Religious Extremism

Yesterday in Tbilisi  a peaceful protest for LGBT rights to mark the International Day Against Homophobia ended in a physical scuffle when religious groups violently disrupted the gathering. In this letter, I try to search for reasons for intolerance and explain the calamity of certain actors by structural factors.

Many Muslims complain that the current news media focus on the proliferation of Islamic terrorist groups in the Middle East and other parts of the world unfairly portrays Islam as a religion that condones the use of terrorism. Given the fact that throughout human history conflicting religious beliefs have often been used by adherents of all of the world’s major religious faiths as a rationale for the use of terrorism, there may be some justification for these complaints. Therefore, this essay will review literature and research published from1984 to 2005, which analyzes religiously inspired violence and terrorism by Buddhist, Christian, Hindu and Jewish as well as Islamic extremists. It is hoped that a broader and deeper understanding of the root causes of various different types of pseudo-religious political terrorism might open the door to more constructive dialogues between religious and political leaders of all religious faiths on ways to reduce religiously inspired violent terrorism. It should also be noted that although many books and articles have been written about religiously inspired Islamic terrorism in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, three of the works reviewed here, which examine religiously inspired terrorist attacks attributed to all of the world’s major religions, were published prior to 2001.

"The upsurge of terrorism in our contemporary world set in motion debates on “perfectly suited definition of the perpetrators of terrorism.”  Some scholars narrowed the concept to mean activities that are within the purview of non-state actors, as against the idea of state terrorism. Others however, advanced the concept of state terrorism and its narrow focus on terrorism studies, employing both theoretical and empirical facts to back up their claims. However, adopting the neo-Gramscian perceptive of hegemony in explaining the politics of terrorism conceptualizing with particular reference to Nigeria has not been fully explored. This article employs the neo-Gramscian theory of hegemony, historical structure and world order, as advanced by Robert Cox in explicating the concept of state terrorism in Nigeria and examining empirical evidences that indict the Nigerian state in acts of terrorism

Keywords: Terrorism, State Terrorism, Religious extremism, Neo-Gramsci, Hegemony, Nigeria
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"Reprinted in: Esotericism, Religion, and Politics. Edited by Arthur Versluis, Lee Irwin, and Melinda Phillips. New Cultures Press 2012. Pp. 129-154.
Comment by Mark Sedgwick: http://traditionalistblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/is-dugin-traditionalist.html
Rebuttal by Anton Shekhovtsov: http://anton-shekhovtsov.blogspot.com/2009/11/is-aleksandr-dugin-traditionalist.html
The opposite view by a Duginist: http://evrazia.org/article/1315"