Landscapes of the Jihad

For over two centuries, Western scholarship dealing with Muslims and Islam has been obsessed with a phobia that a new crusade is in the making. The doctrine of preemptive strikes, unethical as it is, was used by the West as a justification for self-defence and coercive power to suppress so-called jihadi movements. The political and economic instability of the developing world, particularly Muslim countries, has made foreign interventions much easier. The U.S. intrusions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya seem to serve the same strategic goal. All these invasions were made in the name of removing the terrorists, extremists, fundamentalists and the establishment of Western secular democracy as a solution to the existing chaos in some Muslim countries. The existence of this phenomenon has led some thinkers to explore the reasons for the emergence of terrorist outfits. Faisal Devji has tried to look into the problem from a historical perspective. He considers the Rushdie affair and Al-Qaeda’s emergence as two major reasons for the “globalization of jihad”.