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II. Religious Terrorism:
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Biggo, Nancy C. The Rationality of the use of Terrorism by Secular and Religious Groups, www.dissertations.com, p. 18. 
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Speech given by Tony Blair to UN General Assembly on September 21, 1998 Britain and the Fight against International 
Terrorism, An FCO Network Feature, www.fco.org, p. 2. 
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Criteria to Declare a country and organization as terrorist ,Unstarred Question, No 1982, Government of India, Ministry 
of External Affairs.
7
Security Council Foreign Ministers Discuss Counter-terrorism, US Department of State, International Information 
Programs, 
http://usinfo.state.gov/topical/pol/terror/01111206.htm
.
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Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 
www.un.org
. p. 1. 
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Britain and the Fight against International Terrorism, p.1. 
10
Patterns of Global Terrorism, 2003. United States Department of State,www.state.gov, June 2004. 

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Religious terrorism occurs when the use of terrorism is systematized by an ideological 
and fanatical interpretation of a religious text. Religious terrorist groups functioning in the absence 
of this pretext, create “junk terrorism
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”. A few examples of religious terrorist groups are the: Aum 
Shinrikyo, Kach and Kahane Chai, Al-Jihad and Dal Khalsa
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. According to Charles Kimball, 
religious terrorism functions on the basis of five essential principles. These are: means justify the 
end, holy war, blind obedience, absolute truth claims and the ideal times. Kimball explains that 
‘truth claims’ are essential points in a religion “at which divergent interpretations arise
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”. Extreme 
interpretations of ‘truth claims’ provoke the ideology upon which religious terrorism is based. 
However the “authentic religious truth claims are never as inflexible and exclusive as zealous 
adherents insist
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”. The staunch ‘truth claims’ professed by religious terrorists, allow them to use 
“religious structures and doctrines…almost like weapons
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” for their movement. In the process, 
“religious convictions that become locked into absolute truths can easily lead people to see 
themselves as God’s agents. People so emboldened are capable of violent and destructive 
behavior in the name of religion
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”. This conviction creates fanatical interpretations and ideologies 
that give rise to religious terrorism. Nancy Connors Biggo’s
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, states that foreign observers are 
unfamiliar with the extreme interpretations of religious terrorists. Thus scholars often dismiss the 
rhetoric of religious terrorism as one that is devoid of any strategic motivation. This creates a 
dearth of quantifiable data that can be used to assess religious terrorism. However Biggo 
explains that the lack of understanding or data cannot dismiss the fact that religious terrorism is 
systematized by extreme interpretations of a religious text. Therefore Wener Ruf, states, “where 
God was pronounced dead all notions of morality have been turned into nihilism
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”.