How the Western World Perceives Islam through Terrorism - Essay Example

Throughout history, there are instances whereby the Muslim communities were on the receiving end of a brutal occupation regimes (Mansfield 24).The brutality against Muslims can be seen from several angles. There is an aspect of violence and rivalry among communities that straddle the Middle East landscape. This was in many generations that preceded Islam and should not be taken to have been unique to this category of people. Indeed, such violence can be traced to primitive communities across the globe who were keen to expand their territories.

Islam comes in by virtues of the dim view the religion tends to take about those who wear nonbelievers. The terms ‘jihad’ and ‘fatwa’, which have their roots in Islam, have variously been used to describe the war waged by believers against nonbelievers or those who have despised the religion through their actions. As a result, the history of Islam has been punctuated by various wars and acts of violence directed at nonbelievers in a bid to expand the reach of Islam, forcefully convert the nonbelievers, or entrench the religion in areas it was facing strong opposition from locals (Mansfield 26).

Incidentally, violence against nonbelievers can also be seen in the context of colonialism by the western nations. Given that Christianity was the dominant religion in the west, as opposed to Islam in the Middle East, when the colonialists moved in to try and conquer territories, it was undoubted that they would face opposition. Therefore, there existed a lot of wars fought in the Middle East against the colonialist (most cases called occupiers) as they faced resistance from local rulers (Rogan 57).

In some cases, the colonialists were attacked because they were professing a different faith, seen as pagan worship or heathens by the local communities. But the harsh treatment of the local communities by the colonialists cannot go unmentioned. The brutality of the new occupiers who were eager to entrenched themselves and would be not ready to countenance dissent led to a rebellion by the locals, who were mostly Muslims. This is well illustrated in the case of French occupation in Algeria and the British in Sudan (Mansfield 102).