Opinion: Stop blaming Islam for terrorism

When acts of terrorism are associated with Muslims, public discourse frequently treats Islam itself as the most immediate and often only explanation. Because it is a visible and familiar marker to Western audiences, scapegoating Islam feels like a neat answer, but it is misleading. It turns a complex social and political phenomenon into a simple moral story — Islam made them do it. This reflex is also mistaken because religion is rarely the original catalyst that makes an individual vulnerable or recruitable. And it is costly because when terrorism is misdiagnosed as a theological problem, the default is to search for theological solutions, which is like trying to stop the smoke and not the fire. In reality, religious ideology often acts as the mask while structural abandonment is the face underneath driving radicalization pathways. 

Recruitment is rarely a matter of someone reading scripture and becoming radicalized. Instead, it is far more often a story of people being cornered or compromised, materially, socially or emotionally, until a point is reached that is so severe that violence can be sold to them as an escape. More specifically, it is the conditions of structural abandonment — poverty, unemployment, corruption, repression, insecurity, humiliation and broken public services — that produce vulnerability long before religious ideology ever enters the picture. These factors do not “cause” terrorism in a simple, mechanical way, but they create the terrain in which recruiters can present themselves as providers of opportunity, belonging, direction and purpose under the guise of divine promise. Understanding this dynamic is absolutely essential, because once we do, it forces people to stop treating terrorism as a mystery of belief and rather as a symptom of governance and livelihood fractures.

When the state’s primary presence in everyday life is its absence, resentment is not difficult to understand. When its most consistent form of  ‘contact’ is violence — harassment, arbitrary policing, corruption and surveillance — that resentment ceases to be an aberration and becomes predictable. So are vulnerability and the feeling that change is hopeless. Under these conditions, the language of religion, and its perversions, can function like a mobilizing frame — it can convert an individual’s resentment and hopelessness into a sense of sacred duty and moral urgency by giving their pain a vocabulary that feels timeless, righteous and bigger than themselves. It can take what begins as humiliation, and eventually the loss of hope — repeatedly being denied opportunities, repeatedly being treated as disposable, repeatedly being policed more than supported — and repackage it as destiny, as an escape, as a chance of having a greater purpose, and even as a path toward eternal reward. This dynamic is precisely my point — religious language is rarely the spark. It is the accelerant. In this way, socioeconomic marginalization, social abandonment or even the racialized experience of being Muslim in a Western society can produce the kindling that recruitment is then able to ignite. 

We can see this dynamic with painful clarity in Casablanca on May 16, 2003. That night, a series of coordinated suicide attacks struck public spaces of “wealth” that symbolized Morocco’s modernity, tourism economy and proximity to global capital. In the immediate aftermath, the story traveled far and wide, and in familiar form — Morocco had been hit by “Islamist terror.” This simple explanation ultimately dominated the public conversation, especially beyond Morocco. But the Casablanca bombings were not an eruption of theology out of thin air — they were the result of a pipeline of abandonment. 

Multiple reports following the bombings traced many of the attackers’ origins back to Sidi Moumen, an impoverished and long-neglected neighborhood long treated as Casablanca’s disposable periphery. 

This detail matters because it reframes what the bombings “mean.” If the targets of the attacks exemplified Morocco’s modernity and wealth, Sidi Moumen and the experiences of its residents represented the other side of that same national story — a place close enough to see prosperity but barred from it.

In Sidi Moumen, “being barred” is not an abstract feeling, it is something you are reminded of every day. It’s looking at the towering buildings and luxurious houses of Casablanca from a home built out of necessity rather than abundance. It’s seeing people who look just like you, who seem no different from you, get the very opportunities and chances you would do anything for — not because they are more talented or more deserving, but because they were born on the other side of an invisible line. It’s watching your parents struggle to make dignity out of scarcity, while just minutes away, others live lives defined by abundance and opportunity. And finally, it’s understanding that you’re stuck, shut off, cut out, forgotten and there’s absolutely nothing you can do to change that.These are precisely the conditions recruiters know how to exploit. When one has been cut off from legitimate routes to dignity — work, education, mobility, respect — an extremist organization can step in and offer a counterfeit version of it all at once — brotherhood, structure, a paycheck, and even eternal purpose, all wrapped in the language of faith. It is not ideology that first opens the door, it is neglect. 

This is why the “Islamic violence” label is worse than just inaccurate, it is strategically convenient. It allows there to be a fixation on religion and ideology, while the governance failures that manufacture vulnerability are ignored. Furthermore, this misfocus only worsens the issue. More surveillance, more policing and more suspicion directed at religious communities only deepens the humiliation and exclusion recruiters already exploit. If we actually want to reduce terrorism, the response has to be as structural as the problem. This doesn’t require the creation of utopias, rather, it involves the refusal to treat neighborhoods like Sidi Moumen as disposable. Begin investing in the “boring,” life-shaping things — schools that retain and educate students, vocational pathways tied to real jobs and basic public services that restore dignity to everyday life. In other words, build a state that is a provider of opportunities to all. 

Morocco’s response to the Casablanca bombings is instructive — the nation did not conclude that Islam was the problem. Instead, it centered its response on places like Sidi Moumen. The nation directed substantial investment into the neglected urban peripheries that had produced the attackers — schools, vocational programs, basic infrastructure. Morocco understood that the pipeline ran through abandonment, not theology.

That is the model — not searching for the explanation in a mosque, but in the conditions that made recruitment possible in its neighborhood. Not fighting the smoke, but fighting the fire. 

Reeyan Esmail `26 is a religious studies major from Los Angeles, California.