ABSTRACT
The authors of the outrages of September 11 claimed to draw their inspiration from the Muslim religion. This claim gave currency to the term ‘Islamic terrorism’, even though President George W. Bush and other leaders of democratic states stressed time and again that terrorism and not Islam was the threat they faced. The record shows that terrorists can come from any religious tradition or from none. Where a terrorist claims religious motives for his crime, he is abusing religion for a political purpose. It is therefore more accurate to speak of Islamist terrorists to denote those Islamists, i.e. militants in the cause of political Islam, who resort to violence.
