According to the Global Terrorism Index 2024 report, Islamist groups are responsible for the largest share of terrorist attacks in the world — and at the same time, according to the same study, more than 90% of the victims of these attacks are Muslims themselves. In parallel, Pew Research polls show: there are about 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, and the overwhelming majority of them (depending on country, between 81% and 96%) hold negative views of extremist organizations.
These are two numbers that rarely appear together. Radicalism that hides behind the name of Islam exists and kills people — that is a fact. And the same radicalism is rejected by the bulk of Muslims — that is also a fact. Between these two facts lies a huge space that needs to be examined.
This post is an attempt to honestly answer the question: is there radicalism in Islam, where does it come from, how does it relate to the religion itself, and why “Islamic terrorism” is a political rather than a theological phenomenon. No apologetics, no demonization, working from sources.
The word “radicalism” is fuzzy on its own. In political science, it usually refers to ideologies that reject the existing social order and accept violent methods of changing it. There is left-wing radicalism, right-wing, nationalist, religious.
In the context of the Muslim world, “Islamic radicalism” usually covers several different things: Salafi fundamentalism (a drive to return to the practice of the earliest Muslim generations), political Islamism (the idea of an Islamic state), jihadist extremism (the legitimization of armed struggle against “infidel governments”), and terrorist networks like al-Qaeda or ISIS.
These are four different phenomena. Many Salafis are not political, many Islamists are not violent, and most Muslims who in principle support the idea of an Islamic state reject terror. Lumping them together is a typical mistake of media and often politicians.
One of the most common arguments is “the Qur’an has ayahs about killing the unbelievers.” That is true — such ayahs exist. And here it matters how the classical Muslim tradition handles them.
The Qur’an is not a flat text but a corpus of revelations sent down over 23 years in concrete historical circumstances. The ayahs permitting fighting were revealed in the Medinan period, after eight years of persecution of Muslims in Mecca, and they speak of specific conflicts with specific tribes — those who broke treaties, attacked first, and drove the Muslims from their homes.
The principle of context (asbab al-nuzul, “occasions of revelation”) is a basic category of classical tafsir. Any professional Muslim scholar starts work on an ayah not with a literal reading but with the questions: when was it revealed, in response to what, addressed to whom.
In parallel, the same Qur’an contains dozens of ayahs about mercy, forgiveness, and peace. Ayah 2:256: “There is no compulsion in religion.” Ayah 5:32: “Whoever kills a soul, unless for a soul or for corruption done in the land, it is as if he had killed all of mankind.” Ayah 60:8: “Allah does not forbid you from those who do not fight you because of religion and do not expel you from your homes — from being righteous toward them and just.”
To extract some ayahs while ignoring others is not engaging with a source but instrumentalizing it. Both radicals and anti-Islam propagandists do this — their methods are not all that different.
It is useful to look at what happened with radicalism in the very earliest Muslim history. A little more than twenty years after the Prophet’s ﷺ death, the first radical schism appeared in the community — the Kharijite movement.
The Kharijites held that any Muslim who committed a major sin automatically became an unbeliever and could be killed. They declared the caliph Ali — the Prophet’s ﷺ cousin and son-in-law — an unbeliever, and ultimately murdered him.
The reaction of the rest of the Muslim community was unequivocal. The Kharijites were considered deviants, and their doctrine was refuted by the leading scholars of the era. There is a hadith from the Prophet ﷺ describing such people: “They will recite the Qur’an, but it will not pass beyond their throats. They will pass through the religion the way an arrow passes through its target.” This hadith is cited in all the classical collections.
This is an important historical moment. The pattern “extreme literalist reading of texts + declaring other Muslims to be unbelievers + legitimizing violence against them” is not something new. This pattern emerged in the first century of Islam, was identified as heresy at the time, and has been rejected by the mainstream tradition for all fourteen centuries since. Modern jihadist groups largely reproduce exactly this model — and many classical-trained ulama explicitly call them “the Kharijites of our time.”
The word jihad in Arabic means “effort,” “striving.” In the Islamic tradition it has several meanings, and equating it with armed warfare is a serious oversimplification.
Classical theology distinguishes several forms of jihad. Jihad al-nafs is struggle against one’s own passions, ego, laziness, and bad inclinations. Classical scholars often called this form “the greater jihad,” based on a hadith in which the Prophet ﷺ, returning from a battle, said: “We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater — the jihad against one’s own soul.”
Jihad of the tongue and the pen is defending truth and opposing injustice through words, argument, and writing. Jihad of wealth is charity and helping those in need. And only after all of these — jihad of the sword, military jihad, which classical fiqh hedges with very strict conditions.
The conditions of classical military jihad: it must be declared by legitimate authority (not private individuals), it must be defensive in character or pursue a clearly just cause, civilians must not be harmed (women, children, the elderly, monks in their cells, traders), and temples, crops, and water sources must not be destroyed. These conditions were laid down by Abu Bakr, the first caliph, in his instructions to commanders, and confirmed by all classical schools of fiqh.
Modern terror violates all of these conditions in principle. That is why the overwhelming majority of contemporary Muslim scholars — al-Azhar, the leading muftis of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia — unanimously qualify attacks on civilians as crime, not jihad.
To understand modern jihadist terrorism, you have to look at its history. This is not a phenomenon that grew out of the classical Islamic schools — it is a 20th-century phenomenon with concrete political prehistory.
The roots reach back to anti-colonial resistance: the dismantling of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, the partitioning of Muslim lands by European powers, the creation of the State of Israel, and the authoritarian regimes of postcolonial states. The ideological texts of Sayyid Qutb, written in Egyptian prisons in the 1950s and 1960s, became the intellectual base for radical movements.
The Afghan war of 1979–89 turned theory into practice: the US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan funded and trained the mujahideen to fight the USSR, and out of this infrastructure al-Qaeda grew in 1988. ISIS was born from the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the catastrophic de-Baathification that threw thousands of former Iraqi army officers out into the street.
This is not the opinion of Muslim apologists — this is the consensus of serious academic literature. Books like Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower,” Joby Warrick’s “Black Flags,” and the work of Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel all show: modern jihadism is a political phenomenon with religious rhetoric, not a religious phenomenon with a political tail.
If radicalism flowed from Islam as such, we would see a clear pattern: the more religious a Muslim, the higher the probability of radicalization. The actual data shows the opposite.
Marc Sageman’s research (a former CIA officer who studied the biographies of several hundred jihadists) showed: a typical Western jihadist is a young man between 18 and 30, usually a second-generation immigrant, with a low level of religious education, often with a criminal background, going through an acute identity crisis. Many came to radicalism after a period of personal problems — divorce, drugs, prison — and found in it a way to “rewrite” their biography through a heroic frame.
The French political scientist Olivier Roy formulated this as: the problem is not “the Islamization of radicalism” but “the radicalization of Islam” — meaning that radicals come to extremist forms of Islam as a convenient ideological shell, rather than growing out of deep religious study and concluding that they need to kill.
Parallel research on the Middle East shows its own picture: ISIS recruitment was most successful in areas with shattered economies, authoritarian governance, and recent experience of war and collective trauma. Deep religious education actually reduces the probability of radicalization — because someone who has seriously studied fiqh and tafsir sees how primitive the “theology” of the extremists is.
One of the most common reproaches is: “Why are Muslims silent?” They are not silent — their voices simply mostly do not break through the news noise.
In 2005, more than 200 Muslim scholars from 50 countries adopted the Amman Message — a document explicitly rejecting the practice of declaring Muslims unbelievers (takfir), the legitimization of terror, and the use of religion for political violence. It was signed by all the major Sunni and Shia schools.
In 2014, more than 120 leading Muslim scholars wrote an Open Letter to al-Baghdadi — the leader of ISIS — refuting the religious claims of his group point by point in detail, citing the Qur’an, hadith, and classical fiqh. The letter was signed by senior shaykhs of al-Azhar, the grand muftis of several countries, and professors at major Islamic universities.
Al-Azhar, the oldest and most authoritative Islamic university in the world, founded in 970 in Cairo, has consistently classified ISIS as a criminal organization rather than an Islamic one. Separate fatwas against terrorism have been issued by the muftis of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, and Russia. In 2016, the world’s largest Muslim organization — the Indonesian Nahdlatul Ulama, with around 90 million members — held a special congress in Jakarta condemning extremism and articulating the concept of “Islam Nusantara,” a peaceful, pluralistic Islamic tradition.
These efforts rarely make the Western news cycle, but they exist and are large in scale.
It is important to distinguish two different positions. One is to critically analyze specific interpretations, political movements, historical episodes, and concrete fiqh rulings. This is legitimate intellectual work, and Muslim scholars themselves engage in it. The other is to portray Islam as such as a religion of violence, using isolated episodes to smear 1.9 billion people.
The second position has no statistical, theological, or historical basis. If you applied the same logic to Christianity — taking the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Wars of Religion of the Reformation, the Northern Ireland conflict, and the extremists who today attack clinics around the world — you could “prove” anything. That is not analysis, that is propaganda.
At the same time, honest Muslim self-criticism exists and is needed. Leading contemporary scholars — Tariq Ramadan, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Mohammad Hashim Kamali — openly write about problems in modern Muslim thought, the legacy of literalist interpretations, and the need to revisit a number of classical norms through the concept of maqasid al-sharia. That is what a healthy internal debate looks like.
A few data points worth keeping in mind when this topic comes up.
According to Pew Research, support for ISIS in Muslim countries during its peak years never exceeded a few percent and quickly fell to nearly zero. In Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, negative attitudes toward the group ran at 94–99%.
According to START at the University of Maryland, the majority of victims of Islamist terrorism are Muslims. The overwhelming majority of attacks take place in Muslim countries, against Muslim governments and ordinary Muslims. This contradicts the image of “Islamic terror as a war against the West” — the real conflict runs inside the Muslim world, and the front line lies between extremists and ordinary Muslims.
In the US, according to research by Charles Kurzman at the University of North Carolina, Muslims have been responsible for an extremely small share of terrorist attacks since 2001 — even though in absolute numbers this means hundreds of victims, while the bulk of US terrorism over the same period is unrelated to Islam (right-wing extremism, school shooters, interpersonal acts of violence).
This is not to minimize the real victims of jihadist terror — every person killed is a tragedy. It is to see proportions clearly.
What does this breakdown offer us — regardless of religious belief?
If the topic caught your interest, here are serious books worth reading:
Radicalism exists, but calling it “Islamic” is to grant extremists a legitimacy they do not actually possess. They do not represent 1.9 billion Muslims, do not follow the classical tradition, and do not enjoy the support of the authoritative institutions of the ummah. They represent themselves — and that, in essence, is the problem.
Understanding the real picture is the first step toward a reasonable conversation. Both Muslims and non-Muslims need this conversation.
Peace and blessings be upon Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, his family, and his companions.
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