Radical Islam

Statistical Trends

In the News on the Web corpus, a search for the term “Radical Islam” yields 4597 results. To put this into context, the term yields more results than Islamism (3311), Islamic Extremism (3171) and Islamic Fundamentalism (1213).

If we narrow our search to include results only from the British press, however, we find that it yields 666 results, fewer than Islamism (726), but more than Islamic Extremism (596) and Islamic Fundamentalism (195).

These figures show us that the term is used much more frequently vis a vis its proposed alternatives outside of Britain than it is inside. Of particular interest are the statistics from the USA, which show us that the term Radical Islam is roughly twice as popular as the terms, “Islamism” and “Islamic extremism”, and about seven times as popular as the term Islamic fundamentalism. [3]

Usage in Context

When searching for the term “Radical Islam” within the British Press, a contextual reading of the first 100 hits (out of a total of 666) led to the following results:

• In 76 out of the articles analysed, the term “Radical Islam” was being used in relation to terrorism.
• In 20 of the articles, the use of the term “Radical Islam” was too vague for us to make a judgment as to what precisely was being meant by the writer.
• In 3 articles, the distinction between Radical Islam as “peaceful Islamic movements based on complete political and social reform,” and Radical Islam as violent extremism was attempted
• In one article, the term was used satirically

Below are a handful of examples of how Radical Islam is used to refer to terrorism:

Example 1:

Excerpt:  

It is certain that the UK is dying, for when the UK state itself has, by cruel policy, killed hundreds of thousands over the last several years, while radical Islam hasn’t even managed hundreds.  

 Example 2

Excerpt:  

The university has since been linked with several proponents of radical Islam, and Emwazi appeared to have fallen under their sway. He began attending different mosques and was known to associate with Bilal el-Berjawi, who was killed by a drone strike in Somalia three years ago.  

Example 3:
. 

Excerpt: 

He said there’s little research to indicate the efficacy of de-radicalizing inmates with connections to radical Islam, but he said the research shows that recidivism rates for those connected to white supremacy and other forms of extremism are high.  

As different to “terrorism” in ways that aren’t explained 

Example 4:

Excerpt: 

Douglas Murray builds a persuasive case, reaching back to the 1980s controversy over Ray Honeyford, the Bradford headmaster who was accused of racism after writing an article criticising multicultural education policies. Though stormy, that episode now seems, in an era of throat-cuttings and suicide bombings, almost as quaint as a rerun of Passport to Pimlico. Well-meaning but misguided politicians and opinion-formers, Murray argues, underestimated the appeal of radical Islam and allowed extremism to take hold in some communities.  

 Example 5:

Excerpt: 

The two brothers who bombed luxury hotels on Sunday, killing dozens of tourists at breakfast in Colombo, enjoyed a privileged lifestyle before turning to radical Islam and jihad.  Sons of a millionaire spice trader, Inshaf and Ilham Ibrahim were privately educated in the Sri Lankan capital.  

Future research: 

It would be valuable to understand the results of a poll question to the British public asking: “What is the first word that comes to your mind when you see the term “Radical Islam””.  

Appendix:  Worldwide and Great British Corpus 

Worldwide Corpus 

If we search the root word “Islam” on the News on the Web Corpus for collocates, the following are the top fifty results (as sorted by percentage) in the table below. The word “Radical” is ranked 14th on the list. 

NB: The All tab refers to the number of times the word in question appears in the corpus. So, if we look at “Radical”, it occurs exactly 158703 times in the NOW database. The Frequency tab refers to the number of times the word in question occurs within five words (on the left or the right) of the word “Islam”. Taking “Radical” once more, we can see that the number of times it occurs within five words of “Islam” in the corpus is 5490. This means that 3.46% of all usages of the word “Radical” are in relation to the word “Islam”, thus yielding a moderately high Mutual Information score of 6.98.  

For the purpose of this analysis, we have removed results in which the word Islam occurs as either a first name or a surname. 

Great Britain Corpus  

If we limit our search to include results only from the British Press, our results are in line with our previous findings. We can see that “Radical” is lower on the list in the British corpus than in the Worldwide corpus, further evidence that the term “Radical Islam” is more prevalent in media outside the UK (particularly America) than inside.