Submitted by Nauman Sadiq
Islamic radicalism, a consequence of Petro-imperialism:
In its July 2013 report [1] the European Parliament identified the Wahhabi-Salafi roots of global terrorism, but the report conveniently absolved the Western powers of their culpability and chose to overlook the role played by the Western powers in nurturing Islamic extremism and jihadism during the Cold War against the erstwhile Soviet Union. The pivotal role played by the Wahhabi-Salafi ideology in radicalizing Muslims all over the world is an established fact as mentioned in the EU report; this Wahhabi-Salafi ideology is generously sponsored by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf-based Arab petro-monarchies since the 1973 oil embargo when the price of oil quadrupled and the contribution of the Arab sheikhs towards the “spiritual well-being” of the Muslims all over the world magnified proportionally; however, the Arab despots are in turn propped up by the Western powers since the Cold War; thus syllogistically speaking, the root cause of Islamic radicalism is the neocolonial powers’ manipulation of the socio-political life of the Arabs specifically and the Muslims generally in order to appropriate their energy resources in the context of an energy-starved industrialized world. This is the principal thesis of this write-up which I will discuss in detail in the following paragraphs.
Prologue:
Peaceful or not, Islam is only a religion just like any other cosmopolitan religion whether it’s Christianity, Buddhism or Hinduism. Instead of taking an ‘essentialist’ approach, which lays emphasis on ‘essences,’ we need to look at the evolution of social phenomena in its proper historical context. For instance: to assert that human beings are evil by ‘nature’ is an essentialist approach; it overlooks the role played by ‘nurture’ in grooming human beings. Human beings are only ‘intelligent’ by nature, but they are neither good nor evil by nature; whatever they are, whether good or evil, is the outcome of their nurture or upbringing. Similarly, to pronounce that Islam is a retrogressive or violent religion is an ‘essentialist’ approach; it overlooks how Islam and the Quranic verses are interpreted by its followers depending on the subject's socio-cultural context. For example: the Western expat Muslims who are brought up in the West and who have imbibed the Western values would interpret a Quranic verse in a liberal fashion; an urban middle class Muslim of the Muslim-majority countries would interpret the same verse rather conservatively; and a rural-tribal Muslim who has been indoctrinated by the radical clerics would find meanings in it which could be extreme. It is all about culture rather than religion or scriptures per se.
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