2007

2006

Policy Paper No. 146, 2003

Executive Summary

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.