The Arabic term fitna/fitnah is suddenly in the news again. The Pakistani government, in a notification dated 31 July 2025, declared the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) as Fitna al-Khawarij. 

According to a report in the South Asia Terrorism portal, the notification states that the TTP has distorted the image of Islam under the guise of religion and further clarifies that the term Khariji will be used alongside the names of these terrorists to expose their true identity.

The notification further states that titles such as Mufti and Hafiz will not be used for individuals associated with terrorist outfits, while in all correspondence and documents, the term Khariji will be written and read before their names.

Earlier, in another notification dated 31 May 2025, Pakistan’s federal government had announced that all militant organisations based in Baluchistan would be labelled as Fitna-al-Hindustan, as these militant groups are, allegedly, engaging in violent attacks on the directions from India trying to harm the “Islamic faith” and “sovereignty” of the country. 

In a ‘grand jirga’ held at Quetta on the same date, attended by both the Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif as well as the army chief Asim Munir, the issue was raised, and both appealed to the participating Baloch tribal leaders to help the government with its stabilisation mission.

Fitna, as a term, is also not confined to official doctrines and statements but is getting integrated within strategic and popular discourse in support of the Pakistani state.

An online news portal, Policy Wire, for instance, in its editorial dated 21 May 2025, thunders, “The term 'Fitna-al-Hindustani' – the Indian-sponsored discord – is not mere rhetoric for us… It reflects our deeply held conviction that India, frustrated by its inability to achieve its strategic objectives, particularly following the significant setbacks we have delivered, now resorts to the most contemptible form of proxy warfare…”   

Another news portal claims that India secretly partners with Afghanistan in sponsoring terrorism within Pakistan through these fitna al khawarij, and “whenever Pakistan has credible information that it is under attack from Afghan soil, it informs the Afghan interim government. However, the Afghan interim government considers terrorism in Pakistan as “Pakistan’s internal affair,” rejecting Pakistan’s information that Indian sponsored terrorists are operating from Afghan soil.”

The non-Western lexicon on global disorder

How and why Pakistan tries to project its own ‘home-made’ crisis as a ‘threat to Islam’ is, however, not that important. What is more interesting is the repeated use of non-Western terms like fitna (along with others) as explanatory categories in trying to interpret present-day crises and global threats.

As the world confronts multiple crisis situations, there is an overwhelming intellectual and popular desire for some valid explanation. This is particularly affecting the ‘chattering class’ in the West (natives or long-term non-Western settlers), who seem to have been affected by an eerie sense of foreboding and fear of the collapse of the stable and established order that they have experienced within their lifetime.

It is not that the threats of decline and disruption have exclusively affected the West but are part of an evolving global phenomenon defined as ‘uncertainty complex’ by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) having three critical layers that include “dangerous planetary change, the transition to new ways of organizing industrial societies, and the intensification of political and social polarisation.”

Nonetheless, there is a growing tendency within the intellectual as well as popular circles to attribute this decline and global turmoil to a tussle between the two worlds of ‘Order’ and ‘disorder,’ as the western-originating theories and paradigms seem increasingly inadequate in explaining recent developments and change.

This results in an almost knee-jerk reaction to categorise the shift as a trend towards global ‘disorder’ as the West-generated Liberal International Order (LIO) shows signs of decline. This ‘disorder’ manifests itself, argues Hanns W. Maull, in at least four dimensions of the LIO: (a) its normative foundations, (b) its institutions, (c) policy areas, and (d) the poor management of conflicts.

The failure to explain the changing phenomena has, however, raised doubts about the intellectual efficacy of standard academic theories and paradigms, which mostly have originated in the West. Alternatives are being tried out and experimented upon.

The oriental expositions

There are, in fact, several alternate interpretations which view this as an opportunity to incorporate, or at least negotiate with, the alternate, non-Western approaches, to make the theoretical reflections on the actual evolution of the global order closer to actual reality. Most of these approaches essentially encourage the adoption of greater heterogeneity and borrowing from alternative knowledge funds (including non-Western) to make our academic studies more holistic and capable of tackling new-age issues.

Fitna, as outlined above, has been one such case.

The term fitna is usually roughly translated as strife, rebellion, insurrection, etc. This can be largely explained by the fact that in the Arab political culture, there exists a strong notion that large-scale fitna usually develops into fouda – anarchy, chaos or disorder.

It is interesting to note that the term was used several times during the Arab Spring (especially in Egypt) and as an explanatory phrase in several revolutionary situations.

But does disorder indicate a fatal crisis, or are the concepts of order and disorder interrelated, forming patterns of cyclical manifestations? Within the intellectual realm of the discipline of International Relations (IR), there are increasing tendencies to ‘co-opt’ such intellectual challenges originating outside the West, to create space for syncretic tendencies or consensual approaches, avoiding extreme binarism.

India’s rich indigenous intellectual tradition

There are several historical precedents of such possibilities being introduced and discussed by indigenous scholars. The works of Indian scholar Benoy Kumar Sarkar, who discussed the evolution of IR in early Indian thought by analysing classical Sanskrit political treatises and texts, are a case in point. Back in the early 1900s, he pointed out the inherent Realism within the doctrine of Matsya Nyaya, reflecting total anarchy where the strong devour the weak.

The doctrine assumes and is prepared for a world of eternally warring states. While in the internal sphere, the ruler tries to end Matsya Nyaya through danda, on enforcing his rule, the anarchy prevailing in world politics reflects conditions reflecting Matsya Nyaya.

The ancient Hindu thought, however, did not end with the Realist picture of a Matsya Nyaya, a world of anarchy. The ‘doctrine of mandala,’ argues Sarkar, while acting as a centrifugal force, was counteracted by the centripetal tendencies of the doctrine of Sarva Bhauma. The doctrine of Sarva Bhauma, as the concept of federal nationalism, imperial federation, or the universe state, is thus the keystone in the arch of the Hindu theory of sovereignty.

Another Indian scholar, M. Yamunacharya, while analysing Nitisara by Kamandaka in an article written for the Indian Political Science journal in 1941, comes to the conclusion that in order to escape from Matsya Nyaya “safety lies for these states being drawn into the Mandala … whereby small and weak states would be able to participate in the strength and safety of the bigger states which include them under their sphere of influence.”

The Shanti Parva of the Indian epic Mahabharata includes advisories of the grand Kaurava patriarch Bhisma. Bhisma, lying on his deathbed of arrows, also reminds in his advisory to Yudhisthira that the Kshatriya’s duty is the maintenance of order through observations of raj dharma and following of danda niti.

The ruler must be respected as in “this world, the king is seen to be the root of all dharma. It is because they are frightened of the king that subjects do not devour each other. The king pacifies this entire agitated and anxious world. Having pacified it through dharma, he rules it.” However, this does not provide a license to the ruler to become an autocrat. A king applies danda niti to ensure the sustenance of dharma, which could roughly be translated, in our case, as ‘order.’  

The term fitna was also widely used during medieval and early modern times in Islamic political literature by chroniclers in the Indian subcontinent, including within the Mughal empire (1526-1857), to denote a range of socio-cultural and political crises.  However, as Andre Wink notes, “although fina could be a very temporary ‘flame,’ it was as indispensable a foundation of Muslim or pseudo-Muslim sovereignty as was ‘national war’ for the territorial sovereignty of the modern unitary state of the West.”

Scholars like Deepshikha Shahi have recently projected the Indian philosophical concept of Advaita (Monism) as a possible intellectual tool in IR literature.

Shahi contends that “the study sets out to inaugurate a ‘scientific-metaphysical project’ in the academic discipline of IR that methodically restores the missing connectedness amid artificially installed dualisms between the scientific–phenomenal and metaphysical-noumenal worlds, thereby foregrounding the metaphysical-noumenal-world and granting it the ontological and explanatory roles in the process of seeking knowledge that it has been traditionally ‘robbed of’.”

The shifts in intellectual discourses, however, are only one aspect of the rise of the non-West. 

Differences in rhetoric often signify divergent trajectories in the historical evolution of societies. It has been argued, by Kenneth B. Pyle, that the “behaviour of nations, like that of individuals, is shaped by elements of heredity and environment, which through history respond to problems and experiences and in time build up relatively stable patterns of response… These recurrent patterns of behaviour constitute a distinctive set of national attitudes, habits, and principles with which a people approach their problems.”

The prevailing Western tendency to use ‘one size fits all’ techniques to address different manifestations in global crises probably fails as it misses these subtleties and gaps in Western thinking and actual realities.

For the sake of a more peaceful world, more knowledge sharing and careful analyses of non-Western epistemic traditions could generate more holistic crisis-tackling approaches, theoretical and also in terms of policy making.