Books & more: Religious terror

Nothing has to do with nothing ... That's the classic argument that tries to prevent Islamist terror from being equated with religious Islam. Well, peaceful people of Muslim faith are not terrorists. But Islamist terror has a religious ideology in the background, which imagines that it can turn back the wheel of time so that the perfect world of original Islam - purely according to the word of the Prophet - can spread throughout the whole world. With fire and sword, of course. The good against the bad. Especially if you want to understand the (terrorist) opponent, it is worth reading the original or getting a well-founded commentary.

Rüdiger Lohlker brings the Islamic State down from its heaven and presents original texts, which he comments on expertly as an Islamic scholar. It's about the fatwas - religious opinions - that precisely define what is good and evil. It's about the legitimate source texts, from which a world view is fabricated in a circular argument - as every religion does. And of course it's about the practice of the IS, slaves, looting, the longing for salvation in the final battle - religious terror and how it emerges from a specific interpretation of the religion.

The whole thing is an extremely fascinating book that you can't get around if you want to get a compact understanding of the world view of IS. Much of it is so absurd that you wonder how people can believe it. The IS in its own way is a sect that seeks a religious world war and is embedded in a success story of radical Islam from the victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan to the "liberated zone" Islamic State with its new caliphate and the current terror in Europe. It is worth wanting to understand that ...

“Theology of Violence: The Example IS (Islamica, Volume 4648)“ by Rüdiger Lohlker, UTB, Vienna 2016, 206 pages, Euro 18.99 ,–