Source: Quartz

The alarming exploitation of the Brussels attacks for political purposes shows how urgent it is to take back the discourse around Islam and Muslims from racists and extremist populists like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen.

Instead of leaving the field wide open for the big-mouthed bigots and xenophobes surfing the murderous wave of global Islamist terror to stigmatize refugees and all peoples of Muslim confession, let’s recognize and tackle the important religious dimension to jihadist violence—in order to better overcome it.

Muslim modernizers, reformers, and secularists, intellectuals, theologians, writers, artists, academics, political figures, and ordinary believers, have long been engaged in an intense ideological war with the Islamic fundamentalists—the same fanatics who helped create the breeding ground for today’s terrorists committing atrocities against civilian populations in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the US.
They are currently losing the winner-takes-all battle to stop the “confiscation” of Islam, dating back to the 19th century when contemporary Islamism first emerged as a neo-reactionary force in response to modernization. And they need the West’s support, fast, if it is to make any inroads in winning the fight against terrorism.

As French author Jean Birnbaum, the editor of Le Monde’s literary review, declares in his excellent new book Un Silence Religieux (A Religious Silence: The Left confronted by Jihadism), by not standing with the brave souls resisting encroaching religious extremism and fighting to save Islam from its “Islamist perversion,” we have betrayed those who are determined not to watch their cherished religion “degraded before their very eyes, with all its cherished cultural, spiritual, and human richness.” He says:

By repeating that jihadist terrorism has “nothing to do” with Islam, the highest authorities of the state have not only orchestrated a dangerous negation, they have also planted a knife in the back of all the intellectuals and Muslim theologians who refuse to see their religion reduced to these murderous avatars.
(Birnbaum names among other reformers and critical voices the acclaimed Algerian writer-living-under-a-fatwa Kamel Daoud, the late Mohammed Arkoun and Abdelwahab Meddeb, Rachid Benzine, and Abdennour Bidar, as well as past heros like India’s Mohamed Iqbal and Sudan’s Mahmoud Mohammed Taha).
The chiefly Saudi-inspired neo-Salafists reclaiming a so-called “pure Islam” and championing a bloody rupture with Europe and the West have been trying, at an accelerated pace in recent decades, to assume control over Islam worldwide.

With Gulf States’ money and the purchased silence of Western allies, they have brought their deadly politico-theological battles to the heart of Europe via radical mosques and cultural centers, hate-preachers, and media and digital “soft power,” laying the fertile ground for jihadist recruitment by the messianic millenarian apocalyptic behemoth called ISIL.

By fomenting hysteria around the Palestinian cause and deliberately spreading anti-Semitic, women and western-hating propaganda, they have brainwashed entire communities into states of collective resentment, victim mentality, and in the worst case, smoothed the transition to murderous “holy war.”

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