Fault Lines in the Faith: How Events of 1979 Shaped the Islamic World

‘What if an ideology, which is meant to impart wisdom and guidance to humanity, itself loses
all its control and causes serious woes to the entire world?’ In the last few decades, an extremely anti-pluralistic, visibly misogynistic and terribly intolerant strain of Islam has taken control of the Arabian heartland and systematically spread out to other countries, eventually wreaking havoc across the world. Covering the expansion of political Islam in the modern Arab and non-Arab world until the dawn of Crown Prince Bin Salman era in Saudi Arabia, Hasnain’s thorough research explores the radicalization of Muslim youth in North America and Europe, as well as the sectarian fault lines and rise of the Shia crescent in the Middle-East. These developments ultimately led to the rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), along with the weaponization of Islamic thought through the use of various social media platforms for the recruitment of jihadi volunteers, which has plagued the world in the past decade. An important work, it exposes how extremist outfits, with the support of the religious apparatus, methodically managed to scar the face of a faith that claims to have the second largest number of followers in the world.