Confronting Religious Extremism
- Mohamed Imran Mohamed Taib
- 15 Jan 2017
- 8 min read
One observable phenomenon sweeping the world today is the increasing religiously-aligned tensions and conflicts, where Christians and Muslims emerged as the most frequent targets of abuse from groups or individuals for “acts perceived as offensive or threatening to the majority faith”. Christians were the subject of harassment in 102 out of the 198 countries studied by the Pew Research Centre in 2014, while Muslims were harassed in 99 countries. These harassments ranged from physical assaults to arrests and detentions, the desecration of holy sites, discrimination and even verbal assaults.
The irony is that both communities were often targeting each other, as much as they were themselves the subject of discrimination, intimidation, harassment or outright persecution. Christian minorities were targeted severely in several Muslim-majority countries where militancy is growing. In the European Islamophobia Report 2015, 25 European states were also found to have a worrying increase in hate-crimes against Muslim communities, particularly in France after the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ incident. America, too, had seen 10 states legislating bills deemed to be anti-Islam and the emergence of “Muslim-free businesses” and “armed anti-Islam demonstrations”, according to the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in the same year. The deteriorating treatment of Muslims in Europe and America were often driven by Far Right movements, many of whom were White and Christian in membership; just like radical-extremist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and the vigilante Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) in Indonesia are Muslim-based and employ Muslim rhetoric.
Extremism and its Intersection with Religion, Politics and Economics
There is also a correlation between the rise in religio-political extremism and the treatment of religious minorities. Christian minorities were often targeted by Muslim militants who perpetrated violence by way of retaliating against foreign military interventions. The rise of Donald Trump was built upon anti-Muslim rhetoric. Similarly in Europe, right-wing political parties, such as the Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands and the National Democratic Party in Germany, often stoked anti-Muslim sentiments in a bid to gain entry into parliament.