What is the ideology motivating alleged “warriors of God” to “trample Islam underfoot in the name of Jihad”? Algerian anthropologist Mahfoud Bennoune explored this question in 1994, offering an analysis of the political beliefs motivating “throat-slitting emirs” still much-needed today.
Today’s brutal jihadists like “Islamic State” follow in the footsteps of fundamentalists who have afflicted Muslim majority societies since the 12th century. Algerian anthropologist Mahfoud Bennoune revisited that history in order to strategize against jihadists - a task which remains essential.
The desire to stereotype and create generalizations often stifles the conversation about gender relations in the regions of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. So should I be silent?
If European society at large is applying an exclusionary logic to certain groups, it is only encouraging the retention and expansion of a sedentary identity formation in these groups. A rise in reactionary politics should come as no surprise.
Isaac and Isaiah by David Caute and Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan - tales of how Cold Warriors failed to capture hearts and minds - contain an important lesson for our battle against extremist Jihadis.
Jewish people have been legitimately concerned with their own suffering; perhaps it is time to consider what suffering their governments may have imposed on others.
Visibly Muslim females were the subject of anti-Muslim hate and elderly Muslim men and women going about their daily business have also been subjected to fear, intimidation and abuse.
Why did the police not take the investigation seriously at first? Why did the political elite need six victims to admit that these people were murdered because of their Roma identity, to acknowledge the neo-Nazi terrorist nature of their acts?
Groups hold similar roots of discontent, such as poverty, discrimination and the sense of values under threat, but manifest these sentiments in an array of diverse extremist ideologies with highly varied targeted ‘Others’.
As with most other societies that have forced Islamism underground, today’s British fighters in Iraq and Syria were in all likelihood unconvinced by the quietism of Britain’s religious scholars.
