“Islamic Terrorism” as a Discursive Formation: Power, Paradox, and the Politics of Naming

Posted on 14th January, 2026 (GMT 05:08 hrs)

ABSTRACT

This article critically examines the persistence of the term “Islamic terrorism” in global discourse, highlighting its paradoxical nature as a contested label that essentializes Islam as inherently violent in a monolithic manner while being reinforced by the explicit religious self-framing of militant groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Drawing on Orientalist epistemologies, post-Cold War geopolitical imaginaries such as Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” and Barthesian myth theory, the analysis reveals how the term functions as a disciplinary tool of power, asymmetrically applied to Muslim-perpetrated violence compared to similar acts by Christian, Hindu, Zionist or other extremists/fundamentalists/terrorists, thereby naturalizing civilizational hierarchies and obscuring historical contexts like colonial legacies, proxy wars, and political economies of jihadism. Incorporating defenses of the term’s empirical utility alongside critiques of bias and oversimplification, the piece argues for a shift toward nuanced framings that recognize militant Islamism as a product of imperial disruption, authoritarianism, and gendered crises rather than religious essence, ultimately advocating for pluralist transformations to combat all forms of fundamentalist violence without hypocrisy.

In Continuation With

Letters of Blood and Fire: “Terrorism”, Dispossession, and the Distorted Mirrorings of Domination

0. Introduction

The term “Islamic terrorism” endures as a contested category in global discourse, embodying a paradox that reveals deeper tensions between empirical observation, ideological framing, and power dynamics. Despite decades of scholarly critique for essentializing Islam as inherently violent and perpetuating stereotypes, the label persists due to the explicit religious self-presentation of many violent yet funded non-state actors, which aligns with and reinforces pre-existing Western interpretive structures rooted in Orientalist epistemologies and post-Cold War geopolitical imaginaries. However, this persistence is not merely a reflection of unmediated reality but a functional outcome of selective naming practices that serve disciplinary ends, often at the expense of nuance, historical context, and equitable scrutiny across ideologies. Below, we systematically unpack this architecture with greater depth, incorporating diverse perspectives—including defenses of the term’s utility—to foster a more balanced, critical examination that acknowledges both its descriptive potential and its risks of bias, generalization and oversimplification.

I. The Foundational Paradox of the Term

At its core, “Islamic terrorism” navigates a structural contradiction: it is routinely decried in academic and activist circles for collapsing a diverse faith into a monolithic threat, yet it maintains remarkable traction in policy, media, and public spheres. Critics argue that the label reproduces civilizational hierarchies, portraying Islam as irrational and pre-modern, a narrative traceable to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which exposed how Western knowledge production constructs the “Orient” as an exotic, threatening Other to affirm Western superiority. This essentialism is laden with unacknowledged assumptions embedded in political-cultural narratives, often amplifying media biases that disproportionately associate terrorism with Muslims.

For instance, it could be highlighted how white supremacist violence is rarely framed as “Christian terrorism,” and similarly, how acts linked to Hindu nationalist networks—such as those associated with RSS, Sangh affiliates, or BJP extremists—are seldom categorized as “Hindu terrorism.” This reveals an asymmetry in public and media discourse, where non-Muslim perpetrators are often individualized or psychologized, while Muslim ones are religionized. Yet, defenders of the term contend that dismissing it ignores the empirical reality: the lion’s share of recent high-lethality attacks has been perpetrated in Islam’s name, drawing on religious sources like jihadist interpretations of the Quran and Hadith, which cannot be fully decoupled from the faith without intellectual dishonesty.

This discursive hinge—where explicit self-framing meets ideological absorption—invites open-minded scrutiny: is the term’s resilience evidence of bias, or a reluctant acknowledgment of patterns? A balanced view recognizes both, noting that while groups like ISIS account for significant post-2000 violence, most Muslims are victims, not perpetrators, complicating any essentialist linkage.

II. Explicit Religious Self-Framing as Empirical Driver and Interpretive Accelerator

The statement rightly emphasizes self-representation over inherent causation: groups such as Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and Hezbollah do not merely invoke Islam incidentally but deploy it strategically—quoting Qur’anic verses on jihad, framing martyrdom eschatologically, and using symbols like the Shahada on black flags to legitimize violence internally (for recruitment) and externally (for global legibility). U.S. Combating Terrorism Center reports document this “Islamic imagery” in propaganda, underscoring its role in sustaining the term’s circulation.

However, nuance demands acknowledging countervoices: the Global Imams Council condemns such misuse, rejecting any inherent link while affirming the symbols’ sacredness, and fatwas from scholars like Ali Gomaa declare terrorism un-Islamic. Critically, this explicitness accelerates the label’s adoption not neutrally but through selective amplification—New America Foundation data shows Muslim perpetrators overrepresented in U.S. coverage, beyond mere incidence.

Open-mindedly, some defenses, like those in Hoover Institution analyses, point to internal factors such as alienation and religious sources (e.g., takfir doctrines) as contributors, suggesting the framing isn’t solely Western imposition but partly endogenous to certain Islamic interpretations. Thus, while explicitness supplies markers that reduce interpretive complexity, it also risks overlooking how media and policy ecosystems magnify them disproportionately.

III. Legibility within Western Security Epistemologies

Orientalism and Post–Cold War Imaginaries

The term’s “immediate legibility” stems from its seamless fit into frameworks shaped by Orientalist epistemologies—depicting Islam as fanatic and absolutist—and post-Cold War threat narratives, where Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” (1993) repositioned Islam as the West’s new antagonist after communism’s collapse. International Affairs critiques how this lens views Muslim agency through security prisms, as in responses to Arab uprisings, while Countercurrents (2024) links it to dehumanizing Islamophobia.

X discussions reflect this, with users debating “Islamophobia” as a tool to silence critiques of “Islamic terrorism,” echoing pre-scripted risks. Yet, a critical counterpoint emerges: if explicit symbols (e.g., ISIS’s caliphate rhetoric) align with these frames, is the bias total, or does it partially reflect observable patterns?

Defenses, such as in Taylor & Francis studies, argue Islamist groups’ lethality exceeds secular ones due to religious motivations like cultural dignity and otherworldly rewards, substantiated by empirical data on casualty rates. Religions journal ties this to neo-Orientalism in post-Cold War order-building, but open-minded analysis must concede that non-Western actors, including Muslim scholars at the Hoover Institution, sometimes affirm religious roots without endorsing Western bias. This interplay suggests legibility is neither fully contrived nor innocent—it’s amplified by power asymmetries.

IV. Huntington and the Early Enframing of “Islamic Terrorism”

The early consolidation of “Islamic terrorism” as a dominant explanatory frame cannot be understood without attending to the post–Cold War epistemic vacuum into which Samuel P. Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations?” (1993; expanded 1996) intervened. Writing at a moment when the bipolar ideological grammar of global politics had collapsed, Huntington proposed that future conflicts would no longer be organized primarily around ideology or political economy, but around civilizational identity, with religion—particularly Islam—serving as a principal fault line.

His now-infamous claim that “Islam has bloody borders” did not invent anti-Muslim sentiment, but it re-coded geopolitical anxiety into civilizational terms, providing an interpretive template through which disparate conflicts could be read as manifestations of a single cultural antagonism.

Crucially, Huntington did not theorize “Islamic terrorism” as a discrete analytic category in the contemporary sense; rather, he pre-framed Islam as a civilizational challenger whose internal coherence and external assertiveness rendered it structurally prone to conflict with the West. This move proved decisive. By relocating violence from contingent political contexts (occupation, Cold War proxy wars, authoritarian repression) to the level of civilization, Huntington’s framework enabled later acts of violence by Muslim actors to be read not merely as strategic or ideological, but as symptomatic of an underlying civilizational disposition.

In this sense, “Islamic terrorism” emerged less as a neutral descriptor and more as a derivative category, nested within a broader civilizational imaginary already primed to perceive Islam as antagonistic, irrational, and resistant to liberal modernity.

V. Discursive Authorization and the Foreclosure of Symmetry

The significance of Huntington lies not in empirical accuracy—his thesis has been widely critiqued—but in discursive authorization. After the 1990s, and especially following 9/11, policy-makers, media institutions, and security establishments found in the “clash” thesis a ready-made narrative scaffold: Islamist violence could now be narrated as confirmation rather than anomaly.

This early enframing shaped what counted as intelligible evidence. When groups like Al-Qaeda or ISIS articulated their violence in religious terms, these claims were not simply reported; they were absorbed into an already available civilizational script, transforming self-description into civilizational proof.

Importantly, this framing also foreclosed symmetry from the outset. Violence by non-Muslim actors—whether Christian militias, Jewish extremists, or later Hindu and Buddhist nationalists—did not map onto an equivalent civilizational threat narrative, because no comparable “Christian civilization vs. the rest” thesis had achieved hegemonic status after the Cold War.

A critical but open-minded reading must therefore distinguish between Huntington as originator and Huntington as accelerator. He did not cause Islamist violence, nor did he single-handedly invent Islamophobia. What he did provide was an early epistemic alignment between post–Cold War insecurity, Orientalist inheritance, and civilizational reductionism—an alignment that made the later emergence and persistence of “Islamic terrorism” appear not only plausible, but almost inevitable.

VI. Asymmetry in Naming Violence

Selective Application and Power Selectivity

Implicit in the statement but analytically pivotal is the asymmetry: violence by white supremacists, Christian fundamentalists (e.g., clinic bombings), Hindu nationalists, or Buddhist militants is seldom religionized, with motives psychologized or structural ideologies backgrounded. This selectivity follows power, not precision—e.g., the IRA’s Catholic ties were rarely framed as “Christian terrorism.”

In contrast, “Islamic terrorism” constructs Islam as a threat object, justifying disproportionate scrutiny. X posts allege UAE-funded campaigns targeting Muslims in Europe, potentially coordinating with Israel to export Islamophobia and destabilize cohesion. Critically, however, some sources defend the focus: Pew Research notes varying support for terrorism in Muslim publics (e.g., higher in Jordan), and Jane’s Intelligence Review highlights jihadist infrastructures in the West.

An open-minded view integrates this: while asymmetry reveals bias, empirical disparities (e.g., 90% of UK terror convictions involving Islamic extremists) warrant targeted analysis without generalization.

VII. Naming as Governance

From Description to Disciplinary Functions

Drawing from Foucault’s power-knowledge nexus, naming “Islamic terrorism” disciplines by categorizing Islam as a security risk, enabling surveillance (e.g., the PATRIOT Act), wars, and policies like veil bans. Race & Class links this to Orientalist dogmas, while the British Council critiques neo-Orientalism viewing Islamic culture as a threat.

X debates show “Islamophobia” accusations disciplining critics. Yet, proponents argue its descriptive utility: DNI lists highlight patterns for counterterrorism, and sources like the ACLU’s Bar emphasize understanding religious-ideological factors for effective strategy. Critically, this undervalues alternatives—e.g., addressing grievances like alienation—but open-mindedly, the term’s disciplinary role may coexist with genuine security needs, as evidenced by declining fatalities post-2014 amid targeted interventions.

VII.A. Myth, Naturalization, and the Semiotics of “Islamic Terrorism” (Roland Barthes)

Roland Barthes’ theory of myth provides a crucial semiotic lens for understanding how the term “Islamic terrorism” operates not merely as a descriptor of violence, but as a mechanism of naturalization. In Mythologies (1957), Barthes conceptualizes myth as a second-order semiological system in which an already meaningful sign (language, image, or concept) is stripped of its historical density and re-presented as self-evident, commonsensical truth. Myth does not deny reality; rather, it transforms history into nature. It renders contingent social relations and political formations as obvious, timeless, and inevitable.

Viewed through this framework, “Islamic terrorism” functions as a modern political myth. At the level of first-order signification, the term appears empirically grounded: certain violent non-state actors explicitly invoke Islamic symbols, texts, and vocabularies to justify their actions. This empirical referent gives the term its appearance of truth. However, at the mythic level, this referent is emptied of its historical and political conditions—colonial legacies, Cold War militarization, proxy conflicts, authoritarian repression, global inequality, and contemporary geopolitical interventions—and re-filled with a civilizational essence. What emerges is not a falsehood, but a depoliticized truth: a sign that appears to explain violence while in fact obscuring its production.

In Barthesian terms, the myth of “Islamic terrorism” is thus at a time true and unreal. It is true insofar as it draws upon visible signs—religious rhetoric, iconography, and self-identification—but unreal insofar as it converts these signs into an ontological explanation, presenting Islam itself as the causal substrate of violence. The historical specificity of militant Islamism is thereby displaced by an abstracted, transhistorical image of Islam-as-threat. Violence ceases to be read as a political strategy situated in particular contexts and becomes instead a naturalized expression of cultural or religious essence.

This mythic operation also explains the term’s remarkable resilience in public discourse despite sustained scholarly critique. Myths, as Barthes observes, are not maintained because they are analytically rigorous, but because they are functional. By rendering violence immediately legible and morally ordered—dividing the world into secular rationality and religious fanaticism—the myth of “Islamic terrorism” satisfies the epistemic needs of security governance, media narration, and popular common sense. It offers not understanding, but reassurance: a stable meaning in the face of geopolitical uncertainty.

Crucially, myth works through asymmetry. Just as bourgeois ideology presents its own historical interests as universal norms, the myth of “Islamic terrorism” isolates Islam as uniquely religionized violence, while other forms of terror—whether rooted in Hindu fundamentalism, Zionism, Christian fundamentalism, ethno-nationalism, or racial supremacy—remain de-mythologized, normalized, individualized, or psychologized. The selective mythification of Muslim violence thus reinforces existing power hierarchies, allowing dominant political orders to appear neutral, rational, and non-ideological, even as they engage in large-scale violence of their own.

To expose “Islamic terrorism” as myth, however, is not to deny the reality of terror or the sincerity of religious self-framing. Rather, it is to re-historicize what myth seeks to freeze. Barthes’ intervention invites a critical reversal: to restore politics where myth has installed nature, to recover complexity where common sense has imposed closure, and to recognize that the most effective ideologies are those that do not announce themselves as such. In this sense, the critique of “Islamic terrorism” as myth is not an evasion of violence, but a refusal to allow violence to be explained through civilizational caricature masquerading as truth.

VIII. Persistence Despite Critique

Functionality over Truth

The term endures because it is empirically reinforced (self-framing), institutionally embedded (e.g., security agencies), ideologically primed (civilizational narratives), and politically useful (justifying coercion). X users criticize “Islamophobia” as fascist silencing, while defenses note its fading in rhetoric (e.g., Trump’s shift to domestic issues) but relevance in data (e.g., 91% male, young extremists in convictions).

Critically, persistence may overstate Western agency; internal Muslim factors like radicalism (per Scirp.org) contribute. Open-mindedly, this invites comparative analysis: why does “Islamic” stick when “Christian” for abortion clinic bombings does not?

VIII.A The Political Economy of Jihadism: Financing, Militarization, and the War Market

A critical limitation of civilizational and discursive accounts of “Islamic terrorism” lies in their abstraction from material infrastructures. Jihadist violence does not circulate in a vacuum of belief; it is embedded in a transnational political economy of war. From the Cold War arming of Islamist militias by the CIA, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan’s ISI in Afghanistan, to contemporary Gulf-based financing networks, charity laundering, and black-market arms pipelines in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and the Sahel, militant Islamism has functioned as a subsidized form of militarized labor within regions devastated by imperial and proxy conflict.

In this sense, organizations such as Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram are not merely theological movements but franchise-like war enterprises operating within fractured political economies. They recruit from vast pools of displaced, unemployed, and traumatized young men whose societies have been structurally dismantled by foreign intervention, sanctions regimes, and authoritarian repression. The global circulation of “Islamic terrorism” as a category thus obscures the extent to which jihadist violence is materially enabled, logistically sustained, and strategically tolerated by state and non-state actors within the international system.

Religion, here, functions less as a causal origin than as a mobilizing language through which war is rendered meaningful to those whose material lives have been rendered disposable. To ignore this political economy is to misrecognize jihadism as metaphysical pathology rather than as the militarized expression of post-imperial collapse.

VIII.B Colonial Genealogies of Jihadist Theology

The theological forms that animate contemporary jihadism are themselves products of colonial history. Salafi-Wahhabi doctrines, often treated as ancient Islamic continuities, were in fact politically elevated through British imperial strategy in Arabia, the destruction of Ottoman pluralist governance, and the subsequent Saudi petro-theological export regime after 1979. During the Cold War, these doctrinal currents were weaponized through U.S.–Saudi–Pakistani sponsorship of Islamist fighters against the Soviet Union, entrenching a militant scripturalism detached from Islam’s historically diverse jurisprudential traditions.

What is today called “Islamic terrorism” is therefore not the eruption of medieval Islam into modernity, but the crystallization of Islam under colonial dismemberment, authoritarian compression, and geopolitical instrumentalization. Jihadist theology is a theology of wreckage—of societies whose political horizons were systematically foreclosed and whose religious vocabularies were radicalized under conditions of imperial violence.

This genealogy radically destabilizes essentialist readings: militant Islamism does not testify to Islam’s intrinsic character, but to the ways in which Islam was reorganized under the pressures of empire, Cold War militarization, and petro-authoritarianism.

VIII.C Theological Misrecognition: Jihad, Ripujaya, and the War Against the Inner Enemy

One of the most consequential distortions in the discourse on “Islamic terrorism” is the systematic reduction of jihad to physical violence. In classical Islamic theology, jihad (from jahada, “to strive”) primarily signifies struggle, not warfare. The Prophet Muhammad is reported in early traditions to have distinguished between the lesser jihad (armed struggle under strict ethical and defensive constraints) and the greater jihad (al-jihad al-akbar): the lifelong struggle against the nafs—the ego, greed, rage, fear, and moral corruption within the self.

Across centuries of Islamic jurisprudence and Sufi philosophy, this inner jihad was central. Jihad meant disciplining desire, resisting injustice, speaking truth to power, and cultivating ethical life under God. Armed struggle, where it existed, was always conditional: defensive, proportionate, and governed by strict rules protecting civilians, non-combatants, and even enemy property. What modern jihadist movements have done is not to preserve jihad but to invert it. They have taken a spiritual-ethical discipline and converted it into a doctrine of extermination. This inversion is not a continuation of Islam; it is its theological negation.

This corruption is not unique to Islam. A striking parallel exists in Hindu philosophy through the concept of Ripujaya—the conquest of the six inner enemies (shadripu): kāma (lust), krodha (anger), lobha (greed), moha (delusion), mada (ego), and mātsarya (envy). In classical Hindu ethics, these are the true adversaries. The battlefield is the human psyche; the war is inward. From the Upanishads to the Bhagavad Gita, ethical life is understood as impossible without mastery over these destructive forces. Krishna does not teach Arjuna to hate; he teaches him to act without ego, rage, or possessiveness. Violence, where unavoidable, is tragic and bounded—not sacred.

Like jihad, Ripujaya is fundamentally about self-mastery before world-mastery.

What Islamist fundamentalism has done to jihad is exactly what Hindutva has done to Ripujaya. Hindu nationalist ideology does not seek the conquest of anger, greed, and ego; it seeks the conquest of Muslims, Christians, Dalits, dissenters, and the secular state. The inner enemy is displaced onto external bodies. Likewise, jihadist ideology no longer wages war against injustice, tyranny, or moral corruption within Muslim societies; it wages war against Shias, secular Muslims, women, journalists, artists, and non-believers. In both cases, the enemy is relocated from the soul to society. That move is the birth of religious fascism.

Classical Islamic theology explicitly forbids what jihadists practice: the killing of innocents (haram), the reckless declaration of other Muslims as apostates (takfīr), and the privatization of holy war by non-legitimate authorities. Jihadist movements violate all three. They do not practice jihad; they commit theological apostasy in the name of jihad. Their doctrine is not Islam, but war theology—a modern hybrid shaped by Cold War militarization, Saudi petro-clericalism, colonial trauma, and the collapse of social and political meaning.

Christian Crusaders, Hindu nationalists, Jewish extremists, and Islamist militants all perform the same operation: they take a spiritual discipline meant to restrain violence and turn it into a license to kill. That is why the problem is not Islam, but organized religion when fused with state power, masculine grievance, and identity panic.

When Islam is portrayed as inherently violent, what is actually being observed is the product of colonial disruption, geopolitical weaponization of faith, and the modern fundamentalist theft of spiritual concepts. The same theft is occurring across traditions. Jihad is not terrorism. Ripujaya is not lynch mobs. Dharma is not domination. Faith is not fascism.

The true struggle—in every civilization—is not against another people, but against greed, fear, rage, and the lust to dominate. That is the jihad. That is Ripujaya.

VIII.D Racialization and the Ontologization of Muslim Violence

The asymmetry in naming analyzed earlier operates through a deeper process: the racialization of Muslims. In contemporary security discourse, Islam no longer functions merely as a religion but as a quasi-racial marker. Muslimness is treated as a latent security risk independent of belief, behavior, or political affiliation. Secular Muslims, refugees, and even critics of religion remain legible as suspect bodies.

This racialization explains why violence committed by Muslims is ontologized—attributed to who they are—while violence committed by whites, Christians, or other majorities is psychologized or individualized. “Islamic terrorism” thus operates as a racial technology, transforming political violence into evidence of civilizational pathology and converting Muslim identity itself into a site of surveillance.

In this sense, the term functions analogously to earlier racialized categories of threat in imperial governance, rendering an entire population intelligible as a security problem.

VIII.E The Empire–Terror Feedback Loop

A further structural dynamic sustaining the category is the recursive relationship between Western intervention and jihadist violence. Military occupations, drone warfare, regime-change operations, and sanctions regimes generate precisely the conditions—state collapse, civilian trauma, political humiliation—under which militant Islamism thrives. The resulting attacks are then cited as justification for further intervention, expanding the security state and deepening the cycle.

“Islamic terrorism” becomes the narrative lubricant of this loop: it converts the blowback of imperial violence into proof of civilizational threat, thereby erasing the causal role of Western power in producing the very militancy it claims to fight.

VIII.F Gender, Masculinity, and the Recruitment Economy

Jihadist movements are also deeply gendered. Their recruitment pipelines are disproportionately male because they operate within societies where economic collapse, political repression, and military occupation have stripped young men of social status, employment, and future prospects. Militant Islamism offers not only ideology but a script of restored masculinity: weapons, authority, martyrdom, and transcendence.

This hyper-masculine economy of violence is often misread as religious fanaticism, when it is in fact a gendered response to structural humiliation.

IX. From Civilizational Myth to Historical Explanation

Taken together, these dimensions compel a decisive conceptual shift. “Islamic terrorism” survives not because it is analytically superior, but because it is politically efficient: it racializes, dehistoricizes, and naturalizes violence in ways that stabilize global hierarchies.

A more accurate framing would name what is actually occurring: militarized Islamist insurgency within post-imperial collapse zones, sustained by geopolitical proxy warfare, petro-theological funding, racialized security regimes, and gendered crisis economies.

Religion remains part of this picture—but not as essence. It functions as language, symbol, and mobilizing repertoire within a system whose primary engines are imperial disruption, authoritarian governance, and global inequality.

To abandon the myth of “Islamic terrorism” is not to deny the reality of terror. It is to restore politics, history, and power to where myth has installed nature—and to refuse a civilizational alibi for a world structured by war.

IX. Deeper Implications and Pathways Forward

Ultimately, the category “Islamic terrorism” performs what may be called civilizational condensation: it compresses the immense historical, theological, cultural, and political diversity of Muslim societies into a single, securitized threat-sign. Through this condensation, a planetary faith of over a billion people becomes legible primarily as a risk category, while vast landscapes of non-Islamic violence—state terror, white supremacist attacks, settler colonial militarism, and Christian, Hindu, or Jewish extremism—remain discursively fragmented, psychologized, or normalized. The result is not merely analytical distortion but a reorganization of moral perception itself, in which some deaths appear tragic while others become administratively invisible.

At the same time, any critical account must resist the opposite error: the erasure of militant Islamist violence as a real, devastating, and internally generated phenomenon. Empirical patterns—including those acknowledged even in mainstream syntheses—show that the majority of victims of jihadist violence are themselves Muslims, often targeted through doctrines of takfīr that declare entire communities apostate and thus disposable. These movements have inflicted catastrophic harm on Muslim societies, tearing apart fragile states, obliterating cultural pluralism, and subjecting ordinary believers to regimes of fear in the name of divine purification. To deny this violence is not anti-imperial; it is an abdication of solidarity with its primary victims.

What is required, therefore, is not a choice between “Islamophobia” and “apologetics,” but a critical synthesis capable of holding power and violence in the same analytic frame. Such a synthesis recognizes that militant Islamism is simultaneously a product of post-imperial collapse, authoritarian repression, and geopolitical militarization—and also a form of religious fundamentalism that weaponizes scripture, myth, and eschatology to legitimize domination, patriarchy, and mass killing.

This recognition leads to a more general and uncomfortable conclusion: the problem is not Islam as a lived faith, but organized religion when fused with political-economic absolutism. Across traditions, from Christian nationalism to Hindu majoritarianism, from Zionist theocracy to Islamist theonomy, fundamentalism emerges when religious symbols are converted into instruments of state power, social discipline, and exclusion. In these forms, religion ceases to be a spiritual or ethical practice and becomes an apparatus of governance—a technology for dividing humanity into the pure and the damned, the chosen and the disposable.

Resisting “Islamic terrorism,” then, cannot be separated from resisting all forms of theocratic and civilizational authoritarianism. It requires not only security measures but political and cultural transformations: the dismantling of proxy wars and occupation regimes, the restoration of pluralist civic institutions in Muslim societies, the defunding of petro-theological export networks, and the protection of theological diversity against both jihadist coercion and state repression.

Equally, it demands a transformation of Western discourse: a move away from racialized civilizational frames toward a language capable of naming violence wherever it appears, whether draped in the flag, the cross, the temple, or the mosque. Only when terror is understood as a political and institutional phenomenon—rather than a property of any one faith—can both jihadist violence and anti-Muslim prejudice be confronted without hypocrisy.

In a fractured, multipolar world, the stakes could not be higher. The choice is not between secular modernity and religious barbarism, but between pluralist, self-critical societies and fundamentalist systems of identity that sanctify killing in the name of eternal truth. To reject the myth of “Islamic terrorism” is not to excuse terror—it is to refuse the deeper lie that any civilization, any scripture, or any people are born to be its carriers.

References

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