The Jessaverse | Change and Exchange

After I heard about the terrorist attacks on London yesterday, I started analysing the reasons behind the terrorist attacks — most terrorists or ‘freedom fighters’ seem to have some sort of purpose behind bombing buildings; they don’t do it nolens-volens. I personally think the root behind terrorism is intolerance and a lack of co-operation and cultural exchange. Fundamentalist Muslims feel very strongly that Western civilisation is evil because it is against what Allah mandated in the Koran, and they are also taught not to accept others’ beliefs. To retaliate against the inevitable tide of globalisation and ‘westernisation’, the fundamentalist Islamists issue fatwas, bomb buildings, and declare Western states like the US to be the ‘Great Satan’. If there were more acceptance of social reform in Islamic countries, I think that people would be more accepting of different ideas and would allow cultural exchange. I think that since their culture is a bit more stagnant than the ever-changing Western world, they are less accepting of change, and resist it whenever it materialises. I’m not prejudiced against Middle Eastern culture; in fact, the Middle East used to be the cultural centre of the world, and Islam once did support a thriving scientific and intellectual culture. Nowadays, the cultural centres of the world have shifted westward, but the Middle East hasn’t wanted to move along with them. Fundamentalists now are in charge of many of those countries, and they support cultural stagnation, an unfortunate result of extreme social conservatism.

The resistance to change, along with other factors, is one of the catalysts for this variety of terrorism.