Paste your essay in here…To understand Islamic Radicalism one must understand and study political ideologies. Ideologies are grouped around some form of central ideas through which we can classify them as specific groups: liberal, conservative, socialist, anarchist, and fascist. While other ideologies are closely associated with influential religious belief systems, each of them will have a different take on similar situations and problems. Whether we are aware of it or not, we live in a world full of ideologies, whether it is a vague set of beliefs or rules expressed clearly. The West has become so secularized we have failed to perceive the spiritual values of other cultures. For various reasons, the fundamentalist view of imposing some or all of the Shari'a law has grown. Ideology is one of the most controversial terms in the political vocabulary and is often disputed among political theorists. Political scientist Michael Freeden views ideology as an interconnected language that provides us “ theory or philosophy via patterned and situated combinations of political concepts that temporarily define our understanding of the political.” Essentially, the study of Ideology is the study of culture. Ideology can be viewed as both a political phenomenon and as an organizing framework of political thought and action. Both Samuel Huntington and Frantz Fanon offer possible lenses on how to allow one to study Islamic radicalism. To best study Islamic radicalism we should follow Frantz Fanon’s position on how radical Islam came to power due to the lingering effects of colonialism, while at the same time also acknowledging Huntington understandment of current and future conflict and how cultural rift and differences should be understood.
First we have to understand political scientist Michael Freeden’s beliefs on political ideologies. Freeden’s analysis of contemporary ideologies has been noted around the world. He rejects the traditional definition of ideologies’; "belief systems", and rather bases his research on modern semantics. For Freeden, ideologies similarly to languages, consist of certain concepts whose meaning often change and evolve over time. Concepts may gain or lose importance over time, just as new concepts may emerge different ideologies given different meanings to the same term. In liberalism, equality will have legal and political importance, while in marxism it will have a material definition. Concepts are defined by their relation to other concepts?. According to Freeden, it is these conceptual relations that we should focus on as they will be likely evolve over time.
Frantz Fanon, similarly to Freeden, argues that in order to study radical Islam, one must understand that ideologies change due to historic events. In The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, he provides a psychiatric and psychological analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonization on the nation and the individual. Essentially, to understand Islamic radicalism, one must understand the history of the political culture. Fanon begins with the concept that decolonization by definition is a violent process. The object of that process is the eventual replacement of one group of humans with another and that process is only complete when there is a total transition in power. This concept of decolonization is based on Fanon’s construction of the colonial world. Fanon characterizes the assessment of the native population by the settler class as dehumanizing. The settlers literally do not see the natives as members of the same species. The natives are incapable of ethics and thereby are the embodiment of absolute evil, “When the native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out his knife—or at least he makes sure it is within reach. The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed. The aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean that in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him.” In response to colonization, some states seem to be unifying over radical thought. The idea that modernity would displace religion is not new; it is what took place in Europe as a result of the Enlightenment. Religion remains important throughout Europe but it is no longer the pivot around which society functions. The West expected that as the Arab-Muslim world became more modern and westernized, religion would have less importance. Western, modernity was introduced into the Arab world through colonialism and military conflict. Modernity entered the Arab world embedded as part of a colonial trauma. Modernity from Europe deeply affected the educational systems in the region with consequences for religious expression. The Islamic radicalism intellectual roots are deep within modernism, hence its concern with not only re-interpreting religion but in adapting it to the concept of the “Islamic State.”
On the other hand, Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, simply tries to explain the issues, not resolve them. Huntington believes in order for their to be peace we have to be comfortable with other countries cultural identities. Prior to the end of the Cold War, societies were divided by ideological differences; the struggle between democracy and communism. Huntington's main thesis argues, "The most important distinctions among peoples are no longer ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural. People and Nations are attempting to answer the most basic question humans can face: Who are we?’ New conflicts will occur along the boundaries of different cultures and patterns of solidarity will be found within the cultural boundaries. Culture is not constant, it shapes over time. Culture is dynamic, culture is not natural, it is learned, acquired and taught based on a dependent variable. Conflict often arises over culture identity. Huntington disproves patterns that have been ineffective in explaining or predicting the reality of the global political order. To refute these claims, Huntington divides the world into eight "major" civilizations. Human beings, Huntington wrote, are divided along cultural lines Western, Islamic, Hindu and so on. There is no universal civilization. Instead, there are these cultural blocks, each within its own distinct set of values.
Samuel Huntington views Islamic civilization as the most troublesome because people in the Arab world do not share the same general belief system of the Western world. Huntington believed that their primary attachment is to their religion, not to their nation-state but Hunnington misses the pluralism part of Islam. Some of Muslim culture is inhospitable to certain liberal ideals, like pluralism, individualism and democracy. Huntington argued that people in Arab lands are not nationalistic. Rather, it has become apparent that they were simply living in circumstances that did not allow patriotism. The most important countries in the world come overwhelmingly from different civilizations with different ideologies.
Today, most of us need a reminder of what Islam really is; a religion of peace. As Human beings we often generalize. During tense political climates, it is particularly easy to interpret "radical Islam" as a summation of Islam in general. As a result, it is important to study radical Islam through a Huntingtonian and Fanonian lens. We need to see past the biases and see how Radicalism came into power. Jews, Christians and Muslims once all lived in peace and harmony together, it can happen again.
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