In the late 20^th-century, Islam is associated in its very essence with terrorism and authoritarianism by western mass media. This is not merely due to euro centric projections or the cultivation of hostile perceptions. Violence is indeed a characteristic of the Islamic orient, but is it first and for most attributed to religious factors?

 A review of the near and middle East since 1945 brings to light at least Four Major conflict types:

• Uprising  against foreign rule: French and British colonial rule, in the middle East
• Post-colonial military interventions by foreign power: the British-French Suez Expedition..
• Violent conflicts between Post colonial states: Pakistan and India; Iraq and Iran.
• Internal conflicts within the post colonial states of the region; India and Pakistan.

 Further-more, violence are attempts by fundamentalist movements to subject state and Society as a whole to religious law (Iranian revolutions).

The authoritarianism of many regimes in the region represents a chronic type of violence of a particular kind. Massive human rights violations (arbitrary arrest, torture, deportations, executions and assassinations) are frequently part of everyday government practice, sometimes assuming the form of an undeclared war against certain section of population as in Iraq.

The demarcation lines between the various conflict types are blurred and frequently overlap. In many cases the conflict reinforces one another. Struggle against foreign rule, for example, is a particular motif which permeates many inner-and interstate conflicts in the region. Religious motives or a supposedly archaic willingness to engage in violence on the part of the local population are less significant than the effects of foreign rule: suppression, colonial conquest, human rights violation and social injustice continue to foster violent conflict not only in the Islamic world but beyond.

Many of the region conflicts date back to before the “re-Islamisation” processes promoted by the success of the Iranian revolution (78/79). Islamist opposition groups have frequently flourished in places where secularist forces were weakened by state repression (Iran and Egypt).

In many cases, what we are dealing with are multi-layered, multi-causal processes, in which desperate cultures of conflict and strategic considerations are intertwined. Secularist and religious revolutionary ideologies, the muscle-play of foreign powers, economic interests and military-bureaucratic appeasement policies have a part to play, as do tribal, militia and guerrilla warfare as well as a general coarsening of morals in the wake of lengthy conflicts.

These findings are more transparent when violence is measured by the number of victims. The greatest perpetrator of violence in the region are not nationalist guerilla groups or fundamentalist suicide commandos, but authoritarian states with the potential to carry out mass annihilation and repression, Secularist dictatorships were responsible for the worst mass killings in the Muslim orient of the twentieth century.

The mass media of the western world tends to focus on a particular type of “oriental” violence-so called “Terrorism”. The term is measured by the number of direct victims and perpetrators, these actions represent only a very few proportion of the tragic and violent happening in the near and middle-East. Yet their prominence in the western media reveals a lot a bout the problems which mar perceptions and communication between western and middle-eastern audience. Such actions have often had considerable resonance in the west.

The term “Terrorism”, suggests strategies, in which terror is consciously employed in the pursuit of certain goals. In principle, terror can be employed by both private individuals and states. The precise definition of political violence, however, depends on the political and cultural standpoint of the speaker. Opinion on the subject is widely divergent: one person’s “terrorist” is another’s “freedom fighter”.

Political cultures are always “cultures of fear”. Every concrete political order is based in the elimination of other possible orders. These alternatives remains in existence as a subliminal potential to cause disorder and fear and must therefore be held at bay.

It is significant that the vision of an imminent “clash of Civilizations” has gained currency at a time when the spatial boundaries between “oriental” and “occidental” cultures of violence are disappearing as a result of the global mobility of people, idea and finances. Islamist movements in the near East frequently receive support and financial aid from the west, or are controlled from there “orient” and “Occident” are increasingly employed as a territorial, and therefore universally applicable polemical categories in the internal disputes of a global society.

The use of such categories has resulted in stereotypical linkage of Islam and terrorism. This association is particularly problematic not only because it encourages witch hunts against Muslims and ignores the fact that terrorism is an international phenomenon, not tied to a particular culture or religion. It also disregards the extent to which Muslims in particular are victims of terrorist violence, not only in Bosnia, but in the Middle East itself. And finally, by concentrating on “terrorism” in the Islamic world, it neglects the more important question of the causes of political violence in the region.

As well as establishing a European state system world-wide, “European world conquest” in the modern era also universalized a European concept of violence, i.e. the proscription of non-state violence. The results have been paradoxical. In the western centers of modern global system, state monopolization of the use of force is controlled by publicly sanctioned regulations, in the Islamic orient, on the other hand, state violence has augmented authoritarian rule, first in the form of European colonialism and then as a result of he military support given to many authoritarian regimes by the super power of the cold war era. Finally, the ability of many rentier states in the region  to secure substantial external incomes(oil revenue, political subsidies, loans) during the “oil revolution” and the East-west conflict, has enabled them to largely dispense with popular support..

Authoritarian regimes, are more likely than democracies to use force internally and externally. They are less vulnerable on the domestic front to terror attacks and are more inclined to employ terror as a political instrument. More importantly, they provoke violent counter-movements in which the employment of non-state force in the removal of illegitimate and violent regimes is perceived as a positive value.

 The growing number of non-state perpetrations of violence through out the world has resulted in a baffling mixture of state initiatives and private goals Résistance movements militias, gangs, exist side- by- side with the pseudo private activities of state or Para-state secret service and a broad spectrum of political and religious groups, some of which survive on the support of international governments. 

In view of close casual connections between authoritarianism and violence in the Near East, the most obvious way to reduce the dangerous potential described above is not to focus exclusively on terrorism, but to encourage democratization in the region.

The continued existence of authoritarian structures in the region is due in no small part to western participation, as evidenced by the financial, military, and police backing given to numerous authoritarian regimes in the region and the occasional support given by western state to radical Islamic movements out of a perceived need for allies in the struggle against communism or any secularist opposition.