Jihadism is the ideology of modern, armed militant Islamic movements that seek to establish states based on Islamic principles. In a narrower sense, it refers to the belief that armed confrontation is an efficient and theologically legitimate method of sociopolitical change towards an Islamic system of governance. The term "jihadism" has been applied to various Islamic extremist and/or Islamist individuals and organizations with militant ideologies based on the classical Islamic notion of lesser jihad.
Jihadism has its roots in the late 19th- and early 20th-century ideological developments of Islamic revivalism, which further developed into Qutbism and Salafi jihadism related ideologies during the 20th and 21st centuries. Jihadist ideologues envision jihad as a "revolutionary struggle" against the international order to unite the Muslim world under Islamic law.
The Islamist organizations that participated in the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979 to 1989 reinforced the rise of jihadism, which has since propagated during various armed conflicts. Jihadism rose in prominence after the 1990s; by one estimate, 5 percent of civil wars involved jihadist groups in 1990, but this grew to more than 40 percent by 2014. Conflicts involving jihadist groups tend to be particularly intractable. With the rise of the Islamic State (IS) militant group in 2014—which a large contingent of Jihadist groups have opposed—large numbers of foreign Muslim volunteers came from abroad to join the militant cause in Syria and Iraq.
French political scientist and professor Gilles Kepel also identified a specific Salafist version of jihadism in the 1990s. Jihadism with an international, pan-Islamist scope is also known as global jihadism. The term has also been invoked to retroactively characterise the military campaigns of historic Islamic empires, and the later Fula jihads in West Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Terminology
The concept of jihad ("exerting"/"striving"/"struggling") is fundamental to Islam and has multiple uses, with greater jihad (internal jihad), meaning internal struggle against evil in oneself, and lesser jihad (external jihad), which is further subdivided into jihad of the pen/tongue (debate or persuasion) and jihad of the sword (warfare). The latter form of jihad has meant conquest and conversion in the classical Islamic interpretation, usually excepting followers of other monotheistic religions. Modernist Islamic scholars generally equate military jihad with defensive warfare. Much of contemporary Muslim opinion considers internal jihad to have primacy over external jihad in the Islamic tradition, while many Western writers favor the opposite view. Today, the word jihad is often used without religious connotations, like the English term crusade.
The term "jihadism" has been in use since the 1990s, more widely in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in the United States. It was first used by the Indian and Pakistani mass media, and by French academics, who used the more exact term "jihadist-Salafist". Historian David A. Charters defines "jihadism" as "a revolutionary program whose ideology promises radical social change in the Muslim world... [with] a central role to jihad as an armed political struggle to overthrow "apostate" regimes, to expel their infidel allies, and thus to restore Muslim lands to governance by Islamic principles." According to Reuven Firestone, the term "jihadism" as commonly used in the Western world describes "militant Islamic movements that are perceived as existentially threatening to the West."Compare:
David Romano, researcher of political science at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, has defined his use of the term as referring to "an individual or political movement that primarily focuses its attention, discourse, and activities on the conduct of a violent, uncompromising campaign that they term a jihad". Following Daniel Kimmage, he distinguishes the jihadist discourse of jihad as a global project to remake the world from the resistance discourse of groups such as Hezbollah, which is framed as a regional project against a specific enemy.
"Jihadism" has been defined otherwise as a neologism for militant, predominantly Sunnī Islamic movements that use ideologically motivated violence to defend the Ummah (the collective Muslim world) from foreign non-Muslims and those that they perceive as domestic infidels. The term "jihadist globalism" is also often used in relation to Islamic terrorism as a globalist ideology, and more broadly to the war on terror. Austrian-American academic Manfred B. Steger, Professor of Sociology at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, proposed an extension of the term "jihadist globalism" to apply to all extremely violent strains of religiously influenced ideologies that articulate the global imaginary into concrete political agendas and terrorist strategies; these include al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah, Hamas, and Hezbollah, which he finds "today's most spectacular manifestation of religious globalism".Steger, Manfred B. Globalization: A Short Introduction. 2009. Oxford University Press, p. 127.
According to Jewish-American political scientist Barak Mendelsohn, "the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject jihadi views of Islam. Furthermore, as the cases of Saudi and other Gulf regimes show, states may gain domestic legitimacy through economic development and social change, rather than based on religion and piety". Many Muslims do not use the terms "jihadism" or "jihadist", disliking the association of illegitimate violence with a noble religious concept, and instead prefer the use of delegitimising terms such as "deviants". Maajid Nawaz, founder and chairman of the anti-extremism think tank Quilliam, defines jihadism as a violent subset of Islamism: "Islamism [is] the desire to impose any version of Islam over any society. Jihadism is the attempt to do so by force."
"Jihad Cool" is a term for the rebranding of militant jihadism as fashionable, or "cool", to younger people through consumer culture, social media, magazines, Rap videos, toys, propaganda videos, and other means. It is a subculture mainly applied to individuals in developed nations who are recruited to travel to conflict zones on jihad. For example, jihadi rap videos make participants look "more MTV than Mosque", according to NPR, which was the first to report on the phenomenon in 2010. To justify their acts of religious violence, jihadist individuals and networks resort to the nonbinding genre of Islamic legal literature (fatwa) developed by Salafi-jihadist legal authorities, whose legal writings are shared and spread via the Internet.
History
Key influences
Islamic extremism dates back to the early history of Islam with the emergence of the Kharijites in the 7th century CE. The original schism between Kharijites and Shīʿas among Muslims was disputed over the political and religious succession to the guidance of the Muslim community (Ummah) after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. From their essentially political position, the Kharijites developed extreme doctrines that set them apart from both mainstream Sunnī and Shīʿa Muslims. Shīʿas believe ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib is the true successor to Muhammad, while Sunnīs consider Abu Bakr to hold that position. The Kharijites broke away from both the Shīʿas and the Sunnīs during the First Fitna (the first Islamic Civil War); they were particularly noted for adopting a radical approach to takfīr (excommunication), whereby they declared both Sunnī and Shīʿa Muslims to be either infidels (kuffār) or false Muslims (munāfiḳūn), and therefore deemed them worthy of death for their perceived apostasy (ridda).
Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Islamist ideologue and a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, was an influential promoter of the Pan-Islamist ideology during the 1960s. When he was executed by the Egyptian government under the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ayman al-Zawahiri formed Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an organization which seeks to replace the government with an Islamic state that would reflect Qutb's ideas about the Islamic revival that he yearned for. The Qutbist ideology has been influential among jihadist movements and Islamic terrorists who seek to overthrow secular governments, most notably Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri of al-Qaeda, as well as the Salafi-jihadist terrorist group ISIL/ISIS/IS/Daesh. Moreover, Qutb's books have been frequently been cited by Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki.Robert Irwin, "Is this the man who inspired Bin Laden?" The Guardian (1 November 2001).Paul Berman, "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror", New York Times Magazine (23 March 2003).Qutbism: An Ideology of Islamic-Fascism by Dale C. Eikmeier. From Parameters, Spring 2007, pp. 85–98.
Sayyid Qutb could be said to have founded the actual movement of radical Islam. Unlike the other Islamic thinkers who have been mentioned above, Qutb was not an apologist. He was a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and a highly influential Islamist ideologue, and the first to articulate these anathemizing principles in his magnum opus Fī ẓilāl al-Qurʾān (In the shade of the Qurʾān) and his 1966 manifesto Maʿālim fīl-ṭarīq (Milestones), which lead to his execution by the Egyptian government of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966.Gibril Haddad, “Quietism and End-Time Reclusion in the Qurʾān and Hadith: Al-Nābulusī and His Book Takmīl Al-Nuʿūt within the ʿuzla Genre,” Islamic Sciences 15, no. 2 (2017): pp. 108-109) Other Salafi movements in the MENA region and across the Muslim world adopted many of his Islamist principles.
According to Qutb, the Muslim community (Ummah) has been extinct for several centuries and it has also reverted to jahiliyah (the pre-Islamic age of ignorance) because those who call themselves "Muslims" have failed to follow the Islamic law (sharīʿa). In order to restore Islam, bring back its days of glory, and free the Muslims from the clasps of ignorance, Qutb proposed the rejection and shunning of modern society, establishing a vanguard which was modeled after the early Muslim generations (Salaf), preaching Islam, and bracing oneself for poverty or even bracing oneself for death in preparation for jihad against what he perceived was a jahili government/society, and the overthrow of them. Qutbism, the radical Islamist ideology which is derived from the ideas of Qutb, was denounced by many prominent Muslim scholars as well as by other members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, like Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Sunni jihadism
According to Rudolph F. Peters, contemporary traditionalist Muslims "copy phrases of the classical works on fiqh" in their writings on jihad; Islamic modernists "emphasize the defensive aspect of jihad, regarding it as tantamount to bellum justum in modern international law; and the contemporary fundamentalists (Abul A'la Maududi, Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, etc.) view it as a struggle for the expansion of Islam and the realization of Islamic ideals."