The Roots of Radicalisation

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

When it comes to terrorism, we cannot deny that the majority of attacks are perpetrated by those who profess to be Muslims.  Has anyone ever considered what sort of mindset is required for a person to deliberately target civilians, tourists, children, ordinary people going about their lives?  It is this mindset we must address.  Without that internal justification, all the opportunities would pass by. 

It begins with the way Islam is taught in many communities, even in Singapore.  Muslims are taught that we are different from the non-Muslims in terms of our morals and this bleeds into a form of exceptionalism.  Many Muslims casually refer to all non-Muslims as “kuffar”, “disbelievers”.  A kafir is someone who knows the truth of Islam and then chooses to oppose it.  Such a person is damned. 

Many Muslims buy into all sorts of historical revisionism and conspiracy theories.  Essentially, there has been a confluence of events throughout history where “righteous” Muslim polities and communities were defeated and oppressed by a range of enemies, the Crusaders, the Jews, the Illuminati, and the forces of Dajjal, the Anti-Christ.  This creates a mindset of perpetual conflict with non-Muslims. 

In our textbooks, in talks by popular preachers, in websites and elsewhere, verses of the Qur’an are taken out of context, forbidding taking Christians, Jews and other “undesirables” as friends, greeting them on their festivities, attending functions, having any sort of relationship and seeing them as equals.  This is normalisation of alienation of non-Muslims as the other. 

All it needs is for these ideas to gain traction in the wider community.  So, the secular government is a “kuffar” government, the non-Muslims a collectively blamed for the “humiliation” of the ummah, and all that is justified with Scripture. 

From this wider community, there will be groups with their various agendas, from the ridiculous to the sinister.  There are groups who believe evolution is an atheist conspiracy, or the banking system is a form of oppression and other mildly amusing absurdities.  And there will be other groups that seek to dictate the local community’s positions on issues of jurisprudence such as the hijab, or voting rights.  And then there will be groups who believe that Islam is in an existential state of conflict with the “kuffar”. 

Sometimes, people graduate from one cause to another.  Sometimes, they are radicalised by alienation, disenfranchisement and oppression, real or imagined.  Sometimes, people just define themselves by their opposites.  But beneath it all, it still comes down to the root cause: that it is acceptable to believe non-Muslims are enemies of Islam.  No religious group celebrates its converts like the acquisition of trophies, nor advocates violence against apostates as much as the Muslims. 

It is time we stop treating our religion as some sort of a cult, and more as a theological tradition.  It is time we stand more firmly against this sort of hate indoctrination and emphasise our relationships with non-Muslims more.  This is not a call for Reformation; it is a call to return the religion to its prophetic roots.