JVF Conference Papers
After the terrorist attacks of September 11th in the USA, some scholars and policy makers tried to draw a boundary between openly political Muslim groups and Muslim communities, arguing that while the first constitute a potential threat to Western values of freedom and democracy, the latter are fundamentally apolitical and, therefore, unthreatening to the Western countries and their Middle Eastern allies. The problem with this kind of analysis is that it is based exclusively in the evaluation of the explicit ideology of the Muslim political groups, ignoring their diversity and social and political contexts of their practices.
