Countering Violent Extremism

November 2, 2011 | By Specialists Mehreen Farooq and Waleed Ziad
Swat’s success hinged on an integrated approach, which should be replicated at the epicenter of Pakistan’s war against extremism, the tribal belt. There as in Swat, civil society actors, including religious and political leaders, elders, and educators, lead daring resistance efforts against all odds. We visited a flagship madrasa within a network of anti-Taliban educational institutions in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

October 2011 | By Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi
Although mainstream Muslims worldwide wholly condemn radical ideologies, a sect of extremists has been working for almost a century to use religion as a weapon of war. This enemy is not an individual or group, but rather a complex transnational network of organizations that share a common ideology.

October 21, 2011 | By Specialists Waleed Ziad and Mehreen Farooq
In a pristine, remote valley in Kashmir, far from the theaters of war, some families are abandoning their religious and cultural traditions in favor of extremist ideologies.

September 1, 2011 | By Specialists Waleed Ziad and Mehreen Farooq
In southern Punjab, a fierce battle rages for the future of Islam. For the first time in this region’s history, its 700-year-old blue tiled Sufi shrines are being challenged and overshadowed by hundreds of new mosques and madrassas espousing jihadi ideologies.

By Specialist Mohamed Nassir
In 1962, the missionary efforts of the Saudi-Wahhabis took greater momentum with the creation of The Muslim World League, also known as Rabita, which is based in Mecca. Its primary goal is the spread of the Wahhabi ideology to the rest of the world (Aslan, 2006).

By Specialist Mohamed Nassir
Islam is a faith that is embraced by more than a billion people, but for some a more political set of Islamic ideas has gained ground in Muslim communities around the world. This particular set of ideas is termed as political Islam. The growth of political Islam is one of the most important ideological events of the last century. Political Islam is a relatively new phenomenon that developed in the last two centuries of Islam’s 1400 year history.

May 3, 2011 | By Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi and Specialist Mehreen Farooq
Osama bin Laden, 54, unofficial poster-child for the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and radical Islamist movements around the world died Sunday May 1, 2011. He will be remembered as a leader of anti-Americanism, a formidable mastermind of terrorist plots, and an unmistakable symbol of intolerance, hatred, and violence. From a young age, he dedicated his life to tarnishing the image of peaceful, law-abiding Muslims across the world and promoting radical, anti-social interpretations of Islam. He lived by the sword and died by the sword.

March 10, 2011 | By Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi
It won’t be on the official agenda. It might not even be asked out loud. But it may be the most important question during a congressional hearing Thursday on homegrown Islamic terrorists.
How should America talk about Muslim Americans?
Even in the tense months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, public discussions of Islamic extremists were usually accompanied by a careful disclaimer that a peaceful religion had been hijacked.

July 2008 | By Specialists Husain Haqqani and Hillel Fradkin
Excerpt: The Brotherhood and its offshoots, however, took a further step by insisting that the state take the lead in applying shari‘a, thereby making the political act of establishing an Islamic state central to their ideology. The call for an Islamic state was the crucial ingredient that al-Banna and the Brotherhood added to beliefs—in the lost purity of Islam and the need for laws based on shari‘a—that had already won the endorsement of such older movements as the Wahhabis of the Arabian Peninsula, the Deobandis of India, and the Salafis of Egypt.

June 2010 | By Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi
Like most Muslims across America, I watched the news of the Ft Hood tragedy, holding my breath and praying that the crazed gunman was not a Muslim. As the days passed, we learned Major Malik Hasan was not only a Muslim; but that his actions were motivated in large part by a deviant, manipulated interpretation of Islamic law. The case of Malik Hasan and the slew of other “homegrown terrorists” take us to the larger crisis of confronting Islamist radicalism in our communities.