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.

The main goal of Islamic radicalism is to change the place and role of religion in the life of society, as a result of which representatives of this movement reject the dominant ideology, the political practice of the existing secular regime and the state structure as not corresponding to the norms of the Muslim religion.

Thus, Islamic extremists pursue the following goals: the establishment of the foundations of an Islamic theocratic state in society, the introduction of Sharia norms into public practice, and, finally, the restoration of the caliphate as a single state formation for all Muslims.

As extensive world practice shows, radical Islam will not stop within the fixed boundaries of the geographical residence of a certain community of Muslims, since for them the cherished dream is to unite the entire Muslim ummah of the world within the framework of a single political state formation – the caliphate. In this case, the process of "spreading" of Islamic radical ideology and practice to other "Muslim" territories, both within the framework of Russia, the CIS and other countries of the world, seems inevitable.

Thus, it seems relevant to analyze the Muslim literature on jihad as a factor destabilizing modern society.

The study of the problem of extremism in Islam is a relatively new area of research in the field of political science, since modern extremism dates back to the formation of the Muslim extremist organization Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1926.5

During the compilation of the bibliography for the work, we saw that there is a lot of literature on terrorism and extremism. But almost all of it is devoted to the analysis of the political component of modern Islamic extremism. In the same vein, the diploma work of S. Samishchenko, a graduate of the Kursk Orthodox Theological Seminary, was written6. Although the title states that the work is devoted to an analysis of jihad, in fact it describes contemporary Muslim extremism without evaluating the texts. There is practically no separate literature that reveals the features and characteristic features of the texts of the Koran and Sunnah, which contain calls for jihad. Therefore, we had to turn to extremist literature, which can be easily found on the Internet.

We consider it necessary at the very beginning of our work to define such concepts as Islamic fundamentalism, radicalism and extremism.