Introduction

"Islamic history is written with the blood of shaheeds, the stories of shaheeds, and the examples of shaheeds."

(Shaykh Abdullah Azzam) 1.

"Terrorism has no national or religious affiliation." Again and again, this thesis is reproduced by politicians and public figures. It is reproduced so often that it seems as if the speakers are trying to convince us of what they themselves do not really believe in. Or perhaps they do, but over and over again they repeat this incantation, this magical formula that is supposed to banish the ghost of fear from the consciousness of the philistine. But in a strange way, in the consciousness of the philistine, the place of belief that "all people are brothers" is increasingly occupied by ideas of a completely opposite direction.

High political figures are far from sinless either. President Bush has already apologized to Muslims for their "hasty" declaration of a "war on Islamic terrorism." The President of Russia, in turn, let slip that the goal of the "rootless and unbelieving" terrorists is to create the Great Caliphate. However, no matter how much politicians repeat that a terrorist is a criminal without a clan and tribe, interethnic and interfaith contradictions remain the invariable background for their statements. Extremism and terrorism are no more acute problem for modern society. And there is no problem more delicate and painful than the connection of extremism and terrorism with national and religious affiliation.2

Can we even say that terrorists belong to a "different" world, a culture hostile to us? "A recent study by Mark Sageman suggests that terrorists grow out of our own moral universe. The global nature of modern politics, which is not tied to the "polis" or to the place, has brought out a special breed of cosmopolitan "global terrorists"3.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a tendency in the Muslim world to strengthen the positions of Islamic extremism and fundamentalism, which was generally due to the general politicization of Islam (as well as the Islamization of politics).

A number of objective factors also contributed to the strengthening of the position of Islam in the countries of the Muslim East:

"1) A special role was played by the changes in the geopolitical situation in the world as a whole after the collapse of the world socialist system and the USSR. The strengthening of the U.S. position as the world's sole "hegemon" has also become a kind of catalyst for moving away from European models and searching for ways of original development.

2) The conflict of different types of civilizations, Muslim and European, which manifested itself in almost all spheres of Muslim society and showed the impossibility of blindly copying Western society on Islamic soil. Historically, most countries in the Middle East are currently going through a difficult phase. The recent experience of the past decades has shown the inadequacy of borrowing both "capitalist" and "socialist" ways of development, and the unacceptability of their mechanical copying.

3) The current socio-economic situation in the countries of the Arab East is characterized by a number of common features: agrarian overpopulation and the presence of a large number of workers not involved in agriculture; too rapid urbanization of cities at the expense of people from rural areas; the inability to provide work for the urban population, the growth of unemployment; strong property stratification in society"4.

Speaking about modern "Islamic" terrorism and its threat, it should be emphasized that the main and immediate cause of the development of terrorism in the region should be considered the collapse of the socialist system and the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result of the collapse of the USSR with the preceding bankruptcy of the ideas of socialism in many states of the Near and Middle East (Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.), the ideological vacuum there, and then in the Muslim regions of Russia, quickly began to be filled by Islam. The latter appears primarily in its most militant form, in the form of radical Wahhabism, which demands that the Muslim world return to the caliphate with the help of a "holy war." Recording the intensification of Islam in the Muslim East and in Russia, experts note that Islam, which is characterized by a hostile attitude towards liberal values and which can only lead to tyranny and impoverishment, seeks to fill the vacuum formed after the collapse of communism.