THE KHARIJITE ROOTS OF ISLAMIST TERRORISM

Abstract

In the last couple of decades, the world has witnessed the escalation of Islamist Terrorism. Activities of countless Islamist terrorist organizations, such as the Islamic State, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram, today pose the greatest threat to security globally. In ideological and doctrinal terms, they share a common conceptual platform that draws its strength from the distant past, reaching back to the times of founding the first Muslim community as a militant, theocratic state based on the belief in one and only, undivided God, and the necessity of unconditional application of His laws on earth. Initially proclaimed concepts and principles of the necessity of spreading Islam as the only religion, and the Muslim community as an ideal form of state and society organization, have to this day remained a paragon for the majority of modern Islamist terrorist organisations. In the mid- 7th century, a group of renegades segregated from the newly established Muslim community. Later known as Kharijites, they insisted on the unconditional application of these concepts and principles, without refraining from most brutal violence when fighting against their ideological and religious opponents. These first renegades, members of the earliest schismatic movement in Islam were the originators of the phenomenon conceptually defined and classified in many ways as Islamic terrorism, religious fanaticism, radical fundamentalism, jihadism, etc.