Éticas teleológicas y terrorismo Islamista

Abstract

To the teleological ethics of Islamist terrorism (whose main author was the philosopher Sayyid Qutb, who was, in turn, inspired by the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and the reflections of Ibn Taymiyya and Abul alla Maududi) the ultimate goal in a person's life is to please Allah, and the main means to obtaining this goal is the full application of sharia or God's law. This full application of sharia, which shapes a true Muslim's life, supposedly only took place between the years 622 and 660, during the period of the Prophet and the first four caliphs (the so-called «Pious Predecessors» or «Salaf»). Islamist terrorism's ethics, then, foreshadow a regressive utopia featuring as enemies both infidels (the distant enemy) and apostates (the close enemy). The internalization of the principles of this ethical code and, in general, of the central ideas that form its basis (the so-called «Qutbism », which is derived from the name of its main representative, Sayyid Qutb) correlates with certain cognitive, emotional and behavioral distortions presented by terrorists, specifically: feeling like and perceiving themselves as soldiers belonging to a vanguard (taliah) of true Muslims fulfilling the religious duty (the divine man-date) of fighting those that through their ideas and practices contribute to the degradation of Islam's values as outlined in the sacred texts. To the soldiers of the vanguard it is a just war because, even though it may look like an offensive war, in reality it is waged in defense of true Islam, which is threatened in its very essence by apostates and unbelievers. Therefore, it is believed that the alleged victims of Islamist Terrorism are actually aggressors of a lifestyle as lofty as the authentic Muslim.