In the years following the 9/11 attacks, in a bid to attract support for military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq from skeptical populations, the US, the UK, and other governments engaged in a rhetorical strategy of aggregation: the downplaying of complexity and the repeated invocation of the simplistic dualisms of good versus evil, freedom versus tyranny, and democracy versus terrorism. The very idea of a "war on terror" represented a rhetorical device, which at every turn sought to portray acts of Islamist violence — whether in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, the UK, or anywhere else in the world — as part of a global struggle pitting the forces of progress and modernity (democratic, secular states) against those of reaction and barbarity (Islamist groups who use violence). The strategy was expressed in its most striking terms by the ethical dualism of George W. Bush with his "good versus evil" / "with us or against us" rhetoric and the merging of the issues of Islamist violence, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and "rogue states" in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. The UK's Tony Blair spoke in a similar vein, arguing that "Islamic extremism" represented a powerful monolithic global ideology: "The struggle against terrorism in Madrid or London or Paris is the same as the struggle against the terrorist acts of Hezbollah in Lebanon or the PIJ in Palestine or rejectionist groups in Iraq. The murder of the innocent in Beslan is part of the same ideology that takes innocent lives in Saudi Arabia, the Yemen or Libya."[3]

The work of Rohan Gunaratna, influential in US policy circles, lent intellectual weight to this approach, aggregating a multitude of militant groups under the banner of an organized and hierarchical al-Qaeda, linking Palestinian Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah to bin Laden's group.[4] Vague and general assertions, including that "one in five Muslim charities" fund al-Qaeda's campaign and that "[al-Qaeda's] networks are intertwined in the socioeconomic, political and religious fabric of Muslims living in at least 80 countries," should, however, be treated with caution.[5] We should be wary of analyses that seek to combine all armed Islamist groups into one indistinguishable whole. Similarly, we should be wary of descriptions of a global operation with disciplined command-and-control structures, especially since much of Gunaratna's source material comes from unnamed "US intelligence sources."[6]

A more helpful approach is disaggregation. Armed Islamist groups must be distinguished on two levels. Most importantly, we should highlight the difference between Islamo-nationalist organizations and doctrinaire jihadist groups like al-Qaeda. Islamo-nationalist or irredentist groups fight to redeem land from non-Muslim rule or occupation, such as Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the mainstream of the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq, parts of the insurgency in Afghanistan, and other groups in Kashmir, Chechnya, and elsewhere. This type of armed struggle is determined by the context (foreign rule or occupation), and it is viewed by its participants as one strategy among others, including political participation. Doctrinaire jihadism, in contrast, arises from the belief that all forms of democratic or secular government are illegitimate and that "jihad must continue until an Islamic government is ruling according to revealed law."[7] This worldview is characterized by a doctrine that prefers violent means over non-violent means (despite the possibility of engaging in the latter) and that draws heavily on the revolutionary message of Sayyid Qutb.[8] As far as doctrinaire groups are concerned, we should distinguish (although this task, as we shall see, is more difficult) between two types: those (the vast majority) who continue to view the "near enemy" — state regimes in Muslim-majority countries — as their sole target and those jihadists who have followed al-Qaeda's strategic shift toward targeting the US and its allies.[9]

Ideologically, the rejection of democratic norms and the state system lies at the heart of doctrinaire jihadism. It is this rejection that distinguishes them most starkly from Islamo-nationalists and gives rise to the enmity between them.[10] In jihadist ideology the Islamic principle of tawhid — the absolute oneness of God — is redefined and given an all-embracing significance with clear political ramifications. This idea (as expressed in the Muslim confession of faith "There is no god but God") is regarded by jihadists as proof that Islam rejects all forms of popular sovereignty, democracy, constitutions, and parliamentary elections, and that such a rejection is one of the pillars of monotheism. In the words of Sayyid Qutb, "Any system in which the final decisions are referred to human beings . . . deifies [them] by designating others than God as lords over men . . . reducing others to the status of slaves . . . [and therefore] . . . to proclaim the sovereignty of God means to eliminate all human kingship."[11] Since the 1970s, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's chief contemporary ideologue, has railed against Islamo-nationalist groups, especially the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and branded them "infidels" and "tools in the hands of tyrants."[12] In fact, he has devoted an entire work to the subject, accusing the Brotherhood of transgressing fundamental Islamic principles by recognizing the Egyptian regime, accepting democratic principles based on popular sovereignty, and rejecting the jihadist principle that "sovereignty belongs to God alone," i.e., that legitimate political authority can only exist in the form of a theocratic state that implements "revealed law."[13]

This dispute around participation, wedded to a rejection of the jihadi principle that violent action is the only way to further political aims, was a key factor behind intra-Sunni Islamist armed conflict in Algeria in the 1990s[14] and more recently in Iraq. In the case of Iraq, in early 2006 the decision of the Iraqi Islamist Party to participate in elections and the establishment of the new government enraged doctrinaire jihadis. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi accused the Iraqi Islamic Party of "selling the religion . . . in exchange for a parliamentary seat."[15] By mid-2007, facilitated by a new US military strategy that explicitly recognized the differences between the Islamo-nationalist mainstream and the doctrinaire jihadi fringe of the insurgency (after four years of failing to do so), doctrinaire jihadis in the al-Qaeda mould were being attacked by mainstream Islamo-nationalist groups and were being successfully expelled from many parts of the country. The main differences between the Islamo-nationalists and the al-Qaedists in Iraq were over political participation, nationalism, and the targeting of civilians. As one leading mainstream insurgent put it, "Our mantra is 'At the end of the rifle comes the pen,'" meaning that resistance ultimately has to give way to politics — whereas al-Qaeda's mantra is "At the end of the rifle comes the cannon."[16]

As for the distinction between doctrinaire jihadists focused on "near enemy" targets and those who focus on Western targets, such a clear disaggregation is more difficult. Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the merging of Zarqawi's group with al-Qaeda central, a trend has emerged of local state-based jihadis — in Iraq, Algeria, Yemen, and Somalia — adopting the al-Qaeda brand name. It remains unclear, however, the extent to which this rebranding represents a true strategic shift, i.e., an intent to turn their guns onto the "far enemy" outside the borders of the state or whether such rebranding is principally a propaganda move to draw attention onto locally based conflicts by associating themselves with "al-Qaeda central" and al-Qaeda in Iraq.[17] In Algeria, for example, the 'merger' between the GSPC (The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) and al-Qaeda central to form al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has not, at least until now, led to the Algerian organization mounting attacks in Europe or the United States. This has led one scholar to remark that in Algeria "the globalisation of jihad means no more than local suicide bombings, echoed by local e-propaganda."[18] Even in the case of al-Qaeda in Iraq, targeting over the past eight years has been, and continues to be, more focused on Iraqi Shi'ites rather than on US or coalition targets, which reflects the jihadist hope that civil war in Iraq might act as a prelude to a regional conflagration between Sunni and Shi'a, and the first step toward achieving their wider revolutionary aims in the region.[19]

Analyses of al-Qaeda as a broad-based and multi-faceted social movement capture the contemporary complexity of the phenomenon better than any study focused on organizations. Jason Burke's analysis, more persuasive and independently researched than Gunaratna's, argues convincingly that even at al-Qaeda's most organized period in late 2001, "to see it as a coherent organisation, with 'tentacles everywhere' . . . is to misunderstand . . . the nature of Islamic radicalism then and now. The contingent, dynamic and local elements of what is a broad and ill-defined movement rooted in historical trends of great complexity are lost [in such a description]."[20] Anthony Cordesman and Nawaf Obaid agree, arguing that al-Qaeda "underwent a fundamental transformation after the US-led war which destroyed al-Qaeda's headquarters in Afghanistan, [changing] from a quasi-command-and-control structure . . . to a more loosely configured network based upon individual cells dispersed throughout the world," making it now more of a "movement" than an established organization.[21] Burke adds that the most accurate contemporary portrayal of al-Qaeda is of an increasingly powerful and influential idea spread via global media, especially the internet.[22] This is not to say that in 2010 there no longer existed organized groups and structures related to the pre-2001 structures. There are conflicting reports as to what extent al-Qaeda central continues to operate effectively, and although there have been some reports of a resurgence post-2007, the jury is out.[23]

Thomas Hegghammer highlights five "main participants" in the post-Iraq War al-Qaeda social movement: the old al-Qaeda leadership (i.e., Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri); the religious scholars, or "jihad sheiks," who lend their authority to legitimize violent action; the strategic thinkers "who write about the best way — from a functional point of view — to fight the enemy;" the "active militant organisations" affiliated with al-Qaeda, such as "al-Qaeda in Iraq," "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb; and the "grassroot radicals . . . i.e. the thousands of anonymous participants on radical Islamist discussions on the Internet."[24] Marc Sageman's analysis, meanwhile, focuses primarily on these "grassroot radicals" who, since the 2003 Iraq invasion, have participated in a "leaderless jihad." This concept refers to the new breed of "freelance" jihadis who mount operations alone (for example, Casablanca in 2003, Madrid in 2004, and London in 2005) without any significant physical link to al-Qaeda central.[25] They form part of a network linked much less by any physical contact than before and much more by the collective discourse of the several most influential jihadi forums on the internet, described by the author as the "true leader of global Islamist terrorism."[26]

The emergence of a loosely linked social movement that thrives in the online world is partly the result of a deliberate jihadist strategy to create the conditions in which operations could be carried out by clandestine networks protected from detection by the absence of physical connections to other groups or to an organized leadership. Indeed, several prominent jihadist strategists have advocated this approach.[27] One of the most influential among them, Abu-Mus'ab al-Suri, published his decentralization theory in 2004 in his Call for a Global Islamic Resistance, in which the idea of a "leaderless jihad" is a prominent theme. Formulated as a way of responding to expanded counterterrorism policies post 9/11 — the targeting of financial resources, the assassination of jihadi leaders, military attacks on safe havens, and international security cooperation — al-Suri advocates a system whereby groups form from the bottom up among friends inspired by media propaganda, especially via the internet. Such a system would, he theorizes, maximize both the geographic spread of operations and support and their effectiveness, making them less visible to security and intelligence organizations.[28] In terms of jihadi doctrine, the decentralized model is grounded in the radical Islamist assertion (and one of the ideological pillars of the al-Qaeda movement) that jihad (interpreted as armed action) is an individual duty incumbent upon all Muslims who are able to carry it out.[29]

Explanations abound for the rise of the ideology of doctrinaire jihadism or what might today be called al-Qaedism. Some place al-Qaeda in a long line of radical movements dating back to the Middle Ages and beyond, across the span of Islamic history.[30] At the other end of the spectrum, another tendency has been to point out the ideological debt al-Qaeda owes to modern European revolutionary movements, most notably anarchism, communism, and fascism.[31] Other academics, writing from a political science perspective, place al-Qaedism at the end of a Sunni Islamist spectrum, emerging as a radical off-shoot from mainstream political Islam as articulated by twentieth-century theorists such as Mawdudi, al-Banna, and Qutb. These works emphasize the role of ideas emerging from nationalist, anti-colonialist, and reformist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan.[32] Another well-known, but rather partial, analysis focuses entirely on the role of Saudi Wahhabism.[33] Others combine these factors more convincingly, describing al-Qaeda as a "symbiosis" and a "disconcerting encounter" between Egyptian revolutionary Islamism and Saudi fundamentalism and correctly assigning more weight to the revolutionary Islamist current.[34] Taking the symbiosis thesis further, Burke argues that the power and attraction of al-Qaedism lies in its eclecticism, combining as it does so many trends from within Islamic tradition — "millenarian, fundamentalist, reformist, revivalist, Wahhabi/Salafi and . . . Islamist." Furthermore, he suggests that "a key element of the success of their discourse is that it combines so many elements of preceding ideologies."[35]

All of these explanations make useful contributions to our understanding of the phenomenon. Perhaps the most striking characteristic that emerges from this body of literature, as reflected in the wide range of analyses and explanations, is the "omnivorous" nature of doctrinaire jihadi thought.[36] One of the most persuasive analyses of al-Qaedism, Faisal Devji's Landscapes of the Jihad, sees it as an ill-defined ideological composite, or syncretism, that should be analyzed as a direct symptom, not of any local tradition, but rather of modernity and globalization themselves.[37]

The existence and influence of radical jihadist ideology is one symptom of a pervasive phenomenon that has affected the Muslim world in the modern era: the demise of traditional institutions of Islamic jurisprudence over two centuries and the resulting erosion of religious authority. A convincing argument can be made for a direct link between the decline of classical Islamic law and theology as expressed by the traditional institutions of Islamic jurisprudence and the rise of essentialist and ahistorical interpretations of the holy texts.[38] From this perspective, the reason why people like bin Laden are able to obtain the status of a religious authority in the eyes of their followers and to issue fatwas in the fashion of trained Islamic scholars despite their lack of credentials is that they operate within a long-standing and growing vacuum of religious authority. Leading Islamic legal scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl has written about the advent of what he calls "vulgarized" interpretations of Islam by reference to processes of "individualization" brought about by the dissolution of the classical Islamic legal tradition during the European colonial period, the subsequent sudden and traumatic birth of the modern nation-state, and the co-opting of religious authority by centralized state power, often characterized by despotism and corruption.[39]

The thrust of this analysis is that the erosion of Islamic jurisprudence over more than a century has brought about a democratization (almost a protestantization) effect where unqualified laypersons from outside the juridical tradition are empowered as legitimate interpreters of the word of God and revivalist movements emerge emphasizing direct contact between individuals and scripture without recourse to the clergy. This idea is as destabilizing as it is liberating, for although the view that any individual is as qualified to interpret the scriptures as any other does not, in itself, lead directly to radical conclusions, it does allow those with political agendas to abuse the texts, picking and choosing those words that support their cause and ignoring in the process centuries of traditional exegesis. In doing so, they promote literalist, ahistorical interpretations, which in turn encourage black-and-white thinking. In this regard, Abou El Fadl observes that "Islamic law and theology have become the extracurricular hobby of pamphlet readers and writers . . . [who] . . . have reduced the Islamic heritage to the lowest common denominator . . . a vehicle for displays of power."[40] More recently, the role of the internet in this process has been examined. Sageman stresses the egalitarian nature of contributions in chat rooms on the internet, where each opinion appears as authoritative as another and where no one's contribution can be silenced.[41]

Further influencing these trends is what has been referred to as "the objectification of Muslim consciousness" in the post-colonial era. As Dale Eikelman and James Piscatori theorize, over the past half-century, the advent of mass education and mass communications in Muslim-majority states has given rise to a process whereby, more and more, large numbers of believers start to meditate on certain questions: "'What is my religion?' 'Why is it important to my life?' and 'How do my beliefs guide my conduct?'" In this way, long-held and taken-for-granted truths are opened up to examination and religion is increasingly seen as "a self-contained system that its believers can describe, characterize, and distinguish from other such systems."[42]

The fragmentation of religious authority within Muslim-majority societies over the past two centuries is one of the most significant consequences of the dramatic social, political, and technological changes of the modern era, and it is a process that continues. Another facet of these processes is the geographic spread of Islamic practice brought about by migration. Both Olivier Roy and Jocelyne Cesari have written extensively about the nature of religious practice when removed from its traditional geographic and social context and emphasize the "individualization" of interpretation that results from such a shift.[43] The argument follows that when religion no longer has social authority, it falls upon the individual to formulate what it means to be a Muslim. Cesari observes, "to be a Muslim in Europe . . . means to lose one's relationship to Islam as a cultural and social fait accompli, and instead to open it up to questioning and individual choice."[44] Roy, meanwhile, notes that the reformulation of Islam in the absence of social authority leads to a quest to discover a "pure" Islam, "delinked from any specific culture," a project seen as one of loss — "an impoverishment of Islam . . . divorced from inherited cultural habits and collateral knowledge."[45] Although the link between extremism and the "deterritorialization of Islam" is debatable and perhaps overstated, evidence does suggest that the difficulties confronting those living as a minority, including the overwhelming dominance of the majority culture, socio-economic marginalization, and racism, can contribute to a social context in which a small minority seeks refuge in radical doctrines, and the comforting certainties of a black-and-white world, where good versus evil, belief versus unbelief, Islam versus the West.[46]

More broadly, the fragmentation of religious authority brought about by the demise of traditional institutions, objectification, migration, and new communication technologies has heightened the trend of Islam being viewed as one ideology among other competing ideologies (such as secularism, democracy, socialism, etc.) and the resulting ascendance of Islam as a political manifesto that challenges the status quo and offers solutions to contemporary ills.[47]

Doctrinaire jihadists are an extremist fringe within Islamism, and Islamists are a tiny minority among Muslims, but they are a product of the same historical forces that have shaped the Muslim world and Islamic belief and practice over the last 200 years. In al-Qaedism, according to Devji, the demise of the classical legal tradition has opened the door to "personalized . . . non-traditional interpretations of Scripture [which] draw upon the flotsam and the jetsam of received ideas and remembered histories spanning the Muslim tradition."[48] These are arbitrary sets of beliefs and practices employed according to the demands of circumstance and need;[49] they are disparate ideologies that "depend upon the disintegration of traditional Muslim narratives and chronologies, as much as of modern theories of ideology and revolution."[50] Thus, while dismissing "hypocrite imams" and warning young Muslims not to listen to their clerics, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri play the part of religious scholars, arguing that the contemporary political predicament of "the Muslim nation" demands revolutionary action from every individual, among which the deliberate targeting of civilians is permitted in the name of religion.[51] As one scholar notes, such justifications are "not based on the main schools of Islamic theology, but a new ideological starting point that provides Al Qaeda with a theoretical legitimisation for non-discriminatory, violent action."[52]

The defining case of how doctrinaire jihadi ideology uses personalized interpretations divorced from legal tradition is in its interpretation of the concept of jihad itself. Particularly vulnerable to abuse, the doctrine of jihad as armed struggle (as opposed to its other meaning of an internal spiritual struggle) has long been a contentious issue. Indeed, there is no single authoritative voice in the Islamic tradition that has imposed its interpretation universally. The question of armed struggle, and in which circumstances it is legitimate, has been debated hotly by the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence for centuries.[53] The Koranic prescriptions on war are quite general, calling on Muslims to "fight in the way of God," establish justice, and refrain from disproportionate or unjust actions while fighting; mainstream Islamic scholarship tends to interpret jihad as self-defence or a "just war" only to be undertaken collectively and under certain carefully defined circumstances, typically in the defence of a country that has been invaded or occupied.[54]

The doctrinaire jihadi movement has exploited this vagueness to impose its own view. Drawing on the ideas of thirteenth-century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah (whose worldview was shaped by the cataclysm of the Mongol invasions), modern jihadist intellectuals have resurrected the idea of an obligation on all individual Muslims to wage war against all regimes not considered sufficiently Islamic.[55] Ibn Taymiyyah's fatwa proclaimed firstly that jihad was no longer to be considered as a collective obligation undertaken by a head of state in defence of occupied territory but rather as an individual duty and an offensive weapon against 'apostate rulers,' and secondly, that such a duty was to be considered the highest form of devotion. Six centuries later, Sayyid Qutb (perhaps the single most important intellectual source for the al-Qaedist movement)[56] again denounced traditional understandings of jihad and, drawing on Ibn Taymiyyah, offered his own interpretation. As Fawaz Gerges explains, "Far from viewing jihad as a collective duty governed by strict regulations (similar to just war theory in Christianity, international law, and classical Islamic jurisprudence or fiqh), jihad for Qutb was a permanent revolution against internal and external enemies who usurped God's sovereignty . . . he dared to neutralize the entire body of traditional fiqh and provided jihadis with direct access to the original texts, which they used as weapons against 'impious regimes'."[57]

Jihadi ideologues readily drop the main corpus of Islamic theology, adapting Islamic principles in an ad hoc fashion to accord with their perspective on contemporary politics. Indeed, if the circumstances in which jihad could be declared were radically reconfigured by jihadists, so were the actions considered legitimate in the course of such an armed struggle. That the deliberate targeting of civilians is considered un-Islamic by the vast majority of Muslim scholars and Islamist activists was made clear in the days after the 9/11 attacks.[58] Al-Qaeda's religious justification for 9/11, published in 2002, therefore, marked a clear departure from traditional thinking and a stark rejection of mainstream scholarship. Effectively, they argue that there is no unconditional prohibition against killing civilians in Islam and that under certain conditions (which in their view had been met) civilians can be deliberately targeted. Despite overwhelming opinion to the contrary among the vast majority of Muslim scholars (condemned by doctrinaire jihadists as "mouthpieces for Arab regimes" and "apostates"), al-Qaeda once again imposed its own interpretation of the scriptures to justify its standpoint. Chief among these justifications is the citation of Koranic verses that stress reciprocity in war: "And one who attacks you, attack him in like manner as he attacked you."[59] In the contemporary jihadist view of global politics — an existentialist war between Islam and disbelief — the evidence points to a clear conclusion: "If the unbelievers have targeted Muslim women, children and elderly [as they are seen to have done in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere], it is permissible for Muslims to respond in kind."[60] In an ad hoc approach, other Koranic verses are identified in order to argue that further conditions have been met to justify purposefully targeting civilians, among which are "assistance of civilians in deed, word, or mind" (i.e., the responsibility of citizens in a democratic state for the actions of its government) and the inability to distinguish civilians from combatants in battle.[61] As Quinton Wikorowicz and John Kaltner argue, "the sheer breadth of these justifications leaves ample theological justification for killing civilians in almost any imaginable situation."[62]

The modern era has also encouraged a resurgence of the idea of a worldwide Muslim nation or umma. The feeling of a shared identity across borders is one felt by many Muslims and is influenced by the doctrine of tawhid.[63] In recent decades, globalized media, mass education, and migration have contributed to an intensification of this transnational sentiment. There is nothing unusual about such solidarity, and it is not particular to religion or to Islam: the rise of transnational identities and Diaspora politics — whether they are based on religion, nationality, gender, class, ethnicity, or other ideology — are defining characteristics of the modern era. Al-Qaedist discourse, however, essentializes the umma and defines it in opposition to an equally essentialized "West," exploiting pan-Muslim identity to propagate the idea of a "civilizational clash." However flawed, the "clash" thesis is powerful and has entered popular discourse, not least because such a thesis has been mirrored and defended by prominent academics and politicians in the US and Europe.[64] Among Muslims its power derives from the historical context from which it has emerged — perceived injustice over at least a century of relations between the European colonial powers, the US, and some Muslim-majority societies.

It is not surprising that pan-Muslim sentiment is aroused when co-religionists are seen to be suffering around the world. Global jihadist propaganda feeds off and exploits these feelings to encourage an exclusive politics of identity, an extreme religious transnationalism that places grievances in a simple framework of oppressed/Muslim versus oppressor/unbeliever and ignores the complexities of history. When al-Qaeda justifies 9/11 as "a service to Islam in defence of its people,"[65] bin Laden refers to the miserable state of the umma and Islam under attack[66] or when Mohammed Siddique Khan justifies the 7/7 London bombings as a defence of "my people" who daily suffer "bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture" at the hands of "infidels,"[67] a repeated rhetorical device is employed: injustices are identified, linked, and globalized; blame is assigned; and revolutionary violence is offered as a solution that demands every individual take up arms in a defensive and just war.[68] By repeatedly linking all the conflicts in the world that involve Muslims into one anti-Islam conspiracy, the imagined community of the global Muslim nation is invoked within the framework of a powerful Manichean narrative. Fred Halliday refers to this linkage as the "rhetorical . . . political geography of the new Greater West Asian crisis."[69] This rhetorical landscape of Muslim suffering and oppression, reinforced by propaganda videos that graphically demonstrate the suffering of Muslims and in some cases desensitize the viewer to violence, has been, and remains, one of the most powerful recruiting tools for the al-Qaeda movement.[70]

The 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent chaos added a new and potent symbol to the jihadi inventory of grievances. The power of the Iraq war to galvanize and radicalize opinion worldwide was demonstrated in the attacks on Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. This is not to say that these attacks were to be explained solely in terms of the Iraq war but rather that it was a key factor. As the International Institute for Strategic Studies reported in 2005, "the war in Iraq has both intensified the jihad and eroded the ability of Western governments to fight back . . . recruitment to radical causes has increased."[71] This propaganda effort has been reinforced by the perception that certain well-publicized acts of brutality committed by coalition forces in Iraq, shocking even in the context of a war, are representative of the moral vacuity of "Western society." The photographs of abuse and sexual violence at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay reinforced the perception among some that this behavior was representative of the nature of "Western" culture as a whole, which the US and its allies sought to impose upon them.[72] Such feelings serve al-Qaeda's propaganda effort and the spread of its portrait of a corrupt West.

A further factor in this process of radicalization was that the mainstream Islamo-nationalist insurgency in Iraq allowed doctrinaire jihadis to attach themselves to a cause and movement with wide support in the Sunni Muslim world. Radical Sunni Islamism asserted itself in Iraq against the background of an indigenous nationalist uprising with a goal of national liberation from occupation and in the service of Sunni power and identity in a struggle against Shi'a (perceived as Iranian) dominance. The vast majority of those who made up the insurgency were native Iraqis from the Sunni community, uninterested in any wider ideological agenda. Their motives and grievances had roots in the US invasion and occupation, the ascendance of the Shi'a and Kurds as the wielders of political power, and the consequent disenfranchisement (real and perceived) of the Sunni Arab minority.[73]

Despite widely differing goals and ideologies, the confessional flavor of the nationalist insurgency helped doctrinaire jihadis in Iraq and elsewhere draw on the grievances of the mainstream to legitimize their own arguments and actions. Indeed, the belief that the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq represented a justified resistance movement in the service of national liberation was accepted and promoted by many in the Sunni Muslim religious establishment. In this regard, Gerges argues that the invasion of Iraq "backfired and revived al-Qaeda after it had fallen in a coma" by alienating "most of the important secular and religious Muslim groups that had rejected and opposed al-Qaeda's global jihad" in the wake of 9/11 and who had even given their tacit support to the US campaign to oust the Taliban in 2001.[74] Two important examples of this alienation of mainstream Sunni Muslim opinion were the fatwas of Cairo's Al-Azhar University and of Sheikh Qardawi. Al-Azhar, the oldest institution of religious higher learning in the Islamic world, issued a fatwa advising "all Muslims in the world to make jihad against invading American soldiers," characterizing such actions as "a binding religious duty." Qardawi (another prominent Egyptian-born cleric), meanwhile, declared that "death while defending Iraq is a kind of martyrdom," and even went as far as to sanction attacks on Iraqi civilians who commit the "crime" of assisting the occupying forces.[75] These were mainstream sources with a wide audience in the Muslim world. With such widespread support for the traditional idea of a struggle against non-Muslim occupation in Iraq, al-Qaeda benefited from a blurring of the divisions between their own doctrinaire struggle and the mainstream Islamo-nationalist jihad.

Iraq represents a recent and powerful confirmation of the "clash of civilizations" myth for many, but the idea of an imperial, expansionist West as the cause of all ills has an older pedigree and was as prevalent in leftist and secular nationalist discourse as it is now among Islamists of all shades including jihadists. Indeed, the power and resilience of the "clash" myth lies in the fact that it has its roots in real historical grievances. Therefore, the broad global context of 9/11 and similar attacks is not only one of the individualization of religious interpretation, mass population movements, and the strengthening of transnational identities but also of a long-standing political and economic asymmetry between Western and Muslim-majority societies.

Halliday divides this period into "three superimposed periods of asymmetric relation": European colonialism, the Cold War, and economic globalization.[76] Although there is no space here to rehearse the historical details, we should highlight the enduring legacy of the colonial period (1870–1945), especially the creation of the state system in the Middle East after 1918 and the many unresolved issues that have bred conflict and a sense of deep injustice ever since. These include the Sykes/Picot agreement, which carved up the Middle East according to the interests of the UK and France; the creation of the state of Israel; Israel's relations with the Arab states; US sponsorship of Israel; the dispossession of the Kurdish people; and the status of Kuwait.[77] Of particular importance in this rhetorical landscape of injustice is Palestine, which has been the major element in the symbolic politics of Islam since 1948 and especially since 1967, the year when Jerusalem and its Muslim holy sites were occupied by Israel.[78]

As for the role of the Cold War in the rise of Islamism and its radical off-shoot jihadism, we should remember that it was the perceived communist threat represented by revolutionary Arab socialist governments, such as those in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Iraq, and later the Islamic revolution in Iran during the Cold War period, that directly led to the funding and support by Saudi Arabia and other Western-allied regimes of many Islamic activist groups. In the case of Saudi Arabia, this effort also involved widespread evangelism of Wahhabi Islam as a way of countering secular, communist ideology and boosting the authority of the Saudi regime.[79] Referring to the role of Islamist militias in the fight against the forces of communism in Afghanistan and Yemen, Halliday notes "the intimate relation between the rise of the armed Islamists and the crushing of the left in the Cold War."[80]

The third period of asymmetric relation that continues to the present day is economic globalization. Several analyses of the rise of radical Islamism frame the phenomenon as a counterpoint to the socially destabilizing effects of Western market dominance.[81] These factors include social fragmentation, job insecurity, and the "commercialization, commodification and contractualization of more and more areas of human activity and relationships."[82] In some Muslim-majority societies, the perception that such changes are intimately linked to a neo-imperialist project has led to protest movements by politico-religious actors who derive much of their legitimacy from manifestos that offer radical alternatives to "Western" prescriptions of socioeconomic development.[83]

As we have seen, jihadist discourse exploits the core grievances of societies in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world to recruit support for its campaign. But how do these grievances and the civilizational clash invoked in their articulations relate to the aims of the jihadi movement? Discussions of these questions often focus on a debate over whether al-Qaeda views itself as fighting a religious, "cosmic" war with practical politics and irrelevance and its aim as "the vanquishing of evil itself," or whether it is essentially a political movement with religion as a utilitarian side-issue.[84] Such debates risk diverting attention away from the fact that jihadists view religion and politics as inseparable, and Islam is regarded as having "a mandate to order the whole of human life."[85] What distinguishes jihadists from other Islamists is not the application of religious principles to politics but rather an individual interpretation of contemporary politics — its ills and remedies — married to an individual interpretation of scripture. Therefore, the use of indiscriminate violence backed up by a good-versus-evil worldview, no matter how shocking, should not lead us to view the al-Qaeda social movement as apocalyptic. The language and imagery may be religious, and those who participate may believe that they are fulfilling heavenly edicts, but the aims and the agenda of such activity are not geared toward the end of times. On the contrary, radical doctrinaire jihadists have set out clearly their view of the ills of contemporary society and a strategy to rectify those ills. The rallying cry of the "clash of civilizations" is a not an end in itself but rather a means to an end.

It is the roots and aims of the global jihad that draw us most strongly to local factors. Despite the global reach of modern Islamic radicalism, the "omnivorous" nature of its ideology, the context of globalization and the asymmetric relationship with the West in which it has emerged, and the religious terms in which it is articulated, the phenomenon is the result of a myriad of local grievances within Muslim-majority countries, especially the Arab states of the Middle East. Although in its most recent form this movement expresses itself globally, and many within the movement see themselves as soldiers in a cosmic struggle, its roots and agenda lie locally within specific state-based societies. The transformation of state-based revolutionary action into a global war, therefore, represents a new path to the same destination. This shift is the result of two assumptions on the part of jihadist strategists: first, that the only way to achieve their long-held strategic objectives — the overthrow of "apostate" regimes, the installation of an Islamic state governed by their version of Shari’a, the defeat of Israel, and the restoration of the Caliphate — is to attack the "head of the snake," i.e., the United States, and second, that the best way to achieve widespread support for, or acquiescence in, such a project is to invoke the image of Islam under attack.[86]

Prominent jihadist writers and strategists, such as Al-Suri, Zawahiri, al-Qurashi, and al-Muqrin, have all offered detailed accounts of short- and long-term aims and strategies to achieve such aims, and all stress the importance of controlling territory and taking power.[87] In his "Call to Global Islamic Resistance," Abu Musab Al-Suri emphasizes four consecutive strategic goals:

1. Expelling the Crusader and Jewish campaigns under the leadership of America and its allies;

2. Eliminating the agent forces and hypocrites who work to achieve the goals of the invading campaigns;

3. Overthrowing the regimes of apostasy and betrayal in our country;

4. Establishing Shari’a on the remnants of those apostate forces.[88]

Similarly, Zawahiri states the principal objective as being "a piece of land . . . on which [to] establish and protect the state of Islam and launch its battle to restore the rational caliphate based on the traditions of the prophet,"[89] or in the words of bin Laden, it is the "triumph of religion and the establishment of a Muslim state . . . ruling according to revealed law."[90]

The strategic shift among some doctrinaire jihadists (a minority) toward targeting the United States and its allies and the move towards a "global" jihad in the mid-1990s represent a new path to this same objective — seizing power within states. This mutation reflects the widespread belief that militants, within their individual states, have been prevented from achieving any significant change because of US policies in the Middle East, especially its support for Israel and the dictatorships of the region.

The failure of local radical Islamist insurgencies to achieve their objectives within their own states led to a new strategy as a way to ensure the survival of the jihadi movement. In terms of propaganda and recruitment, this would involve stepping onto the world stage, inviting massive media coverage, recasting its participants as defenders of Islam against the global tyrant, and starting a cycle of violence by provoking the US and its allies into military action in Muslim-majority states, thereby undermining local regimes that inevitably would be forced to side with the enemy.[91] In terms of military strategy, the other principal goal as stated by bin Laden, is, by provoking it into a long military campaign, to "bleed the US economy" through attrition, forcing economic decline, "disintegration," "contraction," and a concurrent decline in financial and military aid to the "near enemy"[92] or, in jihadi parlance, "killing the branches by attacking the trunk."[93]

Commenting on this strategy, Gilles Kepel explains the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington as "an attempt to reverse a process in decline with a paroxysm of destructive violence"[94] and as a realization of the myth of the "clash of civilizations" in

A desperate attempt to arouse, motivate, inspire Muslims [and] above all . . . to provoke the US into attack, to start a cycle of violence . . . [and thus] . . . to build universal solidarity among Muslims in reaction to the victimization and suffering of their Afghan brothers.[95]

This thesis reflects the stated view among the theorists and founders of the global jihadist movement that al-Qaeda would act as "a vanguard" to wake the masses[96] and that only a "spectacular act could mobilize the masses."[97] By drawing the US into direct military intervention in Afghanistan and the Middle East, jihadists hoped to provoke massive popular protest, instability, and the possibility of a political space for the rise of radical Islamist power in Middle Eastern states — the ultimate strategic goal.[98]

The failure of doctrinaire jihadist insurgents in Algeria and Libya in the wake of their participation in the Afghan-Soviet war influenced this appraisal, as did the failed Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Syria in the 1980s.[99] The most important state in this regard, however, is Egypt. Ideologically and organizationally, Egypt is at the epicenter of the jihadist movement. Both in terms of the genesis of modern Islamism and its radical offshoot jihadism, Egypt is key. Despite the prominence of Osama bin Laden as a figurehead and financial backer, it is the Egyptian insurgency, the ideological offspring of Qutb and Faraj, that is perhaps the single most important forerunner of al-Qaeda and the al-Qaedist movement.[100] Most of the leaders of the al-Qaeda core organization are Egyptian militants with a history of focusing on the "near enemy,"[101] whose failure in the domestic context — the break-up of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization and its subsequent ceasefire agreement with the government in 1997 — impelled the search for a new strategy.[102] Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of Islamic Jihad, who had been jailed in the wake of the assassination of President Sadat, was most influential in the decision to merge with bin Laden's organization, becoming al-Qaeda's number two and the principal contemporary ideologue of the movement.[103]

Zawahiri has outlined the reasons for the strategic shift in his memoirs, stressing that, despite the operational redirection toward the US and its allies, the "near enemy" — the Egyptian regime — remained the ultimate target. Concluding that the jihadi insurgency in Egypt would always be frustrated by the nature of the easily policed terrain of the Nile Valley,[104] al-Zawahiri says he was attracted to the mountains of Afghanistan as "a tributary and base for jihad in Egypt and the Arab region, the heart of the Islamic world, where the basic battle of Islam was being fought."[105] Thus, the 1998 amalgamation of Zawahiri's group with bin Laden's organization and the formation of al-Qaeda represented a new strategy toward the same aims. The move to Afghanistan was a means of acquiring a new operational freedom ("a kind of laboratory . . . like an incubator where its [the jihad's] seeds would grow and where it could acquire practical experience in combat, politics and organisational matters"[106]) and, in collaboration with bin Laden, a new global strategy to attract widespread support, media coverage, and to undermine the Arab regimes by hitting the United States.

The idea that the jihadist movement's highest priority is the overthrow of regimes in the Middle East and the eventual conquest of Jerusalem under the banner of Islam (and not a war against the "far enemy" — the US and its allies) is a belief held by the vast majority of doctrinaire jihadis today.[107] Ideologically, this view reflects the writings of Mohammed Abd al-Salam Faraj, a disciple of Qutb and an important influence on a generation of Egyptian jihadis, including al-Zawahiri. Faraj argues that the "near enemy" must be prioritized because "liberating Jerusalem must be waged under the banner of Islam, not the internal impious leadership, lest [it] be the main beneficiary of such a victory . . . [and also because] . . . the colonial presence in Muslim lands is the fault of these Muslim rulers." Faraj concludes by arguing that "the jihad's first and foremost priority must be to replace these infidel rulers with a comprehensive Islamic system [and therefore that] any other external agenda would be a waste of time."[108] As late as 1995, Zawahiri still adhered to this same notion that "the road to Jerusalem goes first through Cairo" and that "the fight against apostate regimes must come before other fights."[109] His conversion to the notion of the global jihad should be interpreted not as an abandonment of this idea but rather as a different path to its fulfilment. As Gerges emphasizes, "Localism and not globalism informed the thinking and action of jihadis."[110]

For bin Laden, meanwhile, armed conflict with America is intimately connected to the "special relationship" between the Saudi regime and the US, especially since the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent US-led war to repel his forces.[111] Indeed, it is this single issue that dominated bin Laden's discourse in the 1990s: his "Declaration of Jihad" specifically targets "the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places."[112] In this sense, in the Saudi context, bin Laden is not an anomaly, for although the vast majority of Saudi citizens find bin Laden's means reprehensible, there is substantial sympathy for his message — distaste at the US-Saudi relationship, the stationing of US troops on Saudi soil, US support for Israel, domestic corruption, economic inequality, and Western cultural incursion into the fabric of Saudi society.[113]

Although bin Laden has been less explicit about the importance of the return home from exile and has promoted a more internationalist line than his Egyptian counterpart, the need for regime change in Saudi Arabia is a recurrent theme in his statements. Drawing on a long tradition of Islamist dissent in Saudi Arabia, and tapping into the widely felt grievances that emerged in the 1990s, bin Laden refers to the "bitter repression, [the] terrible injustice . . . [and the] . . . humiliating poverty" which the Saudis suffer, expressing a belief that the regime has "desecrated its legitimacy" and must be overthrown.[114] Other stated grievances against the Saudi regime include the "betrayal" of Palestine, represented by their peace initiative with Israel in 2002, and the state's crackdown on jihadi and reformist Sheiks.[115] In a December 2004 statement, bin Laden effectively calls the Saudi royal family infidels and expresses his opinion that it was the duty of every Muslim to overthrow them by violent means.[116] He also accuses the Saudi regime of colluding with the US in the invasion of Iraq. Fundamentally, the struggles against the US and the Saudi regimes are viewed as the same thing. By targeting the United States through al-Qaeda central, and by supporting the local jihadist movement (an al-Qaeda franchise organization) within the country against the regime, jihadists see themselves as involved in a double-pronged strategy in the Arabian Peninsula.[117] But is the idea that the jihadi movement is principally concerned with seizing state power in Muslim-majority societies contradicted by the "freelancers" of the al-Qaeda social movement? After all, these jihadi operatives are people who live, and in many cases were born, in countries far from the Muslim-majority states where power is sought.

Much has been made of the link between "deterritorialized" Islam — Muslims living as a minority in Western countries, especially in Europe — and radicalization. In the wake of 9/11 and the attacks in Madrid and London, the fact that many of the operatives involved had strong links with Europe — and in some cases had been born in Europe — was used to support the thesis that these attacks had more to do with revenge attacks in the context of an identity war than with revolutionary politics in Muslim-majority states, with Europe and "westernized Islam" to blame.[118] However, as Alison Pargeter argues, this link is far from clear. Despite some evidence to suggest that the stresses of living in a minority culture and the fragmentation of religious authority in the Diaspora can be factors in radicalization,[119] and although many jihadi sympathizers in Europe do appear to be motivated by the clash of civilizations myth — "the lowest common denominator"[120] of all jihadi ideologies — the vast majority of jihadi operatives in Europe have had strong links to their country of origin (or that of their parents) and have been concerned with the internal politics of those states. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi citizens, committed jihadists and highly religious, who, although coming together in Hamburg, were already in most cases committed to armed struggle before their arrival in Europe.[121] Similarly, although alienation and marginalization were often presumed to be behind the radicalization of the second-generation Pakistani operatives who carried out the London attacks, the role of internal Pakistani politics and especially the issue of Kashmir have often been overlooked as factors in their radicalization.[122] Although the call to global jihad and the exclusive identity politics that surround it have played a part in radicalization in some Western countries, it would be simplistic to view this as the sole or main cause of such radicalization. Moreover, we should also not be distracted by high-profile cases of European jihadis into forgetting that the majority of jihadis are young males from the core and Maghreb regions of the Arab world.[123]

In his authoritative study of international relations in the Middle East, Fred Halliday describes the global jihadi movement as a "dramatic transnational expression" of a generalized "crisis of the state" in the wider Middle East (what he refers to as the "Greater West Asian Crisis").[124] From this perspective, as we have argued, the shift toward the "far enemy" and the invocation of a global jihad is symbolic and propagandistic: its primary goal is neither religious nor cultural but rather political. The aim is to take power from those who control states and to hold onto it: "Religious fundamentalism in all countries has one goal . . . to seize power, political, social and gendered, within their own societies,"[125] or in the words of al-Zawahiri, "The foremost duty of Islam is to depose Jahiliyah from the leadership of man, and to take the leadership into its own hands and enforce the particular way of life which is its permanent feature."[126] The main targets of terrorist attacks such as 9/11 are thus the "hypocritical regimes" (munafiq) so often threatened and condemned by bin Laden in his statements over the past 10 years.[127] In a similar vein, Gerges argues that "the birth and evolution . . . of the jihadist movement . . . stem largely from a deep structural and developmental crisis facing the Arab world, in both socioeconomic and institutional terms . . . a crisis of governance and political economy."[128] The central dynamic of the Islamist challenge is, therefore, not a civilizational or cultural clash with the West but rather contemporary state/society relations in "Greater West Asia" — relations defined primarily by "the effective militarization of the opposition in weak states (Afghanistan/Pakistan/Yemen/Somalia) and a growing popular resentment against the governing elite in the major Arab states (in particular Saudi Arabia and Egypt)."[129]