ExtremismFrom Gradualists to Jihadists: Islamists in the West

In the 21st Century, the threat of both state communism and state fascism have largely faded, but, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, another set of “fanatically held social and political doctrines” (this is how he described those two doctrines) Berlin have emerged.

Individuals and groups adhering to militant Islamism, a political ideology underpinned by a strict and literalist interpretation of religion, have claimed tens of thousands of lives around the world. They have provoked the response of the most powerful military alliance in history. In recent years, the appeal of their utopian ideal has convinced thousands to abandon their lives and travel to join the brutal Islamic State experiment in Iraq and Syria. In the process they have destroyed lives and entire communities and permanently scarred parts of the Middle East.

The Counter Extremism Project has just published a new report – Gradualists to Jihadists: Islamist Narratives in the West – which analyzes the four main narratives deployed by Islamist movements in the West. Here is the reports Executive Summary and Introduction.

Executive Summary
This paper considers the four main narratives consistently deployed by both “non-violent” and violent Islamist (Jihadist) movements. Those narratives can broadly be broken down and described as such (with considerable overlap):

1) Enmity for the West

2) An Islamic State

3) War on Islam

4) Communities Under Siege

Accepting the religious underpinnings of Islamist and Jihadist ideology, these narratives are inherently political, as the paper will explain in detail. The paper argues that Islamism should be treated in a policy sense as a political ideology like any other, and for greater attention to be paid to the political narratives of Islamist groups in Preventing/Countering Violent Extremism, such as in the Prevent and Counter-Extremism programming in the United Kingdom.

Whether it is advocating or fighting for a new state, or propagating the idea of a global community under attack at home and overseas, these are political objectives and political solutions with a religious framework.

The narratives presented in this paper were selected because they are most common to both non-violent, legally operating Islamist groups and violent Jihadist groups. This allows the narratives that Jihadists use to enter the mainstream and be introduced to much wider audiences than would otherwise be possible, presenting a radicalization risk.