However, the forum’s main theme -- the status of think tanks in the Muslim world and their problems -- was not given much thought.The forum served as a good venue for discovering that Muslim intellectuals are mainly worried about the rising Islamophobia and identification of Islam with terrorism in the West. Lack of proper education and poverty were frequently cited as the main cause of the emergence of terrorist organizations in the Muslim world.
However, do these factors really account for the emergence of terrorism? Wouldn’t it be an oversimplification to reduce terrorism to these simple factors? Wouldn’t this be a case of looking at the 21st century with blinkers on? The young people who conducted the Sept. 11 attacks were neither uneducated nor poor. They were wealthier and more educated than an average middle-class Westerner. What then urged those well-educated, smart and rich young people to undertake an action that would eventually destroy themselves? What was the reason why they performed an act of self-annihilation for the sake of what they considered to be the truth? What sort of an established and powerful belief could convince a young man who benefits from the favors of the world to die for the sake of his ideals? If poverty, a lack of education and deception are explanations that do not hold true, what then is the correct answer? Only love and faith may give a young person the power to resist and fight against injustice. When the leftist ideology -- both in its Western European and Soviet incarnations -- collapsed in early the 1990s, what ideology were the young people to seek shelter in so as to derive strength in their resistance to enemies, occupation, inequality, chronic injustice and oppression in their countries? How should the weak, who are deprived of even basic democratic rights and human rights in the face of governments that are the puppets of international companies and their security forces and regular armies that are equipped with state-of-the-art weapon technologies, resist? How should intellectuals lend them their support? In the uneducated and poor Middle East of the first half of the 20th century, there was no terror. Why is there terrorism in the Middle East of the 21st century?
If we do not find an answer to these questions and if we do not seek an answer to different points and if we do not dispense with our tunnel vision, we cannot prevent terrorism.
As long as there is no democracy in the Muslim world, as long as big powers continue to send their regular armies against Islamic countries, as long as the governments are formed under the influence of international companies without the will of the nation and as long as intellectuals are not given room in decision-making processes, terror will continue to exist. The solution is democracy. The solution is human rights. The solution is political rights. The solution is to ensure welfare and justice. The solution is to shape the future by looking at history.
