Extremist Politics and Culture, and the Western Role in Its Resurgence

"I was a young man when the first airplane flew to India. Many Indian ullama issued a fatwa stating that Muslims should not travel by airplane because it was a devilish invention that flew in the sky and disturbed God (who lived there). Later, the Imam of a mosque began using a loudspeaker for his sermons. Again, a fatwa was issued stating that this was haram [unlawful] because Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) never used a loudspeaker for prayers."



The propagandists have become much more sophisticated now than they were in the days of the above narration. They now impose their dogmas through violence and taking hold of people's minds through modern media. Television and the internet are their favorite tools. It is now commonly known that extremist politics, in its various manifestations in numerous countries, poses a serious threat to the socioeconomic stability of those countries, and, globally, to a civilization based on tolerance and intellectual freedom. However, not so well known are the common factors and dissimilarities among all these groups, scattered in so many countries and known as Chechen, Kashmiri, or Palestinian freedom fighters, Taliban, Al Qaeda, Sunni or Shi'a insurgents, Islamic Courts, Hamas Militia, Al Sadr Brigade, Jaysh al Mehdi, Hezbollah, Hizb'l Muhajayroon, Hizb'l Tahrir, Jama'at-a-Islami, Akhwan'l Muslaymoon, the Algerian GIA, and FIS, etc. This work aims to inform the reader about the common cognitive-cultural factors that generate these forces, how the extremist culture creates poverty and violence, how its expansionist strategies function, and how it imposes its values to dominate and purge other values. As explained in this work, the extremist expansionist beliefs result in the general impoverishment of societies, violence, migration to newer regions, and the systematic cleansing of non-conformers as more and more regions are gradually absorbed into the extremist dominated regions of the world.