Terror in Egypt: Thoughts on the attack and radical Islam
Three hundred and five.
That’s the number of people killed in the most recent terrorist attack in Egypt. The death tolls always tend to be higher in the eastern part of the world, or maybe it’s just that the ones with “only” double-figure death tolls don’t make it into American news.
That’s just an insane number. I admit that when I first saw the news of a terror attack in Egypt, I assumed it was another church bombing. But no, this time it was a mosque. It was a mosque frequented by Sufi Muslims, a branch of Islam known for not interpreting the Quran quite as rigidly as most. That evidently was enough to make them a target. Bitterly radicalized terrorists slaughtering Muslims because they weren’t Muslim enough.
I’m not sure why it took a death toll of over 300 to get our attention. But mine has been captured. The difference is that unlike the recent Texas attack, where everyone can be privy to the latest information as the news disseminates it, we’ll probably hear very little more about this. Everyone knows who it was, or at least what sort of people they were. Despite the bombing campaigns now being carried out by Egypt’s Air Force, there is no guarantee the individuals involved will ever face justice. No substantive changes will likely be made. More churches and mosques and buses will be bombed, and we can’t really do anything about it. We can’t even control domestic terrorism here, much less play a meaningful part halfway around the world.
But if we ever wonder why people make such a big deal out of radical Islamic terrorism, this illustrates why. Domestic terrorists exist, for sure. Other countries have their own domestic or regional terrorists. But radical Islam is global. It’s caused destruction on almost every continent in the last decade. It relentlessly hates everyone and everything that doesn’t conform to its rigid and outmoded standards. Christians, Jews, atheists, pagans, and the wrong kind of Muslims are all its targets. It’s an ideology that gives its adherents an incredible boldness and rage that has led to thousands of deaths in the Middle East and hundreds more in Europe and America. They’ve expressed a consistent goal to kill those who don’t agree with them, and they’ve carried it out time and time again.
Radical Islamists think it’s their divine mandate to establish and reign over physical territory in the name of Allah. They think it’s their duty to subjugate all peoples under the yoke of Islam. They want to regress to the 7th-century civil and national laws laid out in the Quran and Hadiths. And it’s hard to make a convincing Islam-based case against them, because Islam began as a political and territorial religion. From the very start, Islam’s founder spread Islam primarily by political and military means.
And perhaps most alarmingly, their ideology is not as unpopular as we’d like to think. For example, 29% of Egypt’s 85 million Muslims (i.e. about 25 million) say they think suicide bombings against innocent civilians — like this one — are often or sometimes justified. Converting that poll’s percentages into numbers shows that about 35 million Bangladeshis, 21 million Pakistanis, 15 million Indonesians, 12 million Afghanis, 10 million Turks, 3 million Malaysians, 3 million Moroccans, 2 million Iraqis, 2 million Palestinians, 1.2 million Tunisians, 900,000 Jordanians, and 700,000 Russians believe the same thing. It is not an isolated grassroots movement like most domestic terrorism. It’s a global movement.
So what does this mean for us? Yes, it’s true that since 9/12/2001, more Americans have been killed by cows (20/year) than Islamic terror attacks (8/year). But terrorism has the ever-present capability of doing far greater damage than cows. Still, the answer is not to be scared and panic. Nor is it to turn yet another issue on which all decent people should be unified into a politically partisan issue, where one side overhypes it and the other downplays it. But here’s what I think this means for us:
Recognize this issue is more complex than just “hate.” After the Manchester terrorist attack last year, Katy Perry was castigated on social media for saying, “I think the greatest thing we could do is just unite and love on each other, and like, no barriers, no borders, like, we all just need to co-exist.” Well, no. Terrorists have no interest in co-existing with us. Just saying “love” won’t change that. The only way people with a violent ideology will renounce violence is if they renounce their ideology.
We are not just dealing with certain groups, but an ideology. Everyone knows about ISIS and Al-Qaeda. We know who we’re opposing. But most of us understand very little about their ideology, and the ideology is the real problem. When ISIS and Al-Qaeda fade into the background, more groups will pop up because the ideology is not dead. And because this is now a politically partisan issue, the ideology is rarely talked about. But we should know what we’re opposing. We should know that Americans are being radicalized. And we should know that…
Denouncing an ideology is useless without offering a better one. We Christians know that we have something better. Sharing the gospel publicly, where it reaches even the ears of those who are most resistant to it, is something we need to do. The Internet just may be a great tool for that, and so is reaching out to those who are outcasts in society, which Muslims often find they are. The gospel has reached even hardened members of terrorist groups like Bashir Mohammad, who fought on the side of terrorists in the Syrian Civil War and now leads Bible studies in Turkey. There are even possible reports of ISIS soldiers embracing Christ.
No one is under the illusion that we can stop terrorism from here with a few words. But perhaps we can prevent the next Mohamad Jamal Khweis, Jaelyn Young, or Muhammad Dakhlalla. Even in America, not everyone is at peace, and there are many who need to be reached with the peace Christ offers.
