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Pakistan's present war against extremists has many folds and sheds. The country's initial participation in the Afghan War in 1979 later gave birth to different extremist trends in the country. State patronage of the extremist Wahabi Islamists during the Afghan jihad opened another conflict in Pakistan, and things became more complicated. The combination of external and internal factors gave birth to the worst kind of conflict, which now has not only become dangerous for the country's own existence but also a major threat for global peace. The Afghan jihad initially started as a war against Soviet occupation and later became the hub of global jihad-war against infidels.

This chapter analyzes how external factors promoted internal contradictions in Pakistan due to which the country became not only an exporter of jihadis for the world but also the worst kind of sectarian conflicts, including. Shia–Sunni, Deobandi–Wahabi clashes, entered into in the past two decades. Such a strong link exists with Pakistan's official support to global jihad. Draft sectarian groups now head to head with their opponents have killed thousands of members of rival sectors, have strong support from external sympathizers, and have spread in the country. The well planned terrorist activities of these groups reflect the fact that support to these groups in the past is now leading to a severe crisis in Pakistan. The nexuses of these indigenous extremists like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen with external terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan of Tahir Yuldasher Chechen Guerilla War has led to several bloody clashes in the country and outside.

This chapter discusses about tourism in Iran, an old civilization and a theocratic country where Islam is a dominant force. The majority of the people in Iran are Shia Muslims. References are made to conditions in Iran, its tourism industry, and the role of Islam in tourism and society. It is followed by discussion of Shia pilgrimage features. The findings show that while tourism has great potential in Iran, which is renowned for its diversity of attractions, tourism development is, however, constrained by several factors that limit the industry's contribution to economic growth.

In this chapter, the authors investigate the correlation between social and economic indicators and Islamic finance, to see whether increasing Islamic banking will increase account penetration in Muslim majority countries. Inclusive financial services are beneficial to a country as a whole, especially for poorer individuals, giving them more access to investment and financing opportunities. Shari’ah law has guidelines for banking that Muslims must follow and many believe that commercial banks do not follow these guidelines. As many individuals cite religious reasons as their excuse for exclusion, there is potential to develop Islamic finance as a means of improving financial access in certain countries. The authors find that individuals from the countries in our study tend to be more religious and that there are potential economic and social benefits to an increase in Islamic banking in this region.

Islam began in western Arabia with the preaching of Prophet Muhammad (ca. 570–632 CE) and has since spread through expansion, economic trade, missionaries, and migration. CE is an abbreviation of Common Era and is the system used in this book. In this system for recording dates, 2009 CE represents 1430 after Hegira (abbreviated as AH). During his life, Mohammad was able to unite virtually the whole of the Arabian Peninsula under Islam. After his death, Islam expanded north into Syria (636 CE), east into Persia and beyond (636 CE), and west into Egypt (640 CE), and then into Spain (711 CE). Dissention about the procedure for choice of the Muslim leader (caliph) led to the proclamation of a rival caliph in Damascus in 661 and the establishment of the Shia faith (Donner 2004). Islam arrived in the area known today as Pakistan in 711 when the Umayyad dynasty sent a Muslim Arab army that conquered the northwestern part of Indus Valley from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea (Esposito and Donner 1999). Today, the majority of Muslims worldwide are Sunni but Shia Muslims constitute the majority of the population in Iran as well as are significant minorities in Pakistan, India, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

This chapter studies how in Iranian schools the power of resistance is evident in female students’ moral dilemmas. The Islamic Revolution of Iran was a turning point in Iranian educational system in which the role of religion and the desire for Islamization of all aspects of the society was emphasized. The data was gathered from one girl and one boy school in Tehran in 2016, and it includes lower secondary school students’ essays (Female n=175, Male n=165) about moral dilemmas. The study reveals the impact of Islamic values in school life and that the power of resistance is weak since students cannot criticize Islamic values. However, female students’ moral dilemmas indicate aspects of resistance in terms of questioning the schools rules that are based on these religious values and principles. This chapter examines female cases in detail to discuss how issues related to gender and religion are interconnected in Iranian schools.

What kinds of support do interstate rivals provide to domestic actors in ongoing civil wars? And how do domestic actors utilize the support they receive? This chapter answers these questions by comparing Iranian and Saudi military and non-military (mediation, foreign aid and religious soft-power promotion) support to the Houthis and to the Government of Yemen (GoY) during the Saada wars (2004–2010) and the internationalized civil war (2015–2018). It also focuses on the processes through which the GoY and the Houthis have utilized this support for their own strategic purposes. This chapter applies a structured, focused comparison methodology and relies on data from a review of both primary and secondary sources complemented by 14 interviews. This chapter finds that there were less external interventions in the conflict in Saada than in the internationalized civil war. During the latter, a broader set of intervention strategies enabled further instrumentalization by domestic actors, which in turn contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. This chapter contributes to the literature on interstate rivalry and third-party intervention. The framework of analysis is applicable to civil wars that experience intervention by rivals, such as Syria or Libya.

Iran has significant potential for an international tourism industry based on culture and heritage. However, the rich fusion of Persian and Islamic cultures that distinguishes Iran from the rest of the Middle East is not easily promoted for tourism internationally, mainly as a result of successive American and European attempts at forcing Iran's isolation since 1979. Given that Japan was a significant inbound and outbound market for Iranian tourism in the 1980s and is a close trading partner of the group of countries aligned against Iran at present, this chapter focuses on the recent development of the Iranian inbound tourism industry with the history and current status of the Japan–Iran tourism connection.

For over three decades, Afghanistan has been a battleground in which many of the states of the wider neighbourhood have been involved. The importance of fostering a concerted effort for Afghan peace and stability is widely agreed upon, yet such a process remains difficult to bring about. Some analysts emphasize states and their security relationships, seeing Afghanistan as an ‘insulator’ caught between different regional state systems, each with a strong dynamic of its own. Other analysts emphasize various transnational networks and see Afghanistan as the ‘core’ of a larger conflict formation. This chapter takes as its starting point the former perspective, which has been codified by Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver (2003) as the regional security complex (RSC) approach. The chapter examines the security dynamics of each of the regions surrounding Afghanistan – South Asia, the Persian Gulf and South Asia – adopting a comparative and historical perspective, with an emphasis on the period since the late 1970s. It concludes that each of Afghanistan's three surrounding regions is characterized by deep security concerns of its own. These concerns nonetheless inform the engagement of neighbouring countries in Afghanistan, which then comes to reflect conflicts and cleavages specific to the respective regions. One central implication is that a more promising strategy for Afghanistan might be to seek a unilateral non-offensive or neutral status, rather than full security integration with its neighbours. Although such a strategy would necessitate the creation of a forum for Afghanistan's neighbours to foster understanding for the Afghan position, it represents a dramatic departure from mainstream policy proposals with their emphasis on an integrated regional approach.