The word “extremist” does not describe a person. It describes the speaker’s surrender to a rigged framework.
When someone calls a practicing Muslim an “extremist,” they are not making a neutral observation. They are performing a securitisation move: the deliberate framing of a political, social, or religious issue as an existential security threat, shifting it beyond the domain of normal debate into the domain of emergency. The Copenhagen School of security studies identified this process in the early 1990s: issues become “security issues” not because they are inherently dangerous, but because a securitising actor with institutional power labels them as such and an audience accepts the framing.
The post-9/11 Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) framework operationalised this exact mechanism. As Viana and da Silva documented in their 2021 study, the shift from “war on terror” to “struggle against violent extremism” was not a softening. It was a broadening. The target was no longer an action (terrorism) but an ideology (extremism), and since ideology lives in minds, the monitoring mandate expanded to encompass anyone whose thinking might be suspect. Muslims became the default subjects of this expanded gaze, their religious practice reframed as a risk factor to be managed rather than a faith to be respected.
When a Muslim internalises this label and applies it to fellow Muslims, the securitisation is complete. The subject has accepted the securitising actor’s framework and begun policing from within. Authentic Islamic practice gets recoded as deviance, and the “acceptable” Muslim is one whose deen has been hollowed out enough to pose no challenge to secular, man-made systems.