re: #184 wheat-doggha — oo bird outside my window

That second option may just happen, if they’re found.

Indeed.

This little snippet - in my opinion - sums up Boko Haram quite nicely:

The politically aggrieved (also being religious people) often seek religious interpretations that allow or justify the actions they feel compelled to take. It becomes a matter where religion does not shape politics (politics does not unfold cohesively from the principles of the religion) but rather politics of desperation or outrage may shape and distort the interpretation of the religion - in this way religion and violent politics can, at times, become dangerously conflated (and dangerously intertwined with a misanthropic impulse to purge the society of impure elements). But the root is politics (and disillusionment), not religion. Unfortunately, the impact of seeking religious justification for extreme actions is that a (mistaken) theological precedent emerges. The more extreme the actions taken, the more unbending and absolutist the theological justification becomes.

The Khawarij method was to strive endlessly to determine who among those who call themselves believers were, in reality, heretics, and then to drive out from the community all such “so-called” believers till only “true” believers remained. Some of the sub-sects of the Khawarij accomplished this through wholesale slaughter of those Muslims believed to be engaged in any form of shirk (according to the Khawarij’s own amorphous, shifting, and politically-bound ideas of what constituted shirk). They were characterized by their hasty and persistent tendency to declare Muslims who deviated even fractionally from the narrow Khawarij view of Islam as betrayers of the religion and deserving of death. Under the Khawarij, the designations of kafir and mushrik came to mean the wrong type of believer, rather than unbeliever. An unbeliever was often more palatable to them than the wrong type of believer who by his mistaken belief supposedly undermined the religion itself. This type of takfir was a praxis first widely initiated by the Khawarij. They made themselves judge, jury, and executioner in labeling, convicting, and punishing those who did not measure up to their standard (throwing aside due legal process). In the midst of the turbulent politics of that time their hermeneutic was not merely a theoretical position, and rather than engage in reflection, discussion, and exchange of ideas, the Khawarij spoke with their swords and they spoke often, and without mercy.

islamfrominside.com