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The Deep Crisis Facing Extremist Organizations | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – Reuters


Dubai – A report issued by the Bureau of Counter-terrorism in December showed that individuals who are religiously educated among ISIS’s members (among 4000 members involved in the report) were only 17.6%, which emphasizes a weak relation between these terrorist organizations and the deep religious education.

Other reports published over the past months confirmed that around 25% of ISIS’s foreign militantswere new to Islam and didn’t have the opportunity to learn closely and deeply about this religion. For instance, such violent extremist movements do not need religious education, as they feed on blind commitment, lack of historical knowledge and religious intellect. However, they always seek to create their own symbols and to present their representatives and scholars with religious titles, as extremism has always been a major conflict in religious sciences.

Extremism promotes science and religious heritage, but it doesn’t use them as a base; extremism is a continuous state of anger seeking a justification that suits its goals, while the religious science is a state of understanding based on restricted regulations. Different extremist movements emerged as crisis speeches, which react and interact religiously with other crises. The following five phases serve as examples:

1. After the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, the political Islam, like the Muslims Brotherhood was founded in 1928 by Hassan al-Bana (died in 1949).

2. Radical movements in Egypt and the region emerged as a result of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, and the anger after the accord which was inked between Israel and Egypt in 1978.

3. Al-Qaeda appeared following Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait in 1990, after it received a great momentum from the Afghani Jihad aiming to confront the communism of the Soviet Union in the eighties.

4. Al-Qaeda branches strongly appeared following the 11 September attacks in 2001, after the 2003 war in Iraq, the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

5. Extremist movements have reached their ISIS-like phase after the Arab intifadas in 2011, mainly the Syrian revolution.