Jay Bryant says referring to Islamist terrorists as nihilists, besides being accurate, serves another purpose:
...it offers a means of separating the terrorist from the decent Muslim. So long as al-Qaeda terrorists are seen by Muslims simply as practitioners of a radical version of the true religion, they will retain a measure of legitimacy, perhaps even the sort of wary admiration reserved in all religions for those whose faith is so strong as to permit them to abnegate their own comfort and well-being toward holy ends.Posted by dan at September 17, 2004 11:53 PMMoreover, as Muslims, the terrorists are heirs to a tradition that includes the wonderfully tolerant, learned and productive Umayyad dynasty in Spain, as well as their great rivals, the Abbasids, who founded Baghdad, made it their capital, and one of the great centers of scholarship and commerce of the medieval centuries. But if the terrorists are placed instead in the tradition of nihilism, there is no necessity to make allowances for anything like that. Nihilism can boast no worthy role models.