Revision 84866904 of "Militant Islam" on enwiki

{{cleanup-date|January 2006}}
'''Militant Islam''' is an approach to [[Islam]] that holds that the [[religion]] and its followers must be aggressively fought for on a political and religious level. Just as militant [[Muslim]]s are but a segment of Islam, so too are supporters of violence and [[terrorism]] only a segment of all militant Muslims. Designation of people as practitioners of militant Islam is often highly contentious. Critics of such designation often ascribe bias and/or prejudice to such use of the term.

Groups advocating [[Islam as a political movement]] are invariably responding to complex political and historical situations, usually with deep roots in the local environment. For example, the rise of the conservative [[Jamaat-e-Islami]] party in [[Bangladesh]] would not have been possible without widespread public reaction against the corruption of the secular [[Awami League]] government in that country. But this complex local political history is completely lost in the simplistic reductionism of terms like [[Muslim fundamentalism]], which ultimately explains little by blaming a multitude of problems common to less developed countries (including violence and lack of democracy) on religion.

In fact, the application of the term Islamic militancy is so broad that it encompasses any kind of revolutionary movement in any Islamic country. Invariably, this means that it lumps together such a variety of [[nationalist]], [[marxist]] and [[ethnic]] movements that it has no longer has any real ideological content. The only defining characteristic it has is that it is [[militarism]] in a Muslim context; but this explains very little.

The members of such groups are more likely to see themselves as [[freedom fighters]] rather than terrorists, as the political origins of such groups in [[Israel]] and [[Palestine (region)|Palestine]], Soviet-occupied [[Afghanistan]], [[Chechnya]] and most recently post-Saddam [[Iraq]] are often rooted in political demands for statehood and nationalist self-determination. In Muslim majority societies, these nationalist sentiments invariably are mixed with a feeling of Muslim identity, and this produces the ideology of [[pan-Islamism]] or [[Islamism]]. The most international of these groups, [[Al-Qaida]] also has its origins in a particular nationalist struggle; namely, rebellion against the royal family of [[Saudi Arabia]]. The Saudi regime is perceived as being too closely associated with American foreign policy, particularly through its support of the US liberation of [[Kuwait]] during the first Gulf War. Since Al-Qaida's ideology is one of pan-Islamic nationalism and solidarity, the Saudi regime was thereafter seen as insufficiently Islamic; although such a view is bewildering to Westerners, who cannot imagine anything more 'Islamic' than the country's [[Wahhabi]] brand of Islamic law. To