Islamism and Maverick Terrorism Charles Elias Chartouni/November 07/2020 شارل الياس شرتوني: الإسلاموية والإرهاب الفردي
The late attacks in France and Austria testify to the rising tide of individual terrorism, and the idiosyncrasies of Islamist terrorism which locates on a continuum between quietest salafism and abrupt radicalization.
The radical twist far from being an ex nihilo phenomenon feeds on the failures of Muslim modernity, draws on its psycho-pathological repertoire (resentment, psychotic foreclosures, Hatred of others as the obverse side of self despise, manichean worldview, paranoia, moral depravation ….) and the equivocations of religious scripturalism and fideism as platforms of Islamic totalitarianism and outright political subversion.
One cannot account for Islamic radicalism, if analytical insights fail to perceive the inner connections between religious totalitarianism, pervasive existential crises and the destructive proclivities they generate.
The recapitulation of the different typologies under which classify different islamist movements of terror crystallize around a cluster of variables (systemic, individual, religious and socio-political ….), and help us make sense of the systemic interdependencies and their operational modulations.
As long as the systemic concatenations perpetuate, the psycho-pathological repertoire is readily engaged and instrumentalized alternately.
Western democracies, with enhancing Muslim migration to the West, are confronted with the systemic and existential crises of a failed Islamic modernity and its deleterious impact on their political stability, narratives, institutions and civic doxa.
The instrumentalisation of the reticular radical networks is by no means incidental, it taps the lingering dynamics of a failed modernity, its intellectual aporetics and deep reservoirs of disgruntlement and anger.
Democratic countries are experiencing the impact of concurring dynamics on their societal structures, normative consensuses and civil concord, and are bound to deal with them on the basis of coherent strategic choices, solid normative consensuses and institutional cohesiveness.
The terror acts are developing within the interstices of strategic shortsightedness, knowledge gap, laxism, lack of resolve, and the inconsistencies of murky and overstretched notions of political correctness.
The randomness of Islamist terrorism is tantamount to its totalitarian purview, haphazard lethality and strategic objectives predicated on Muslim supremacism, religious self righteousness attaching relations of superiority and inferiority to differences between Muslims and non Muslims, and open imperial vindications laced with genocidal overtones.
The ferocity of these attacks are quite expressive of cultivated hatred and characteristic of an ecology of violence, anger and predatory ethology.
Having set my conceptual framework, I think time is ripe for major intellectual and political turnarounds:
1/ The holistic approach to reformation of failed Islamic societies is preliminary to any political undertaking;
2/ religious reformation is the entry gate to the overall reformation process and should be predicated on the epistemics of Modernity ( Deconstruction of the Islamic canon, critical historiography, philosophical and political discourse of Modernity: Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Constitutional State, collective and individual Rights, the distinction between public and private, …. );
3/ The primacy of developmental policies and the politics of conditionality as prerequisites for sustainable financial, economic, social, educational and environmental reforms;
4/ the destruction of the ideological, political and strategic platforms of Islamist terrorism;
5/ the stabilization of Muslim and Arab geopolitics is essential in any reformist undertaking;
6/ the review of migration policies should be based on putting end to massive and desperation ones induced by political instability, violence and endemic poverty cycles, revising benchmarks of eligibility, inter-developmental cooperation and the politics of conditionality;
7/ the containment of Islamic neo-imperialism which thrive on instability, Islamic radicalism, politically induced migration, and on steering ghetto politics within Western Democracies.
It’s about time to contain the viral outbreak of Islamist violence, its normalization and the adjustment to the idea of its inevitability, and the need to deal with it on the basis of shadowy political arrangements with Muslim and Arab power politics, undermined sovereignty and inadmissible concessions in regard to normative and constitutional stipulations, political meta-narrative and basic security.
The destruction of the operational platforms of militant Islam is mandated, if we were to oversee the twilight of this protracted interlude of trivialized violence, international insecurity and adjustment to the destructive constraints of institutionalized terrorism, its ideological implements and blackmailing power politics.
The depraved killers are the derivatives of a wholesale ecology based on religious worldviews, institutional violence, moral callousness and their corollary culture of moral and political servitude ( Dhimmitude ), it’s about time to move markedly unto a new stage which ends this bloody turpitude and ushers a new era.
