Islamic Terrorism and the Radicalization of Religion

Introduction

For people in the United States, radical Islamic terrorism became a real threat on September 11, 2001, when terrorists from a group known as Al-Qaeda used box cutters to hijack airplanes and then flew those planes as missiles into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. A fourth plane was intended as an additional weapon, but passengers thwarted the hijackers before it could reach its target. The day remains the largest terrorist attack on American soil and ushered in the second Iraq War and an era of curtailed civil liberties under the USA PATRIOT Act, a government attempt to heighten monitoring of potential terrorists and prevent another attack of that scale (United States Department of Justice, 2016). It also brought widespread attention to a new type of threat: jihad, as these terrorists styled themselves holy warriors fighting in the name of Islam.

What Is Jihad?

While members of Al-Qaeda and subsequent terrorist groups have called themselves mujahideen, jihadists, and jihadi — and have proclaimed that their actions are taken in the name of Islam — it is important to understand that their interpretation of jihad is a radicalized distortion of the religion that differs significantly from what the average Muslim believes. For the average Muslim, jihad is not a violent concept and does not incorporate terrorism; the Quran specifically prohibits nearly all calls for violent jihad. In addition, Islam is an Abrahamic religion, like Christianity and Judaism, and the Quran requires Muslims to respect Christians and Jews. Radicalized Muslims, like radicalized members of other faiths, reject those teachings and twist their religion to justify violence against others.

However, the root cause of terrorism is not simply religion. Religion is a tool manipulated by leaders to recruit vulnerable individuals to their cause. Factors such as poverty, class inequality, warfare, and pervasive anti-Muslim sentiment in Western societies are all used alongside religion as recruiting tools.

The Sunni-Shia Split

It is also important to recognize that Islam has been marked by an internal division since the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD. Sunni and Shia Muslims are divided over who constitutes the rightful successor to the Prophet. While many in the Western world view all Muslims as a monolith, this division reflects significant doctrinal differences and has been the source of many territorial disputes throughout history (Humphreys, 2015).

In brief, Shia Muslims believed that only direct descendants of Muhammad were eligible to lead the faithful, advocating a kind of hereditary religious succession. Sunni Muslims, by contrast, held that the most qualified and worthy person should be eligible for leadership, regardless of lineage. The Iranian Revolution, which was led by Shia Muslims and marked the founding of the terrorist organization Hezbollah, led many observers to regard Shia Islam as the more radicalized branch — a view actively promoted by predominantly Sunni Saudi Arabia and many of its political allies, including the United States. However, Sunni Islam proved equally susceptible to radicalization. The Taliban, which originated as a group of mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, was a Sunni organization, and its radicalized ideology formed the ideological foundation for Al-Qaeda.

Terrorism: A Many-Headed Beast

Terrorism is the use of violence and intimidation to advance political aims, and it can be carried out by individuals or organizations. What the United States government discovered in the aftermath of 9/11 was that fighting a terrorist organization like Al-Qaeda is extraordinarily difficult. Although the organization had a well-known leader in Osama bin Laden, it did not function in a top-down hierarchical manner. Instead, it employed terrorist cells — small groups of independently operating individuals who share no common leadership and do not overlap with one another — making it far harder for law enforcement to dismantle the network as a whole.

This decentralized model proved globally devastating: "Al-Qaeda was linked — whether directly or indirectly — to more attacks in the six years following September 11 than it had been in the six years prior, including attacks in Jordan, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Israel, Algeria, and elsewhere" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2016). The organization was also highly effective at using social media and the Internet as both a recruiting platform and a vehicle for spreading terror. The United States eventually located Osama bin Laden and killed him in May 2011. Although Al-Qaeda remains an active terrorist organization, it has largely been supplanted by other groups.