Assignment No 03 Project

SUBJECT: ISLAMIC STUDIES

SUBMITTED TO: SIR OMER AZAM

Name Registration Number

ATTA-UR-REHMAN FA21-BME-050

Asfand yar FA21-BME-052

Muhammad haris FA21-BME-043

Muhammad umar khalid FA21-BME-069

Current Social, Moral, and Political
Challenges of Muslims and their Solutions
in the Light of Islamic
Title: “Muslim viewed as Terrorist” as a current political challenge
for Muslims.
Introduction:
In a 2011 meeting, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, as well as the
League of Arab States, a key partner, identified Islamophobia as an important area of concern.
Gallup developed a specific set of analyses, based on measurement of public opinions of
majority and minority groups in multiple countries, to guide policymakers in their efforts to
address the global issue of Islamophobia.Research shows that the U.S. identified more than 160
Muslim-American terrorist suspects and perpetrators in the decade since 9/11, just a percentage
of the thousands of acts of violence that occur in the United States each year. It is from this
overall collection of violence that "an efficient system of government prosecution and media
coverage brings Muslim-American terrorism suspects to national attention, creating the
impression -- perhaps unintentionally -- that Muslim-American terrorism is more prevalent than
it really is." Never mind that since 9/11, the Muslim-American community has helped security
and law enforcement officials prevent nearly two of every five Al Qaeda terrorist plots
threatening the United States and that tips from the Muslim-American community are the largest
single source of initial information to authorities about these few plots.

Islamophobia affects more than a small fringe group of Muslims. Through various research
vehicles and global polling efforts, Gallup has collected a wealth of data detailing public opinion
about various aspects of respect, treatment, and tolerance relative to Muslims worldwide. This
brief serves as a snapshot of opinion and thought displayed by people from multiple countries,
regions, and communities findings that chronicle perceptions associated with Islamophobia
globally.

Findings and Discussions:

Religion and culture outpace politics across all regions surveyed
as the root cause of tension between Muslim and Western worlds. This is significant in
discussions about Islamophobia, considering political interests can vary and change while
cultural and religious differences are more ingrained within populations.Recent examples of
Islamophobia exist within several countries. In late 2009, the largest party in the Swiss
parliament put to referendum a ban on minaret construction. The government opposed the ban,
citing harm to the country's image and particularly Muslims' views of Switzerland. Nearly 60%
of Swiss voters and 22 out of 26 voting districts voted in favor of the ban, leading to cries of
Islamophobia by leaders in countries such as Pakistan and organizations such as the United
Nations.In the month following the referendum, Gallup asked a representative sample of Swiss
adults a series of questions about the issue specifically and Muslim rights in general. Most Swiss
say that religious freedom is important for Swiss identity. About one-third agree that there is an
irresolvable contradiction between liberal democracy and Islam. However, the Swiss are more
likely to disagree (48%) than agree (38%) with that statement. Rather, 84% say it is possible for
a Muslim to be a good Swiss patriot. When asked if those in the Swiss Muslim community have
reason to believe they have been discriminated against in the wake of the minaret ban, two-thirds
(68%) say no. Furthermore, most Swiss say they do not believe that the recent belief that
Switzerland was being seen as willing to infringe on the rights of its Muslim minority in the
wake of the referendum on minarets has harmed Switzerland's reputation in the international
community.Despite a very public debate on the banning of a religious symbol of Islam, much of
the Swiss population did not believe that the Swiss Muslim community should feel discriminated
against.In 2008, Gallup asked representative samples from a subset of majority-Muslim countries
about public perceptions of fair treatment of Muslims in the U.S., France, Britain, and China

Even among Americans who report no personal prejudice toward Muslims, one-third say they
have an unfavorable opinion about Islam (36%). Unsurprisingly, those indicating they have a
great deal of prejudice toward Muslims are the most unfavorable about Islam (91% unfavorable).
That one-third of those with no reported prejudice have an unfavorable opinion of Islam is
alarming because it indicates that those who harbor no reported prejudice for the people maintain
negative views about the religion.For Mironova, the relative increase in anti-Western terrorist
attacks emanating from the post-Soviet world is a result of several national, regional and
international factors. On the one hand, with the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS), militants from
Russian-speaking areas turned from domestic to regional concerns. “By 2017, at least 8,500
fighters from former Soviet republics had flocked to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State.

The Illusion of a Unified Islam:

Western ethnocentrism is based on an illusion that Islam is

monolithic and homogeneous. Muslim societies stretching from Albania to Indonesia via Turkey
have cultural differences, complexities, and contradictions, as well as different political
trajectories in different regions. Islam as a set of belief systems is different from political Islam
or Islamism, which ‘refer to those ideologies and movements that strive to establish some kind of
an “Islamic order” a religious state, shari’a law, and moral codes in Muslim societies and
communities’.There is neither a unified Islamic entity that transcends cultural, national, and
regional differences in the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia-Pacific, nor consolidated goals of
Islamism defined by a specific political group.
The Legacy of Orientalism:
The age of Islamist terrorism was defined by the attacks of
9/11 and the following 7/7 (London), Istanbul, and Madrid bombings in the beginning of the
21st century. However, long before the age of Islamist terrorism, Western conceptions and
representations of Muslims had already consigned them to the category of the ‘East’, ‘Oriental’
or ‘Islamic world’, as produced by the narratives of Orientalism. It was at the end of World War
One that the Middle East was created as an ‘imaginative geography’ and peopled by ‘Others’.
These people were labeled as ‘uncivilized’, ‘traditional’, ‘irrational’, and ‘violent’, almost
similar to the way they were defined by ‘Orientalism’ two centuries earlier. Meanwhile, many
critical thinkers had warned their readers about Western hegemony and its attempts to confirm its
power against ‘Others’ by trying to dominate their ‘hearts and minds’. For those who have
heeded these warnings and for readers of critical social theories, the rise of resistance to Western
hegemony was unsurprising. What is surprising is that this knowledge is still not filtering down
into society by mainstream media in a critical way even in the 21st century.

Islam as a Violent Religion:

Western ethnocentric biases frame Islam inevitably as the
primary referent for the cause of violence. While the Middle East is singled out through
the essential view of Islam as a violent religion, religious extremism and violent practices of
Christians, Jews, and Hindus rarely receive a similar critique. I wonder why the increasing
literature on religious terrorism contains virtually nothing on ‘Christian terrorism’, ‘Jewish
terrorism’, or ‘Hindu terrorism’. By singling out Islam as a violent religion, uncritical studies of
terrorism do more harm than good in understanding the causes of international terrorism.
Unpacking the historical, political, and socioeconomic specificity of each terrorist attack in
question, as well as cultural and religious motives, is necessary to understand the complexity of
international terrorism without reducing it to a simple cause.

The Impact of Asymmetrical Exercise of Power:

Essentializing Islam and the Middle East,

in fact, prevents many Westerners from understanding the complex causes of power struggles.
Historical, political, social, and ideological power structures are exercised asymmetrically not
only between regional states and the West but also between oppressive regimes and marginalized
groups. Without contextualizing these particular power structures it is difficult to understand
what lures an individual or a group towards the use of violent tactics and joining a terrorist
group. For some, the reason might be challenging the existing status quo, repressive governments
at home, and for others, searching for divine justice. The consequences of asymmetrical exercise
of power have been shaping the key issues in the Middle East, such as Palestinian and Kurdish
struggles, for years. The reduction of the motives of violent tactics to religion alone the so-called
Islamist terrorism is bound to fail to explain the complex causes of terrorist acts. Such
reductionist views refrain from analyzing the asymmetry in existing power structures and, hence,
the wrongdoings of Western in particular US and UK foreign policies towards not only the
Muslim world, but also the Global South as a whole.

All Muslims as Potential Terrorists:

In contemporary politics, much of the Western media and right-wing populist narratives continue

adopting rather simplistic views of Islam as a violent and backward religion, and stereotypical
images of Muslims as irrational and warmongering beings. On the one hand, they create a false
perception of non-Muslims as rational, non-violent, and peaceful beings. Such binary oppositions
contribute towards right-wing populist narratives and exclusionary politics of ordinary Muslims.
On the other hand, these views prevent much needed efforts to open space for the inclusion of
marginalized and dissident voices, voices that are explicitly critical of ahistorical, apolitical and
reductionist understandings of violence and Islamist terrorism.

Putting the Links Between Islam and Violent Extremism in Context:

Any analysis of the patterns in terrorism faces major challenges simply because of the lack of
reliable and comparable data, and the tendency to compartmentalize analysis to deal with given
threats, nations, and regions. The problem becomes much greater when the analysis attempts to
deal with issues as controversial as the links between Islam, extremism, and terrorism.It is far too
easy for analysts who are not Muslim to focus on the small part of the extremist threat that
Muslim extremists pose to non-Muslims in the West and/or demonize one of the world's great
religions, and to drift into some form of Islamophobia blaming a faith for patterns of violence
that are driven by a tiny fraction of the world's Muslims and by many other factors like
population, failed governance, and weak economic development.

The end result is to ignore the reality that most extremist and terrorist violence does occur in
largely Muslim states, although it overwhelmingly consists of attacks by Muslim extremists on
fellow Muslims, and not some clash between civilizations . The analysis draws on a wide range
of sources to illustrate these trends and how the global patterns in terrorism and violence interact
with Islam. It cannot overcome the lack of consistent and reliable data in many key areas, or the
fact that many key factors do not lend themselves to summary quantification and trend analysis.
It is also impossible to go into depth in analyzing the individual the trends in Islam and
extremism in a broad overview of global trends, or to highlight all of the limits in the quality and
reliability of the data available.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, it is indeed time to ‘forget the Middle East’ but more importantly to
refrain from the ethnocentric and cultural biases, which have led Westerners to get Islamist
terrorism so wrong. Essentializing Islam will not help the West to find a solution to the use of
violence by Muslims. On the contrary, it will only impede the understanding of the complexity
of anti-Western terrorism, as increasingly coming out of the post-Soviet world, and also alienate
ordinary and diverse Muslims across the world.It is important to note, however, that only a
relatively small portion of the incidents can be attributed to ISIS, even using the highest START
estimate. More broadly, even if Afghanistan is added to the total for Iraq and Syria, the three
major countries where the U.S. and other outside states partner with Muslim governments
accounted for 26,113 incidents—or only 37% of the global total. Moreover, even if one counts
all of the MENA region and South Asia, key organized extremist groups like Al Qaida, Al
Nusra, ISIS, and the Taliban accounted for 12,159 incidents or 17% of the total