lence and evil) that explained the distributions of fortune and why they were
typically unequal. For Weber, suffering came not simply from class domina-
tion, but the human condition, death, misery and sadness; religion served
ameliorative functions for the person, while at the same time it was a cen-
tral factor directing an “economic ethic”. For Weber, religion provided expla-
nations of reality, orientations to the world, and prescribed ethical codes of
conduct. Thus Islamisms can now explain the economic adversity and humil-
iation that have befallen Muslim societies on the basis of foreign domination
and the incursions of immorality from without. But this was made possible
by their own failures of faith and loss of virtue. Islamisms give voice to the
alienated, explanations for their conditions and solutions for overcoming
adversities.
From Jihad to Terrorism
While fundamentalisms divide the world into the chosen and the damned,
most fundamentalists are typically ethnocentric and denigrating toward the
infidel Other. However, they do not typically embrace actual violence.^42 But
today, the political Islam that is often seen as the basis of jihadqua religious
war, terrorism is seen as primary tactic to influence another State. But ter-
rorism is a label for those who employ violence in political struggles; it is a
military tactic used in low intensity warfare by non State actors. Thus, when
Menachim Begin was inIrgun, bombing the King David hotel was seen as
part of a struggle for independence. Those Iraqis who seek the explusion of
American troops are labeled terrorists.
For Islam, jihadconnotes struggle, typically the individual’s own struggle
to be moral and virtuous. But the notion of lesser jihad, holy military war,
violence toward others, has been revived to legitimate terrorism in the name
of God.^43 Small numbers of Islamicist Jihadishave embraced terrorism, typically
the “weapon of the weak” to articulate a variety of grievances of economic
and political powerlessness ranging from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank,
Russia’s domination of Afghanistan or Chechnya, America’s invasion of Iraq
From the Caliphate to the Shaheedim• 323(^42) Of course ethnocentrism and denigration of the other, whether on the basis of
religious, racial, ethnic or class, can, and often does, become mobilized as actual vio-
lence from lynching to genocide. 43
Many Muslim scholars have decried the use of Islamic theology by Islamicists,
whom they say have corrupted the Quran by justifying suicide, and/or the murder
of non-combatants, especially women and children.