Why the Category “Terrorism” Must Be Rebuilt
By Dan Burmawi
Almost every morning, I wake up, unlock my phone, and open the news, and almost every day there is another Islamic terrorist attack somewhere in the world. In the last week alone, we’ve seen a deadly shooting at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, where an ISIS-linked gunman yelled “Allahu Akbar” before killing an Army officer and injuring two others in an act of Islamic terrorism; a vehicle-ramming and shooting attack on Temple Israel synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, by a suspect with Hezbollah ties who injured a security guard and terrorized children inside; and an attempted bombing in New York City, where two teenagers hurled improvised explosives at protesters outside Gracie Mansion in a plot to cause mass casualties to defend Muhammad.
But that’s just the latest. Add to this the three Americans killed in an Islamic State ambush in Palmyra, Syria; fifteen Jews murdered in a mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia; and five men arrested in Germany for plotting an Islamic vehicle-ramming attack on a Christmas market in Bavaria. The locations shift, the casualties vary, the headlines evolve, but the pattern endures: a relentless torrent of Islamic terrorism. Yet modern governments cloak it under the amorphous term “terrorism,” as if the label alone suffices to explain or confront the threat.
Nothing in modern political vocabulary is as hollow, overused, and under-defined as the word “terrorism.” It is a category that pretends to illuminate but actually conceals. A bureaucratic convenience that functions as a moral anesthetic. A word that allows governments to condemn violence without naming the worldview that produced it.
Before the twentieth century, political violence was described by ideology, not abstraction. When an anarchist bombed a government building, he was not labeled by his method; he was labeled by his worldview. When Bolsheviks assassinated ministers or fascists marched on Rome, their acts were understood as extensions of their ideologies. The actor and the doctrine were inseparable.
That clarity collapsed precisely when Islamic movements began to articulate a global political-theological project in the late twentieth century. Rather than naming the ideology that animated this violence, Western governments and institutions retreated into vagueness. They invented a category, “terrorism,” that could condemn the act without confronting its doctrinal source.
There were geopolitical reasons for this. Arab alliances mattered. Oil mattered. Diplomatic sensitivity mattered. Washington did not want to alienate allies across the Muslim world, and Europe had already entangled itself in complex migration and energy dependencies. Naming the ideology would trigger political crises; avoiding it offered stability.
Thus emerged the linguistic escape hatch: “militants,” “radicals,” “violent extremists,” and the catch-all “terrorists.” These terms gave the illusion of moral clarity while actually erasing the intellectual roots of the phenomenon.
Unlike anarchism, communism, fascism, or Baathism, all of which were dissected with academic and political precision, Islam was quarantined from ideological scrutiny. The academy shielded it under cultural relativism. Governments shielded it under diplomatic necessity. Media institutions shielded it under the fear of being accused of bigotry. So instead of studying Islam political theology, Western institutions studied: poverty, alienation, unemployment, integration, trauma, mental health, colonial grievances, and identity crises. Everything except the one thing the perpetrators consistently cite: their theology.
This is how “terrorism” became a category without an author, a word that condemns violence while laundering responsibility. It treats the violent actor as a generic creature rather than a doctrinal agent. It places all violent non-state actors into one moral bucket regardless of motivation, history, or worldview.
A cartel assassin, a separatist militia, a Marxist insurgent, and a jihadist suicide bomber all become “terrorists,” even though their intentions, strategies, and intellectual traditions share almost no overlap. Every group uses violence, but only one category of movement defines the use of terror as an explicitly sacred act, a divine obligation, and a central mechanism of political communication. And that is precisely the distinction the term “terrorism” erases.
Where other violent groups pursue political concessions, territory, or wealth, Islamic jihadists pursue something fundamentally different: the production of fear as a religious act. This is based on the explicit commandment of Allah “And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrify the enemy of Allāh and your enemy and others besides them whom you do not know [but] whom Allāh knows. And whatever you spend in the cause of Allāh will be fully repaid to you, and you will not be wronged.” Surah 8:60
Cartels use violence for profit, separatists use violence for independence, leftist guerrillas use violence for revolution, mafias use violence for territorial control. Islamic jihadists as defined by their own sacred literature, use violence to terrify, to signal divine obedience, to create existential dread in the enemy, and to enact a theology of domination. To them, terror is not a byproduct. It is the point. This doctrinal structure is unique. No other contemporary movement insists that fear itself, not victory, not negotiation, not territory, is a strategic fulfillment of divine will.
Western analysts constantly ask, “Why would they do something so counterproductive?” The answer is simple: because the goal is not the effect on the battlefield. The goal is to embody a theological command. When jihadist groups chant “we love death as much as you love life,” they are not expressing nihilism. They are articulating a worldview where terror is sacramental, fidelity is proven through violence, and intimidation is a religious virtue.
To ignore this theological dimension is to misunderstand the core of Islam.
“Terrorism,” as a generic category, cannot explain this. Because the phenomenon is not generic. It is doctrinal.
What separates Islamic movements from every other violent actor is not the severity of their violence, but the fact that terror is embedded in their theological DNA. It is not merely justified. It is sanctified. This is why Islamic attacks differ in nature, scale, symbolism, and intent from other forms of political violence. The method is fused with theology, and the theology demands a specific kind of spectacle. Terror is, in effect, liturgy. And this is precisely what the word “terrorism” suppresses.
Why the Category “Terrorism” Must Be Rebuilt
By treating Islamic violence as if it were behaviorally equivalent to cartel violence or separatist insurgency, the term “terrorist” becomes an empty label. It condemns the act but obscures the cause. This has several consequences:
- It collapses all violent movements into one shapeless category.
The word “terrorism” places ideologically unrelated actors on the same moral plane. The IRA is compared to ISIS; the Tamil Tigers to al-Qaeda. - It prevents the public from understanding the theological dimension.
Western audiences are taught to search for socioeconomic explanations, unemployment, trauma, alienation, response to imperialism, instead of ideology. This infantilizes both the attackers and the public. - It blinds policymakers to the role of doctrine.
Counterterrorism becomes a tactical project, not an intellectual one. Programs focus on surveillance and policing rather than ideological literacy. - It gives Islamic movements a cloak of anonymity.
If terrorism has no author, the Islamic theology behind most contemporary attacks remains untouchable. The only actors who take Islamic ideology seriously are the jihadists themselves. Everyone else avoids the subject out of fear, politeness, or intellectual laziness.
What should replace the existing vocabulary? When a movement explicitly frames its violence through Islamic theology, the correct description is: Islamic violence using terror as method. This is specific, accurate, non-collective, intellectually honest, and analytically useful.
“Terrorism” should be the description of a method, not an ideology. And when the only global movement that ritualizes terror as theological obligation is Islam, then the category must reflect that reality, not deny it. This does not implicate a billion people. It implicates the religion they identify with.
To confront Islamic violence, the West must confront Islamic theology. To confront Islamic theology, the West must name it. And to name it, the West must abandon the euphemism that has dominated its political vocabulary for decades.
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