and concepts that are at the centre of the radical discourse. This is an immense task. This article is a humble attempt at providing a framework of analysis for the kind of thought contained in the pamphlet. Almost all the important terms in the contemporary radical discourse are contained in the above mentioned pamphlet, which makes it quite a representative document of such thought. -- Naqib Hamid |