The term violent extremism and the reasons of extremism
Most of the studies on the phenomenon of extremism agree that it is not related to a specific religion, culture, ethnicity or civilization, rather, it is a human phenomenon, like all phenomena that can exist at any time and in any place; Noting that there is a possibility of a central element or central elements that determine the difference in extremism from time to time, and from place to place, such as the Islamic religion in contemporary violent extremism, for example. On the other hand, it was pointed out that this phenomenon is expressed in a package of terms that meet here and separate there, according to the terms of reference of each party.
There is the term “extremism”, there is the term “violent extremism”, there is the term “exaggeration”, there is the term “terrorism”, and there is the term “Islamic extremism” and “Islamic terrorism.” There is also a disagreement over the state’s violence, is it terrorism or not? The evidence here is that all of these terms, and the differences between them, ultimately express a manifestation of an act or actions based on an intellectual vision that considers the other who different as a threat, and violence must be used to remove him. All these terms despite the differences between them they agree on the final result, which is the use of violence, meaning terrorism, and here, I prefer to use the term “extremism” to mean “violent extremism” and “terrorism”, especially in relation to what the groups and organizations that used to call terrorist or extremist do. For more information regarding the term, please refer to Dr. Amin Hassan Omar series of articles entitled “Terrorism; Dilemmas of Identification and Confrontation”, which were published in the Sudanese newspaper (Al-Sahafa) in August 2016, which is available on the web. Haji Warraq‘s study, entitled “Toward a Sudanese Humane View of the Issues of Violent Extremism,” published in the online newspaper (Hurriyat) in March 2018.
The report adopts the term “violent extremism” as the extremism that takes the Islamic religion as its reference. Extremism, with this definition, has a long history in Sudan. There are many evidences for its manifestations in the various central periods in the history of Sudan, including the post-independence period, including the accusations of Takfir (Muslim declaring another Muslim, or any individual, as a non-believer) and the provisions of apostasy, indeed, the killings events that took place during these periods with claims that based on the use of religion to justify violence in its different forms against those who disagree.Considerable studies of violent extremism agree that this phenomenon has its own causes; each cause leads to the other. There are economic, social, psychological and political reasons, as well as the cognitive reasons related to how extremists receive their religious information, and how they interpret a religious text. Each of these causes expands to interact and overlap with other causes, so that it is not possible to rely on one of them, whatever its reasonableness.
There are three main factors and influences that contributed to the development and formation of extremist groups:
- The emergence and development of modern Islamic movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood movement with its various names. These movements, despite the fact that most of them worked and work according to the law in many Arab and African countries, and although some of them are steadily seeking to renew many of their ideas on many critical issues, they often deal with many of the issues constituting extremism with many Pragmatism and political imperatives such as the issue of apostasy, for example, the issue of women’s rights, and issues of non-Muslims’ rights in the Muslim-majority country, which can be called “deferred issues” among the activist Islam groups
- The phenomenon of violent extremism is related to the dominant economic, political and cultural system, meaning the global capitalist system or neoliberalism, represented in the aspect of its violent modernity and its totalitarian centralization.
- This phenomenon is, in addition to being the result of objective and subjective conditions, but from other aspects it is “manufactured” in the sense that it was subjected or subject to “foster” that nourish, develop and improve it, and the fosters concerned here are some of the intelligence agencies, especially the CIA and its allies, such as some Arab and foreign intelligence.
