Amir Taheri, Arab News Staff

PARIS, 13 December 2003 — How to fight extremism? This is the question that a number of Muslim theologians will be debating in Makkah at a seminar beginning today

The debate is long overdue. For, in its various modern shapes, extremism has been responsible for many tragedies in the Muslim world and beyond over the past decades.

Since 1992 an estimated 120,000 Algerians have died as a result of a war unleashed by extremist groups. The clash of extremist groups in Afghanistan claimed over 100,000 lives between 1992 and 2002. In the final decades of the last century no fewer than 30 Muslim nations, notably Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt, suffered from terrorism unleashed by extremist groups. Today there is hardly a Muslim country that is not threatened by extremist violence.

The high cost of extremism in terms of human lives should not hide its other devastating effects. By creating a climate of intellectual terror, extremism tries to impose atrophy on creative thought in the Muslim world. It hampers economic development, and provides an excuse for despots to refuse social and political reform. Like a whirlwind it tries to destroy all cultural, literary and artistic endeavors by Muslims.

The history of the Muslim world is ridden with the rise and fall of extremist movements, often of a cabalistic nature, that have tried to seize control of mainstream Islam. Many disappeared while some have survived in the form of esoteric sects.

Islam, of course, is not the only religion to face extremism. Christianity and Judaism, the other two Abrahamic faiths, have also been haunted by extremism in one form or another for centuries. Extremism is like a shadow that always follows the development of theo-political thought in any religion.

So what should Muslim theologians do when they discuss extremism?

The first thing they need to do is to expose its political nature. For extremism has always been, and remains, a political beast in a theological skin.

While faith is concerned with the transcendental, politics is the realm of the temporal.

Man changes, but the text does not, although it could be read differently at different times.

Any attempt at projecting an eternity into our limited human time is bound to lead to distortion. Attempts to define the transcendent through the temporal cannot but lead to violence and tragedy.

Thus any attempt at imposing a single, arbitrary reading as the final and definitive one is a political move designed to secure for an individual or group the authority that is ultimately incumbent only on the text itself.

Next, the theologians would have to ask why is it that political movements, which are ultimately interested in achieving power, seek a religious expression?

One answer may be the refusal of Muslim societies to allocate a distinct space within which individuals and groups can compete for power in political, and not theological, terms.

In the absence of institutions such as Parliaments and parties, the mosque becomes the only space where citizens can form and exchange political views. This leads to a theologization of politics which, in turn, ends up by politicizing theology.

Wherever extremism appears in violent forms, including terrorism, it has to be combated through effective policing and, when necessary, repression. It is foolish to believe that a man who is prepared to kill and die for what he imagines to be the only truth could be persuaded to change his mind through theological debate. A tiger does not become vegetarian because we feed it carrots.

In the longer run, however, one of the most effective means of combating extremism is the opening of a proper political space that is subjected to clear rules accepted by a majority of citizens. In such a space it would be possible for people to hold opposed views on political matters without waving the finger of anathema (takfir) at one another.

Extremism has always been based on a theology of fear.

It uses the fear of hell and damnation to impose its exclusive reading of the text. But the truth is that it is frightened by its own doubts. We would not think of murdering a man who might deny that the sun will rise again tomorrow.

This is because we have no doubt that it will and that the man’s error would become apparent. We might be tempted into killing, and dying, only when we are not quite sure of the truth of what we are killing and dying for.

Politics is the domain of doubt, of changing of mind, and of making and correcting mistakes only to make more mistakes later. It has its own grammar. To apply that grammar to religion harms both.

Finally, the theologians would remember that extremism is not something that strikes out of the blue. It is the product of societies in which religion is used as a means of controlling, obscuring, or even excluding other aspects of human existence, especially culture and politics.

Societies that mistake monism for monotheism will always breed extremists.