Religious extremism is a phenomenon that emerges when a religious community has degenerated. When a community falls prey to degeneration, it begins to display this tendency. This degeneration occurs in accordance with a natural law and no religious community is an exception to this law.

Today, the Muslim ummah (community) is in a state of degeneration. Along with other signs of degeneration, it is afflicted with the disease of religious extremism.

When degeneration develops amongst the later generations of any religious community, then in accordance with natural laws, its members lose their religious spirit. What they are left with is just the external forms of religion. It can be said, then, that religious extremism is but another name for religiosity based simply on form.

Efforts to work with a community that has degenerated have to begin with the reform of individual members, and not in the form of mass movements.

Whenever form-based religiosity establishes itself in a religious community that is in a state of degeneration, it so happens that the external forms of every religious issue is given great importance. At such times, people start focussing on the correct pronunciation of the words of their scriptures whilst ignoring the spirit of the divine message. Instead of trying to cultivate humbleness and submission in their worship, they lay great stress on the external form of their prayers. They debate endlessly about the nitty-gritty of religious laws. They think that religious life is all about maintaining and preserving a sort of community-based identity.

A religious community in the state of degeneration becomes just like any other conventional, materialistically-oriented social group. However, because of its historical traditions, it is not possible for it to cut-off all links with its religion. Its religion now becomes simply an inherited tradition and a source of its communal identity. The history of its religion becomes a source of communal pride. All its institutions and its activities will be in the name of its religion, symbolically but the spirit will be missing.

Religious extremism generally emerges when all of this happens to a religious community. This extremism manifests itself not in terms of the spirit of faith, but, rather, in terms of the external forms of religion. It displays itself in those facets of religion that have to do with the worldly or material aspects of life.

Religious extremism is but another name for religiosity based simply on form.

Efforts to work with a community that has degenerated have to begin with the reform of individual members, and not in the form of collective efforts. If efforts are made at the collective level in such a community—in the form, say, of establishing an organization or forming a government—they will always prove to be a failure in terms of their results. This is because the members of any institution that is set up in a degenerated community will themselves also be degenerated. Such institutions may appear very grandiose, but in actual fact they would be nothing but grand graveyards.