While the
core countries of Islam remain in the Middle East, in historical, cultural and
ideological terms, the demographic shift of Islam eastwards into the vast
continent of Asia has become a fact of life. So, while the ideology of
terrorism has originally sprung from Arab Muslims, the likes of bin Laden,
Nasrallah and Arafat, the threatening proximity of the US and Israel to the
core areas and their determination to fight terrorism, have caused it to seek
refuge in the huge, remote and radicalizing Muslim populations of Asia. The
first article (“International Islamic Terrorism: From Origins to
Globalization”) traces the origins of the current globalization of terrorism
in the two Gulf Wars of the 1980s and the early 1990s, and in the Afghan War
of the the 1980s. The second article (“Islam on the March: The Case of Asia”)
explains the spread of Islamic radicalism over the continent of Asia.