TERRORISM AND ISLAM: INHERENT OR INCIDENTAL CONNECTION?

Abstract

Ever since the 9/11, the world has come to experience the unfortunate reverberations of transnational terrorism. While the effects of such dastardly and lethal acts leave much to be desired, it has never failed to be noticed that the greater part of and the most heinous of these terrorist attacks are championed by Muslims and in the name of Islam. In Nigeria the two monsters of Boko Haram and Fulani militia have this Islamic connection. These have led to lots of aspersion cast on Islam as religion as well as heightened Islamophobia in some quarters. The question is whether this Islamic connection is merely incidental or inherent. The piece therefore is concerned with to what extent Islam as religion fuels terrorism and violence in general. It tries to find out if it has such potency in itself or is it a congregation of factors. In doing this it uses the philosophical methods of analysis and hermeneutics. It discovers that while there are presence of non-religious factors as well as Islamic factors that are merely incidental, Islam has contents, history, tradition, values which being rigid and dichotomist and even fundamentalist of a sort, predispose towards and encourage intolerance and violence, fanning the embers of Islamic terrorism.

Keywords: Islam, Terrorism, Religion, Connection