DOHA – “Islamism” and “political Islam” are not monolithic ideas and they are as diverse as other contemporary trends in the Islamic world, says a prominent Muslim scholar and intellectual from Europe.
“After 9/11 and 7/7, terminologies like radicalism, Islamism and political Islam have been widely used in West. The so called terrorism experts tend to put all ‘Islamists’ in one category,” said Dr Tariq Ramadan, President of the European Muslim Network (EMN) based in Brussels. He was delivering a lecture at the Education City yesterday on the topic “Understanding contemporary Islamic trends”.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not similar to Al Qaeda and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan cannot be equated with Osama bin Laden, said Ramadan. We hear terms like “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims”, “moderates” and “fundamentalists”. Such terminologies remind us of the colonial attitude – “all the good are with us and all the bad are resisting us.”