What kind of muslims are terrorists

Williams, Kayla M. Willis, Henry H. Yayla, Ahmet S. Young, William Zeigler, Sean M. Zeman, Jalen Zimmerman, S. Jul 7, Jun 25, Apr 2, Apr 1, Research Brief The Role of U.

Feb 12, News Release Interest in a U. Jan 22, Report A U. Grand Strategy of Restraint Some U. Jan 21, Oct 23, Sep 14, Commentary Repression in Mozambique Is Stoking an Islamist Insurgency, Risking Wider Unrest While Southern Africa has largely remained immune from violent extremism, the situation in northern Mozambique threatens to destabilize the country and could potentially spread to other parts of the region.

Jun 5, Report Weighing U. May 19, Apr 14, Commentary Iraq's Vote to Expel U. Jan 6, Oct 28, Commentary How the U. Oct 21, Commentary The Syrian Withdrawal: Where Things Stand Without an orderly process for its national security decisions, the Trump administration has defaulted to the worst option regarding Syria. Oct 11, It also, however, highlights the lack of any clear grand strategy to bring security and stability to Syria and Iraq.

Defeating extremist organizations like Al Qaida, ISIS, and Al Nusra will be a critical step in limiting the threat, but even near total defeat of today's major perpetrators will leave major cadres and large numbers of fighters. As yet, there are no indications that such defeats will be followed by recovery and reform efforts that will bring lasting security and stability to the divisions within Syria and Iraq shown in this section. Extremist groups will remain, governance and economic development will be weak and divided, ethnic and sectarian differences will be critical, and the outside role of powers like Iran, Russia, and Turkey will be deeply divisive.

Limited tactical victories are no substitute for a meaningful grand strategy that addresses the lasting outcome of such victories. The trend data in this section show that even tactical success is uncertain in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Again, there is no clear indication of the capability to build on the defeat of the Taliban, Haqqani Network, and other extremist groups to bring lasting security and stability to either Afghanistan or Pakistan.

The final section in the report provides a different kind of warning. It shows that the cost of failing to create effective strategic partnerships can be far greater and more destabilizing even if such partnerships only really address a limited part of a nation's tensions and divisions and focus almost exclusively on security. Yemen is only one such case study.

Libya, Somalia, the Sudans, and a number of Sub Saharan African countries already present similar challenges. Skip to main content. Download the Report. Written By. Media Queries. Contact H. Most Recent From Anthony H. Cordesman On Demand Event. Book Launch: Armies of Arabia. November 12, In the News.

UAE pursues better border security collaboration, more domestic capabilities. Defense News Agnes Helou. November 8, The New Challenges in Aid to Afghanistan. October 28, Washington Post Mariana Alfaro.

October 22, Iraqis remember Powell as both liberator and 'engineer' of endless war. October 19, There is nothing fundamentalist about putting an airplane through a building. All parties have been too long accustomed to blaming others for the problems they face. Their attention should be directed to his criticism of the West:. We ought to take these exhortations seriously on at least two accounts.

All the same, he manages to use his Islam cleverly to exploit the long-festering anger of Muslims, especially in the Middle East, toward the West. We would be foolish to acquiesce in this perverse strategy. The Arabic word for catastrophe is nakba , and this was to be only the first such nakba experienced by the Arabs during the twentieth century. The rage of Arabs and other Muslims continued to grow throughout the rest of the twentieth century, not because of any teachings of Islam as such but as a result of the forced domination of Muslims by Western nations, which increased with one nakba after another.

The first was the onset of the Cold War, which ended the period of European ascendancy and polarized the whole world, including Muslims, between the United States and the Soviet Union. Then another major nakba occurred in —the greatest nakba of all in most Arab eyes—when all the Western nations collectively imposed the formation of Israel with no apparent concern for the fate of half a million non-Jewish Palestinians not only Muslims but also Christians and secularists.

Arab humiliation grew as the United States both strengthened Israel militarily against the Palestinians and other Arabs and armed Middle Eastern dictators during the Cold War in return for their often cruel support in the struggle against the Soviet Union.

To many Arab intellectuals this seemed to be the final, intolerable blow. But the collapse of the Soviet Union would prove to be yet another catastrophe from the point of view of Muslims who had looked to it for salvation from the United States. This hope in itself was particularly remarkable because the official atheism of the Soviet Union had long been thought to exclude the possibility of Muslim cooperation. According to Abou el Fadl:. Many of them speak of another Islam, their personal, private faith.

No argument here. A far more elaborate and relentlessly negative treatment of Islam is that of ibn Warraq. His strong resentment toward the religion of his childhood resonates with many humanist readers, myself included, whose path out of traditional bondage was mainly intellectual in nature.

This book and The Origins of the Koran , which followed in , are entry points into the slowly expanding literature highly critical of Islam, past and present, in general and in specific detail, with particular focus on contradictions in the Quran and the traditions surrounding the Prophet, violence in the history of Islamic interactions with other groups, and issues of the status of women and the relation of religion to the state.

This is required reading for all who may doubt that Islam even has a darker side. Twice during the past decade I have published in Humanism Today an organ of the North American Committee for Humanism and the Humanist Institute , my own optimistic assessments of chances for the future evolution of Islam in the direction of humanism.

These favorable estimates, while clearly contingent on events yet to unfold, are based on some sixty years of comparative study of the history of civilizations. I then went on to list a few of the hundreds of sources from which my optimism was derived.

In the harsh, eerie glare of September 11, what I am saying here may be considered an update of my earlier remarks. It would be hard to make the case that Islam is intrinsically more cruel or violent than Judaism or Christianity. The Old Testament—the foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition—echoes, after all, throughout the Quran and can easily match the Quran on a literal basis for violence and brutality. Jews, and later Christians, have never had any problem with ascribing violence to their religion when it served their purposes.

The gradual liberalization of Judaism and Christianity included the metaphorical interpretation of such phrases, with the heavenly host referring to the stars and the angels. And the cruel punishments set forth in the Old Testament laws notably death by stoning for what the modern world might regard as civil wrongs or misdemeanors or no wrongs at all are all-of-a-piece with the severe hudud punishments called for by Wahhabi jurists in Saudi Arabia and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The brutality of the Christians in the Crusades was unmatched. John L.