The Nature of Extremism in Political Islam: The Roots of Identity and Normative Action

Salafi thought and the phenomenon of violent extremism are the most interesting issues in political and international studies. However, with a reductive and impressive attitude from our Islam with fundamentalism it is attempted to despose the whole of Islam from extremism despite the diversity of intellectual, theological, philosophical and political varieties. However, it seems recognizing the nature of extremism requires deep study on the forming the layers of contemporary political Islam. The purpose of this paper is to explain the theoretical concept and objective flow of “extremism in political Islam. The main question of this study is ‘how the roots of identity and normative elements of extremism in political Islam are explained.’ To answer to this question it was hypothesized that ‘Salafist- Hadith groups are defined as the “Radical Political Islam” flow because they believe that they can revive the Islamic Caliphate and implement Sharia law by violent struggle to gain power and violent overthrow of governments through takfir opponents. To examine the hypothesis, the conceptual charts of intellectual flow and realtions of salafi groups with each other as well as the normative features of extreme political Islam as the main source of internal consistency of the extremism identity in the political Islam framework are presented.