Dr. Reham Salama, the executive director of the Al-Azhar Observatory for Combating Extremism, delivered an informative lecture, entitled “Extremist Organizations' Exploitation of Religion to achieve Political Objectives” to students in the Political Science department at the American University in Cairo. She addressed the historical roots and mechanisms used by extremist organizations in manipulating religious texts for their political purposes.
Dr. Reham Salama pointed out that extremist ideology is the result of a long-standing intellectual distortion. Extremists have exploited religion as a cover to justify their violence and brutality, turning heedless to the context of guidance and development, and deliberately pushing towards the flames of war, conflict, and destruction. Furthermore, she reviewed extremist organizations’ motivations to exploit religion, most notably the legitimization of violence and terrorist acts. They deceive youth and exploit their sincere religious eagerness in polarization and recruitment.
In addition, Dr. Reham highlighted historical and contemporary examples of organizations that exploited religion for political purposes, including Zionism, which relies on biblical texts to justify occupation and settlement, the Crusades, which claimed to be holy wars while in reality they sought power and seized territory, and ISIS, which claimed delusively that it followed Islamic law.
Finally, AOCE’s executive director emphasized that the world is in urgent need of a comprehensive approach for combating deviant ideologies, supporting education and critical thinking to counter the takfiri (labelling other as unbeliever) mindset, and raising awareness of Islamic teachings.