I find such loose definitions of words serve more to confuse than clarify, but I guess that’s just me.

On Imperialism I’m close to Said. Borders are a moot subject. A forced ‘unification’, how does one decide it actually is ‘one nation’? Only after that forced (or not) unification. How big is the ‘homeland’?
In still think that a ‘struggle for supremacy’ is close to a definition of Imerialism. Supremacy over what? Moot indeed.

I also note that those who do not want to go into relatively recent examples of Islamic imperialism are keen to invoke the Crusades… 🙂
I did not imply *at all* that the ‘West despising Salafist Wahabist madrassas’ (indeed more recent than the start of the migration) were the reason the muslim immigrants in Europe stayed, Only that they made integration much more difficult, if not close to impossible.

‘Colonisation’ is a correct term here, meseems: in many areas muslims have replaced the original population, imposing their Islamic rules and culture. How would you call it otherwise?

As Heather pointed out, Islam is more than just a religion.

This is almost exactly what I’ve expressed several times myself in the past, although I usually use the Westboro Baptist Church as my example. Jim Jones is a better one because of things like practice runs where he tells them to drink poison that turned out not to be poison and other extreme forms of control.

Knowing about Outb is vital to understanding Islamism, and I think in this post I wrote about how bin Laden rejected even the Wahhabism practiced in Saudi Arabia as not being pure enough. The writings of Qutb are referred to in the CNN/Fareed Zakaria documentary I posted a few weeks ago: Why They hate Us.

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1. Islam has many problems that need to be addressed in relation to human rights and social justice questions.

2. Terrorism should not be mixed up with those generic problems facing Islam. Islamist terrorism is a recent development that needs to be explained on its own terms — and that means studying the origins and spread of the Islamist ideology in recent decades, including the ideological writings laying down its foundations and setting out its goals, methods and rationale.

3. As for the difference between motivation and justifications the division is not always black and white. But studies into the processes of radicalization show that religion is usually the worst predictor of who will become radicalized because those who do become extremists generally only show a suddenly new zealous interest in religious ideas after they have already moved well along the path towards extremism. By the time that new interest is evident it is too late to do anything to change them in too many cases.

One study showed that would-be suicide bombers often were the ones who received their most intense religious indoctrination only after they were committed to their cause.

One often hears someone say yes of course social and political factors are also a cause but at the same time they speak of Islam as if it is the only cause and one cannot understand what significant role other factors actually play. I think this is because so much of our view is governed by a broader hostility to religion generally and Islam in particular.

But if we try to step outside our biases and study the research literature we find it by and large supports what Maajid Nawaz expresses in his book co-authored with Sam Harris. (I am no fan of Maajid, by the way, but that’s for other reasons.)

What dismays me in this debate is how so few people seem willing to read the serious research into Islamist extremism, the processes of radicalization, etc. and rely upon lay views that unfortunately rubbish that research (misrepresenting it, in fact) and fan little more than an all round anti-religious and anti-Islamic bigotry.

Sure Islam and religion have a lot to answer for and lots to change. But let’s be careful and get our facts straight — do a bit of serious study of the research — when we’re talking about terrorism.

Coel– Islamism is not Islam. Islamism is a religious-political ideology that rejects mainstream Islam as apostate. Islamism is as much at war with Islam as with the West, even moreso because it sees Islamic clerics and rulers and political systems as a betrayal of the “faith”.

Islamism is to Islam as Jim Jones or some other cult is to Christianity. Of course Jim Jones and other cults proclaim that only they represent True Christianity and they quote literally sections of the Bible. But no-one believes them — quite rightly, too.

Look at Maajid Nawaz’s boyhood — he describes n his autobiography the fear and horror among mainstream Muslims (his parents included) at the reports of spreading Islamism.

Read the Islamist founding documents. If you want to know what Nazism was about you could not go past Mein Kampf. Ditto if you want to know what Islamism is about you can’t go past Qutb and Naji’s “Management of Savagery”.

We alienate our best allies in the fight against Islamism when we blame Islam for extremism.

Coel, you wrote: “according to you — it has no role in determining whether people are moderate or extremist, peaceful or violent; the only role it plays is in being pointed to in post-hoc rationalisation by people who are violent for other reasons.”

What I wrote was: “I meant to add that research into terrorist activity has never disputed the role of religion in the case of Islamist terrorists. That is as obvious as the nose on one’s face.”

I have never disputed the role of religion as a factor involved in the reason many people become terrorists. Scott Atran, contrary to what Harris and Coyne say about his research, actually writes that religion is a motivation of Islamic terrorists.

Take Bin Laden for example. He stated his motivations very clearly and they were geo-political. They were also religious. He expressed his rationale for his geo-political goals in religious terms. The religion was his justification for his political goals.

That is not reducing to religion to a mere afterthought. It is more than that.

I have been posting a series on the books setting out the foundational Islamist ideology that has spawned todays Islamist terrorist movement. The first was by Qutb. What we are seeing today is a religious revolutionary ideology that is very dangerous.

Once one reads the writings of the likes of Qutb and others one sees that religion is an essential factor (obviously) but the question facing us is what attracts people to this revolutionary ideology that declares, in effect, all other Muslims to be apostates.

Just blaming Islam does nothing to explain this attraction. Most Muslims reject it, and in fact are the targets of the extremists. Islam can be called upon with more justification why most Muslims reject Islamism (i.e. the politico-religious ideology of the terrorists).

We know once a person is wrapped up in the extremist groups he and she see themselves as very devout and desiring only martyrdom. That’s not your average everyday Muslim.

There is abundant research to explain why this attraction. I wish Sam Harris would listen just a wee bit more closely to his colleague Maajid Nawaz in understanding some of this and not misrepresenting it.

I meant the fact that Muslim countries were once colonisers should not be used as an excuse by westereners to avoid advocating for less imperialist foreign policies now.

Ok, thanks for clarifying that. Yes it takes two, the coloniser and the colonised.

If we’re going to say that almost any “struggle for supremacy” is imperialism, the word will lose it’s meaning. From Wiki:

Imperialism means “to extend a country’s power through military and diplomacy”. Its name originated from the Latin word imperium, which means to rule over large territories. Imperialism is “a policy of extending a country’s power and influence through colonization, use of military force, or other means”. It has also allowed for the rapid spread of technologies and ideas. The term imperialism has been applied to Western (and Japanese) political and economic dominance especially in Asia and Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. Its precise meaning continues to be debated by scholars. Some writers, such as Edward Said, use the term more broadly to describe any system of domination and subordination organised with an imperial center and a periphery.

This applies perfectly to what the caliphs did in extending Arabia’s power and control well beyond Arabia, all the way to Spain. It does not fit with creation of a united Arabia itself.

Your theory of cheap labour is surely part of the reason for Muslim immigration, but it’s not nearly the whole story, and “‘west-despising’ whahabist madrasas”, being a recent phenomenon, have little to do with why they stayed. In France and Britain, for instance, most Muslims came from their colonies and had a right to stay as British and French citizens. These Muslim communities are now many generations old and predate any influence from the whahabists. It’s true that integration was bungled. The US has done a much better job at this. And of course, neither has much to do with the huge influx of refugees from states western imperialism helped to break.

The fascists don’t understand the problem, they are just exploiting people’s fears. They are the ‘reality-detached’, those who complain about immigrants and refugees, but who will take no responsibility for their own part in creating the mess, but think a racist policy of just closing borders will fix the problem.

And those comments, Ken, I can (for a change) wholeheartedly agree with. 🙂