Extremism is an obvious gateway to violence and terrorism. The world has suffered in the past centuries and years of various forms of extremism – intellectual and religious. The most recent form of extremism is the fanaticism of terrorist organizations and groups claiming belonging to Islamic religion.
Terror entities have always been hostile to human values. They stereotyped a bad image of the Islamic religion through videotaped crime against Western citizens, most recently in lone-wolf attacks.
In the journey of de-Islamizing extremism, we should never allow the growth of a counter-extremism. We have been witnessing odd trends in the Arab media on the pretext of promoting freedom and pluralism. It’s not.
The holy month of Ramadan offers a great opportunity to reshape the perception of Islam tainted by sedition, terrorism and extremism ideologists.
For Muslims, the month is about forgiving, moderation, tolerance and spiritual purity. But what we see on many Arab TV screens is programs and television series deliberately that are non-Arab and non-Islamic.
Standing for our authentic values is sometimes faced with calls against auto-censor and other red-herring arguments.
Every society comes with a value system. Radicalism in a society cannot be remedied with another form of radicalism but with a return to the moderation that is inherent in the rightly interpreted value system.
Anti-cultural extremism is just going to fuel religious extremism and give opportunists a chance to mobilize the people, once again, in the wrong direction.
Negative Counter-extremism is also encouraging Westernization and secularization, giving yet another battle to the Muslim communities.
From 1967 onwards, waves of counter-extremism in arts and culture maybe helped religious extremists to some extent,
But what is certain is that every action has a reaction. The societal tug of war could drag us into decades of chaos if we don’t work towards establishing strong social standards that should be observed in arts and cultural production.
