One expression Peta Credlin asked me to explain this week was ‘radical Islam.’
And here’s my explanation.
The adjective ‘radical’ comes from a Latin source word radix meaning ‘root’ or ‘roots.’
So, when a movement is ‘radical’ what it is doing is (literally) going back to its roots.
Which is what the Wahabi movement in Islam did on the Arabian Peninsula as long ago as the 1700s.
This is a movement in Sunni Islam that came to be centred in Saudi Arabia (especially in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina).
One of the things that grew out of this ‘radical’ return to roots was a further movement that focussed on the life of Mohammad the founder of Islam.
And Mohammad was a strikingly different founder from the founders of the other major religions.
In contrast with Budda. Confucius, Jesus or Moses Mohammad was a military man—he led armies into battle and executed his enemies.
If you see that history as your ‘roots’ to which you should return, then it is also possible to misunderstand how such a history should be applied in the 21stcentury.
In this way ‘radical Islam’ came to see itself not as engaged in a purely spiritual battle, but rather a literal battle—in which it must engage and slaughter the enemy.
This is the sort of thinking that gave rise to ‘radical Islamists’ flying aircraft into the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001.
There were two other hijacked aircraft that day—one flew into the Pentagon, and the other was crashed by passengers before it could reach its target.
The same ‘radical Islamism’ gave rise to the wave international terrorist attacks that followed on from that day of slaughter—in Paris, in London and around the world.
And that is why ‘radical Islamist’ terrorists shoot and murder Jewish families on Bondi Beach.
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