Is it correct to identify terrorism with ‘Islamism’?

• 
• Murat Sofuoglu
• 3 days ago

According to Azami, France’s laicite, which defends a strict separation between religion and state, is nothing but another deeply intolerant religion that is used as a tool to straightjacket others by force. 

Therefore seeing any sign of Islamic presence in public space as an offense to those values reveals the social fault lines of the French majority. And professing laicite like a priest preaching God’s commandments, Azami says France’s founding principles are inherently self-contradictory.

“These new religions are being imposed by force on the global audience. Other religious traditions, like Islam, are by contrast vilified as terroristic,” he says.

Which violence is good?

Despite their fierce defence of enlightenment values and democracy, Azami and other critics think that modern nation states like France tolerate a lot of other violence across the world like places in India and China as state-sanctioned policies — a stance that smacks of hypocrisy.

“The reality is that innumerable forms of terroristic violence exist around the world and they are many, they are constant and they are frequent. In some respects, it’s perpetual. They are also done in the name of other ideological values, such as those of secularism. But when it comes to Islam, mainstream discourse insists on identifying it as Islamist,” Azami says.

For example, despite the fact that Syria’s Assad regime, which is based on a secularist Arab nationalist ideology known as Baathism, has committed many atrocities against its own people, and it is not usually identified as a “terrorist” state, Azami says.

Myanmar’s Buddhist-majority nationalist regime’s atrocities against the Rohingya Muslims have also not been identified as an example of terrorism, Azami says, whether nationalist or Buddhist terrorism.

“The same goes for India, whose state ideology is currently both Hindu and nationalist. I think what is key here is the nationalism component because nationalism is the ubiquitous secular religion of the modern world,” says Azami.

“One of the most extreme examples of such secular/nationalist violence today that certainly deserves the emotive label of state-sponsored terrorism is China’s persecution of the Uyghur Turks.”

“Such states are massacring, killing, imprisoning, torturing and depriving of basic human dignity of millions of people. This is happening constantly — every single day,” he says. 

Despite all these horrors, no one is talking about the nation-state’s “terrorism,” be it Chinese or Indian. The emotionally charged term of “terrorism” is almost exclusively used to designate violent acts committed by Muslims.

“Yet when a relatively small number of people in Europe are tragically attacked by vile and criminal elements within these societies — and even one such murder is absolutely unacceptable — everyone starts talking about ‘Islamist’ terrorists,” Azami says.

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