Book Review: Jawad Syed, Edwina Pio, Tahir Kamran and Abbas Zaidi (eds.), Faith-Based Violence and Deobandi Militancy in Pakistan

Recently, there has been a growing interest among policymakers, leaders and research practitioners around the globe to attend to the potential threat that faith-based violence poses on individuals, communities and societies. Pakistan is the world's sixth most populous country with a population of more than 207 million (Rana 2017), which is diverse in terms of religion, ethnicity and other forms of identity (Syed 2008). In spite of extensive scholarship and developments in the area of religion and terrorism over the recent decades, not much attention has been paid to the role played by Deobandi ideology and violence that took place in Pakistan and in other countries. The book review titled Faith-Based Violence and Deobandi Militancy in Pakistan documents and explains the Deobandi dimension of extremism and its implications related to faith-based violence and terrorism. This book comprises 18 chapters that are organised in a logical format and easy to follow up. At the onset, it looks at the issue of extremism and violence from the South Asian perspective and then focuses on the international Deobandi movement.