The Politics of Counter-Terror: Islam and Security in the Postcolonial Muslim State (Studies in Asian Security)

There is a fundamental paradox in counter-terrorism: while Muslim state elites insist that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, the way Muslim states deal with terrorism has everything to do with Islam.In countries like Morocco and Tunisia, terrorism is treated by governments as if it is a religious problem.Elsewhere, in Malaysia, Islamic actors are relied upon to conduct "deradicalization" programs, Islamic institutions are the key authors of counter-radicalization materials, and Islamic expertise is often considered interchangeable with counter-terror expertise.These findings draw attention to a security logic whereby Islam and Islamic interventions became central to solving the problem of terrorism. In this theoretically innovative and empirically rich book, Chan argues that Malaysia's "Islamized" counter-terrorism is an outcome filtered through a matrix of factors, including postcolonial elite status-seeking, modernist state-building, and the immediacies of governmental problem-