A common flaw in Islamist & Post Islamist perception of Islamic militancy

Islamists and post Islamist worldviews diverge on numerous dimensions of Islam and the issues confronting Muslim Ummah. However, in one key area they converge: Muslim predicament in conflict zones. Both the Islamists and post Islamist Islamists view the current violent conflict in Muslim lands from purely religious perspective. The Islamists perceive the ongoing war in different parts of Muslim world as a clash of civilizations, an endless war between Islam and the Judeo-Christian civilization of the West. Much of their violent response to the Western powers primarily emanates from this traditional “Us” and “Them” worldview of mutual distrust, animosity and conflict. In the same way, the post Islamists interpret the ongoing militancy in Islamic world as purely religious in nature, motivated by the traditional narrative of Islam indoctrinated in Madrassas. If a counter narrative is developed and propagated among the Muslims, the post Islamists believe, Islamic militancy will fizzle out.Both the Islamist narrative and post Islamist counter narrative are essentially reductionists and simplistic in that both define the violent interaction between Muslims and the Western powers in religious terms, almost to the exclusion of all other factors. True that religion is an important motivating factor for the Muslim resistance forces, yet the dynamics of conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Palestine and elsewhere in the Muslim world cannot and should not be confined to Islam or a particular interpretation of Islam. Nothing would be father from the truth than to reduce the complex nature of intractable conflict within the Muslim world into religious motivation. There are indeed diverse socio-cultural, economic, strategic, political as well as religious drivers of the conflict in different countries. Just as the simplistic understanding of Islamists is leading them nowhere, so is the post Islamist approach too naive and misleading.
If conflicts were that simple as portrayed by the rival camps, the world would have been a much easier and peaceful place as conflict resolution and transformation would not have been such a challenging, resource intensive, time-consuming and complicated process. There was certainly no religious narrative involved in some of the bloodiest conflicts of the world such as Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Somalia, Nigeria, WW-I and WW-II, to cite just a few cases in point, yet the conflict lingered on for years and decades, with far more devastating consequences. It is dangerous to portray complex phenomena in such an artificial manner.

Writer : Karam Ilahi