By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

While still unclear to many people a short description of Salafism is in place here, also called salafiyya, it is an Islamic trend that developed at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century in Egypt. Although bound by a common religious creed revolving around the principle of tawhid (unity), Salafism today is a diverse trend consisting of various branches. Throughout its development, Salafism has borrowed liberalist, rationalist, and jihadist ideas, which has added to some of the confusion surrounding this term.  Rather than an organization or even a precise school of thought, Salafism is better understood as a dogmatic relation to the fundamentals of the religion, or in other words, as a methodology to understand and realize Islam. (Christopher M. Blanchard, "The Islamic Traditions of Wahhabism and Salafiyya," in CRS Report for Congress RS21695, Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 2006).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the term "Salafiyya" was linked to a transnational movement of Islamic reform whose proponents strove to reconcile their faith with the Enlightenment and modernity. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, the Salafi movement became inexplicably antithetical to Islamic modernism. Its epicenter moved closer to Saudi Arabia and the term Salafiyya became virtually synonymous with Wahhabism.

What happened is that the rise of a transnational and generic Islamic consciousness, especially after the First World War, facilitated the growth of religious purism within key Salafi circles. The Salafis who most emphasized religious unity and conformism across boundaries usually developed puristic inclinations that proved useful in the second half of the twentieth century. Due in part to their affinities with the Saudi religious establishment, they survived the postcolonial transition and kept thriving while the modernist Salafis eventually disappeared.

Salafiyya was originally designed as a pan-Islamic reform movement. It first developed in Egypt in the 1890s, where it was propagated by the Islamic scholars Muhammad Abdu (1849-1905) and Rashid Rida (1865-1935). Abdu and Rida were concerned with reforming Islam in the wake of its general decline vis-à-vis the West, and as such were walking in the footsteps of Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani* (1839-1897), a political activist who strove to reform Islam and adapt it to the challenge of colonization and westernization. Abdu and Rida’s concerns grew out of the same intellectual debate that revolved around the reconciliation of Islamic heritage with modernity. They blamed the weakness of the ulama, social injustice, and blind imitation of the past (taqlid) for Islam’s relative stagnation. Their Salafism also came in response to burgeoning pan-Arab nationalism, which in itself was an attempt to reconcile Islam with modernity. (*Like we pointed out in early 2003 in his two part essay on various radical groups, the intellectual roots and historical precedents of today's Islamic revival can be traced back to Sayyid Jamâl al-Din, called al-Afghani. And entail a closeted form of the Western modernism that it so publicly claims to oppose. This included also the Deoband movement that emerged from central India in the wake of the ill-fated revolt against the British in 1857. Founded by Mohammed Zasim Nanautawi (1833-77) and Rashid Ahmed Gangohi (1829-1905), it set up madrassas in India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.)

Early Salafis such as Abdu and Rida were more liberal than many contemporary Salafis because of their belief that the stagnation of the Ottoman caliphate, and that of Islam in general, could be alleviated by a return to the true principles of Islam with an interpretation suited to modern realities. The original Salafis were not opposed to modernization, but instead admired Europe’s technological innovations and social advancements and sought to reconcile modernity with Islam. The aftermath of World War I and the ensuing colonization of much of the Middle East by Britain and France changed the Salafi scenery. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, reform within that caliphate, which had been the concern of the early Salafis, made way to a new priority, the struggle against colonialism as a way to recreate the caliphate. These competing elements, reforming Islam on the one hand, and fighting colonialism on the other, were reflected in the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. The Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy was a novel one as it aimed to create a popular movement that would rely on reforming Islam to create a social revolution. During the 1930s and 1940s the brotherhood’s idea of generating a broad Islamic political and social movement began to dominate the Islamic discourse revolving around the desire to rebuild the caliphate, increasingly sidelining those voices who advocated a nationalist strategy based on reforming Arab states independently. The new strategy entailed the indoctrination of younger generations, but also the decision to find a modus vivendi with the existing political order of Arab states. (Trevor Stanley, "Understanding the Origins of Wahhabism and Salafism," Terrorism Monitor 3, no. 14, 15 July 2005).

Beginning in the 1950s, a new phase began for the Muslim Brotherhood when the movement clashed head on with Arab governments in places like Jordan, Egypt, and later Syria, countries that had come under the influence of Gamal abd-el Nasser’s hybrid form of socialism and pan-Arabism. Sayyed Qutb was the predominant ideologue against the Baathist and Nasserite form of Arab socialism. In his writings, which focused on social injustice, Qutb’s ideas marginalized the pure reformist Salafiyyah, on which al-Banna grew up. Following the violent crackdown of the Muslim Brotherhood under Nasser, the remnants of the movement found refuge in Saudi Arabia under King Faisal. In Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood’s remnants were led by Muhammad Qutb, Sayyed’s brother. They quickly established a foothold in Saudi Islamic universities in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the Saudi education system was filled with Muslim Brothers and other Salafis, who managed to spread their books across the larger Muslim world. The Muslim Brotherhood’s remnants, who established themselves in Saudi Arabia, introduced a politically oriented agenda to the existing Salafi movement in Saudi Arabia. There, they also encountered the more traditional, apolitical Saudi Wahhabi scholars, an encounter that created a new, more militant form of Salafism. Wahhabism, a doctrine related to Salafism, originated in Saudi Arabia in the course of the 19th century. Both Wahhabism and Salafism advocate the immediate, ‘fundamentalist’ interpretation of Islamic teachings. The two movements differ, however, in their original doctrine, in that Wahhabism rejected all traces of modernity, while Salafism, at least initially, attempted to reconcile Islam with modernity. Wahhabism centers around a group of sheikhs who studied in Wahhabi learning centers, mostly in Saudi Arabia and Gulf States. Wahhabis continue to extend their influence through fatwas, and are frequently speaking at conferences and giving lectures. Their doctrine is also spread through the Internet, television, and Wahhabi publications. Although Wahhabism originated in Saudi Arabia and is still strongest in the Arabian peninsula, Wahhabism has spread to other countries, and Wahhabi sheikhs are conveying their message to younger generations of Wahhabi students. (Muwahideen ‘monotheists’ is the name by which Wahhabis call themselves.)

Case Study: Philosophical Analyses of Radical Islam

The encounter between the remnants of the Muslim Brotherhood with the Saudi Salafi-Wahhabist scholars, many of whom were opposed to the Saudi regime’s modernist trend, gave rise to a new form of Salafism that combined a puritan notion of Islam with the militant dimension of the salaf, the generation of the prophet and his companions. Faisal’s embrace of Salafi pan-Islamism resulted in cross-pollination between ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s teachings on tawhid, shirk and bid’a and Salafi interpretations of ahadith (the saying of Muhammad). Some Salafis nominated ibn Abd al-Wahhab as one of the Salaf (retrospectively bringing Wahhabism into the fold of Salafism), and the Muwahideen began calling themselves Salafis.Many Saudi and other Arab scholars who adopted this militant form of Salafism taught or studied at these Saudi institutions. They included, most famously, Abdallah Azzam and Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, both of whom would later play a key role in the formulation of global jihadi doctrine.The 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a number of key historical events, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, the first Palestinian intifada of 1987, and the U.S.presence in Saudi Arabia—which had a profound impact on the future trajectory of the Salafi movement. On one hand, these events promoted the rise of more politically minded Salafis in Saudi Arabia like Safar al-Hawali and Salman al-Awdah. They represented a younger generation of Salafi scholars who distanced themselves from the older, more traditional and purist generation of Salafis who opted to stay out of politics and were more concerned with religious questions. (Q.Wiktorowicz, "Anatomy of the Salafi Movement," Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, Volume 29, Number 3, April-May 2006 , pp 222-24.)

On the other hand, the war in Afghanistan gave rise to the Salafi-Jihadist faction of Salafism, of which Al Qaeda became the most prominent exponent. In the mid-1990s, the Saudi regime cracked down on the younger generation of Salafi scholars, with Salafi-Jihadists gradually filling the vacuum. Many of the repressed young Saudi Salafis, including Saad al-Faqih and Abu Baseer al-Tartousi, left Saudi Arabia for London. The meeting of these individuals with radical Algerian Salafis and Palestinian scholars such as Abu Qatada, in addition to the inspiration provided by Al Qaeda’s spectacular terrorist attacks like 9/11, led to the gradual conjoining of the apolitical and politically minded trends of Salafism into militant Salafi-Jihadism. As a result of these developments, Salafism, in the modern usage, refers less to the reformation and modernization of Islamic societies, and more to a stance of ignoring the West.

Except for the Palestinian Hamas movement, the Muslim Brotherhood did not take part in the process by which some elements of Salafism turned increasingly militant. Instead, since the 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood adopted a more pragmatic stance, opting to participate more openly in the political and social life of its various host countries. In places like Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Iraq, and Yemen, the Brotherhood attempted to transition into a legitimate political party, with varying rates of success. Hence, the global rise of Salafi-Jihadism widened the division between Salafi-Jihadists, which are increasingly equated with Salafism at large, and the Muslim Brotherhood. On its end, the Muslim Brotherhood stopped using Salafi rhetoric but, because their social infrastructure, the dawa, is reformist, they can still be viewed in part as Salafi in the original sense of the word. In recent years, a growing rift has developed between Salafi-Jihadists and the Muslim Brotherhood. Zawahiri, for example, acknowledges the Muslim Brotherhood as the largest Islamic movement, but accuses it of “committing suicide ideologically and politically” ever since it pledged allegiance to the regime of Hosni Mubarak. Zawahiri writes that the Muslim Brotherhood has “made mistakes that are tantamount to crimes that must be punished.” These crimes include what Zawahiri describes as the brotherhood’s abandonment of jihad as the guiding concept; its embrace of worldly matters; its championing of modern religious jurisprudence (the ‘new fiqh’) which violates the sanction against innovation (bidah); and their overall lack of support for the mujahideen. (Al-Zawahiri, Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, Part 9.)

Case Study: Muslim Brotherhood and Mubarek Government:

Egyptian and Palestinian parliamentary elections in early 2006, where individuals with established ties to the Muslim Brotherhood were among those vying for votes, illustrated this growing rift. Zawahiri openly criticized the Brotherhood for participating in the Egyptian parliamentary elections. He also made a jab at the Palestinian Hamas, which in January 2006 had won parliamentary elections in the Palestinian Authority, lecturing them that power is not an end in itself. Real power is application of sharia on earth … entering the same parliament as the lay people, recognizing their legitimacy and the accords they have signed is contrary to Islam.” (Craig Whitlock, "Keeping Al-Qaeda in His Grip," Washington Post, April 16, 2006, A1.)

Today, a large number of different Salafi groups exists, charging each other with deviations from ‘true’ Salafi tenets. Each group regards itself as the only true heirs of the program of Allah, as conveyed by his messenger, Muhammad, and as practiced by him and his companions, known as the salaf, or the ancient ones. Traditionally, Salafis favour the strict implementation of Islamic religious law, the sharia, and thus reject all other schools of thought as innovation (bida). In terms of the religious and legal interpretations of Islam, most Salafis accept only the Quran and the Sunna (the sayings attributed to the prophet) as valid religious and legal interpretations of Islam, while rejecting less rigid forms such as the analogies and consensus as innovations that are in dissonance with God’s word. Since they advocate a return to what they regard as the basics of religion, they are at times called fundamentalists or neo-fundamentalists.

They are at times also referred to as Wahhabis, although most scholars regard Wahhabism as a branch of Salafism,  and Wahhabis themselves tend to call themselves Muwahideen (monotheists) or Salafis. Most branches of Salafism reject any form of adaptation or compromise with other religions, and do not believe in discussions or other contacts with Christians and Jews. That said,mainstream Salafism does not believe in the need to harm Christians and Jews, arguing that as long as these ‘people of the book’ (dhimmi) remain non-belligerent infidels, they shall be treated with leniency. At the center of Salafi creed is the concept of tawhid (unity of God), which Salafis understand literally. While all Muslims believe in the unity of God, Salafis take tawhid to a more extreme level. Since God is one, Salafis believe that Muslims must abide only by God’s laws. The unity of God extends to a unity of worship of Allah, as a result of which all man-made laws must be rejected as an interference with the word and will of God. Salafis therefore reject the division of religion and state, which would suggest that man-made laws are supreme to those of Islam. Except for the contemporary Muslim Brotherhood, which adopts a more pragmatic position, Salafis, for instance, believe that current Arab rulers are apostates because they “legalize what God prohibits and forbid what God permits.” (Husayn, Al-Zarqawi: The Second Generation of Al-Qa'ida , Part 4.)

Only God can be worshipped, and no other entity can be invoked. Similarly, no living person must be venerated, which is why Salafis, especially of the Wahhabi branch, vehemently oppose personal idolatry. Wahhabis, for instance, demolished the shrine even of the Prophet Muhammad for that reason.In order to abide by and protect tawhid, Salafis believe that Muslims must strictly follow the Quran and emulate the model of the prophet Muhammad, who, as the Muslim exemplar, embodied the perfection of tawhid.23 Salafis believe that only the salaf, the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, led a lifestyle that was in accordance with God’s will and hence pleasing to him. They hence imitate Muhammad’s lifestyle on even the most mundane issues. Since their only goal is to please God, Salafis do not engage in the study of history and philosophy, and reject the application of Western laws of logic and reasoning. Rationalism is considered as opening a gateway to human desire, distortion, and deviancy, because Salafis consider the Quran and hadith to be self-explanatory. Using ‘rationalism’ in effect would challenge the attributes of God because all knowledge comes from and is contained within Islam. (Wiktorowicz, "Anatomy of the Salafi Movement," 210-11.)

The expansion of Islam to new territories led to the adoption of various local cultural elements into Islamic tradition. Salafis reject these cultural variations as innovation (bid’a) which do not reflect genuine Islam. Salafism is hence understood in part as a movement designed to purify Islam from these foreign and modern influences, a process that Olivier Roy has termed the ‘deculturation’ of Islam. Through the education of Muslim men of the true meaning of Islam, Salafis aspire to create the genuine Muslim individual and to unite these genuine Muslims in a global Islamic community of believers, the umma. Abiding by the true tenets of Islam and widening the community of real believers is considered an act that is pleasing to God and that leads to the purification of self (tazkia), which is central to Salafi thought. (Roy, Globalized Islam, 244.) Salafis make a particular diagnosis of the current state of Islam, as well as of the reasons for this state and possible remedies. They believe that Islam is in decline because it has abandoned the righteous path of Muhammad and his companions. The umma’s past strength, they believe, derived from its faith and practices, which were in accordance with God’s will. Muslims can only recapture the glory of Islam if they return to the authentic faith and original practices of the salaf, i.e., the Prophet and his companions. (Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks, 4.)

There are thus two major trends of Salafism, namely mainstream Salafism which is nonviolent, and Salafi-Jihadism which advocates the waging of jihad. Mainstream Salafism can now be further divided into two trends, the original reformist (or purist) trend that rejects Western political culture and all that it entails; and second, the socio-political trend of the Muslim Brotherhood and similar movements like the Jamaat-i-Islami, which accept the principle of pluralism in the modern polity, at least as a temporary step on the way to the establishment of the caliphate. Apart from the major trends, there are also a number of smaller Salafi trends of various kinds in the Arab and larger Islamic world, such as trends led by scholars and abided by a small number of followers. They include such scholars as Muhammad Said al-Buti, Nassir al-Albani, Zein al-Abedin Srour, or Abdul Majid al-Zindani. Mainstream Salafis however believe in the spreading of Islam via proselytizing rather than using violence. Their main aim is to promote the Salafi creed and fight against practices they deem as being deviant from true Islam. The purists among them reject political activity, which they believe leads to corruption. They do not regard themselves as a political movement, but consider themselves as a vanguard on a mission to protect tawhid and resist corruptive and innovative influences on Islam. Among the most well-known groups of mainstream Salafism are the tablighi, a group established in the late 1920s in India. Tablighis, also known as tablighi jamaat, are missionary Salafis, traveling across the world while promoting a non-violent dawa (call to Islam). The tablighi became one of, and perhaps the most leading group practicing Islamic revivalism in the 20th century. Wahhabis, discussed earlier, can also be thought of as a mainstream trend of Salafism.

Salafi-Jihadism in turn  is a violent subset of Salafism that rejects the usefulness of the traditional, nonviolent dawa, and instead espouses violence as the way to establish an Islamic state. Salafi-Jihadist groups include Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Ahl-e-Hadith, Jaish-e-Muhammad and Sipah-e-Sahaba in Pakistan, Al-Muhajiroun and Ahl al-Sunna w’al Jamaat in Britain, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and the GSPC in Algeria, to name a few. The division between mainstream Salafis and Salafi-Jihadists manifests itself in four major ways.The first and most important point of disagreement between mainstream and violent Salafis is over the issue of jihad. By and large, mainstream Salafis believe that dawa should be given priority over jihad, whereas Salafi-Jihadists regard jihad as a priority. External jihad in Islam comes in two forms, an offensive and a defensive one. The offensive jihad is used in order to expand Islam to the dar al-harb (domain of war). However, according to most interpretations, an offensive jihad can only be waged under the leadership of a caliph. The more widely accepted form of jihad is that of the defensive jihad (jihad al-dafaa), which resembles Christian and Jewish doctrines of Just War. According to the doctrine of defensive jihad, a holy war must be waged if an outside force invades Muslim territory. If such aggression occurs, then it is the individual duty (fard ayn) of each and every Muslim to come to the help of his Muslim brethren, since an attack on one Muslim territory is an attack on the entire umma.
Salafi-Jihadists saw the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as a clear act of war against Muslims that warranted a defensive jihad. This interpretation, however, was less automatic in the eyes of most Islamic scholars at the time, who argued that jihad focuses on the inner struggle against one’s vices.31 In the subsequent years, Abdullah Azzam, more than any other Islamist scholar, embarked on a campaign to spread the notion of the need to wage a defensive jihad, urging Muslims across the globe that it was the duty of each and every one of them to come to the help of their Afghan coreligionists.

The elevation of the militant interpretation of the concept of jihad as a central element of Islam dates back to ibn Taymiyyah (1268-1328), a medieval theologian who continues to exert tremendous impact upon the contemporary Salafi-Jihadist movement. Ibn Taymiyyah elevated the importance of Jihad to the same level as the five ordinary ‘pillars of Islam,’ namely the five daily prayers (salat), the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj), alms-giving to the needy (zakat), the declaration of faith (shahadah), and the fast of Ramadan (sawm). At a time when most clerics regarded participation in jihad as a collective duty, one that does not require the participation of every individual, only those of a select group, ibn Taymiyya argued that the goal of jihad is the victory of Allah, and therefore those who opposed jihad would oppose God himself. Adopting ibn Taymiyya’s stance on jihad, modern Salafi-Jihadist groups place jihad at the top of the agenda of duties for Muslims. They justify attacks against the West as a defensive jihad which was provoked by an attack against Islam, which renders the joining of Jihad an individual duty (fard ayn) for every Muslim, including all segments of the umma, be they rich or poor, men or women. This explains Al Qaeda’s framing of all of its activities as defensive. As Osama bin Laden stated, Al Qaeda was set up to wage jihad against infidelity, particularly to encounter the onslaught of the infidel countries against the Islamic states. Jihad is the sixth undeclared element of Islam. Every anti-Islamic element is afraid of it. Al Qaeda wants to keep this element alive and active and make it part of the daily lives of Muslims. It wants to give it the status of worship.

A second issue that differentiates Salafi-Jihadists from mainstream Salafis is the issue of takfir, a term that describes the labeling of fellow Muslims as infidels (kufr), thus justifying violence against them. The vast majority of all Muslims do not condone takfir, and refer to several sayings (hadith) attributed to Muhammed in which the prophet said that if a Muslim wrongly declares a fellow Muslim a kufr, then he himself turns into a kufr. Mainstream Salafi trends argue that a Muslim leader can only become an infidel if he knowingly implements laws that are contrary to Islam and declares them as superior to Islam. The practice of takfir was used by the medieval Kharijites*,and later propagated by Shukri Mustafa, who led the group Takfir w’al Hijrah in the 1970s, a group that declared virtually all Egyptians that did not abide by its own doctrines as heretics. (* Kharajites were members of a sect in Islam that had seceded from the followers of Ali because of their belief that the Shia were exceedingly willing to compromise with Muawiya, then the governor of Damascus, who competed with Ali over the rightful succession of the caliphate.) Because of their wont to engage in takfir, Salafi-Jihadists are sometimes called takfiris.

A third issue that distinguishes Salafi-Jihadists from mainstream Salafists is the justification of targeting civilians. Most Muslims, including non-violent Salafis, cite a number of sources from the Quran and hadith against the killing of civilians, although mainstream Salafis recognize that innocent civilians may be killed in the course of war, which is an acceptable consequence if the war is just. According to Wiktorowicz, the acceptance by Salafi-Jihadists of targeting civilians appears to be a recent phenomenon that emerged in the course of the Algerian war. He points out that some earlier theoretical exponents of violent Salafism, such as Wahhab and Sayyed Qutb, never argued that civilians could be targeted.On the contrary, the Quran and Sunna contain many verses calling for the protection of the sanctity of life and the need to limit attacks against non-combatants. Groups such as Al Qaeda, Wiktorowicz adds, have therefore “broken new ground over the past decade or so to develop an expanded understanding about permissible targets in war.” (Wiktorowicz, "A Genealogy of Radical Islam," 87.) Arguments justifying the killing of non-combatants include that the latter are surrogates or representatives of the enemy, and are thus legitimate targets. Although even nonviolent jihadis agree with this, Al Qaeda has lowered the threshold at which a person counts as a ‘supporter’ of the enemy considerably. Recently, an argument was also made that since Westerners elect their own governments which represents them, they are fair game. “War is a common responsibility among people and governments,” bin Laden said in this regard. “The war is continuing and the people are renewing their loyalty to their rulers and politicians and sending their sons to the armies to fight us. They also continue their material and moral support, while our countries are burning, our homes are being bombed, and our people are being killed.” (Quoted in Scheuer, "Osama Bin Laden: Taking Stock of the 'Zionist-Crusader War'," Terrorism Focus 3, no. 16.) Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the London bombers, for instance, said in his farewell videotape, “your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world. And your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters.”( Video on the London July 7th Blast, Released on the Internet by Al-Sahab, SITE Institute, 7 November 2005.) Among the most prolific justifications for the killing of enemy civilians is the argument that since the West targets Muslim civilians, it is permissible to strike back in kind. Suleiman Abu Gheith, Al Qaeda’s chief spokesperson, for example, says that given the extent of U.S. killing of Muslims, Muslims are permitted to kill 4 million Americans to reach parity. (Wiktorowicz, "A Genealogy of Radical Islam," 90.) Finally, the process of takfir, as well as a widespread philosophy of ‘the end justifying the means’ have enabled Salafi-Jihadists to justify the killing even of Muslim civilians. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for example, said that “the shedding of Muslim blood ... is allowed in order to avoid the greater evil of disrupting jihad.” ("Tape Justifies Killing Innocent Muslims," CNN.com, 19 May 2005.) In these cases, the jihadists usually emphasize that if Muslims who are killed are innocent, they are martyrs and will go to heaven anyway.

The fourth and last major distinction between Salafism and Salafi-Jihadism is the latter’s permission of suicide attacks. The consensus among Salafi-Jihadists that this tactic is the ultimate form of devotion to God would not have been possible without the debates and eventual broad consensus among Islamic religious scholars about the legitimacy of ‘martyrdom operations’ against Israelis. This consensus, that suicide attacks were acceptable against Israelis, but unacceptable if targeted against Muslims, was shared by radical clerics and scholars in many Islamic establishments, especially in zones of conflicts where Muslims took part. For example, the Arab and Islamic world gave moral sanctioning to the Palestinian ethos of death. The voices of those clerics who deplored suicide attacks were marginal. Even with regard to Iraq, some criticism was heard only in recent years, and the critique was focused more on target selection than on the technique. And while Salafi-Jihadists have adopted this legitimacy, it is nevertheless interesting, as Wiktorowicz notes, that Salafi-Jihadists care little about constructing theological justifications of suicide missions. Instead, their writings and speeches praise the virtues of martyrdom, virtues that nearly all Islamic scholars agree on. (Wiktorowicz, "A Genealogy of Radical Islam," 92.) Martyrdom occupies such a central place for Salafi-Jihadist groups like Al Qaeda’s because of its proximity to jihad, itself the key strategy for Salafi-Jihadists to establish the dream of a caliphate. Salafi-Jihadist groups, Al Qaeda included, have been able to instill in the minds of its members, as well as non-members they inspire, that self-sacrifice in the name of Allah is the most respectable and noble way to wage Jihad. Salafi-Jihadists present the willingness to perpetrate a martyrdom operation as the ultimate manifestation of complete submission to God’s will in the holy struggle against the infidels and apostates. Equally important, however, this particular tactic, which requires a devotion of the believer to the death, also marks the difference between the mujahideen and his enemy. For these reasons, Salafi-Jihadists are often heard arguing that while the West loves life, they love death. As Suleiman Abu Gheith declared, “those youths that destroyed Americans with their planes, they did a good deed. There are thousands more young followers who look forward to death like Americans look forward to living.” (Quoted in Hoffman, "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism," Atlantic Monthly June 2003.)

Jihad and Martyrdom is hence presented as the very antithesis of everything that the West stands for. In early 2002, Abu Ayman al-Hilali, who interprets many of bin Laden’s ideas on Salafi-Jihadist web sites, gave the following suggestion of how the enemy could be eliminated:“First we have to acknowledge a basic fact, proved by experience and reality, already acknowledged by the enemy, which is that the vital contradiction to the Zionist and American enemy is the doctrine of Jihad and Martyrdom, Istishhad.” (Placed on www.aloswa.org/ in early May 2002.) Salafi-Jihadist preachers who venerate martyrdom help inspire thousands of Muslim youth to develop a cult-like relationship to self-sacrifice. On April 23, 2004, Abu Hamza al-Masri told a crowd of 200 Muslims gathered at London’s Finsbury Park mosque to embrace death and the “culture of martyrdom.” (Patrick E. Tyler and Don Van Natta Jr., "Militants in Europe Openly Call for Jihad and the Rule of Islam," New York Times, 26 April 2004, A1.) In an address to Muslims at a tennis center community hall near London on April 22, 2004, Omar Bakri Mohammad, the leader of the Salafi-Jihadist al-Muhajiroun group (since its disbandment in October 2004 known as the Saviour Sect and Al-Ghurabaa, its two offshoots), urged Europeans to accept a truce offered by bin Laden lest Muslims “be obliged to become [bin Laden’s] sword” in a new battle, while adding that “it is foolish to fight people who want death, that is what they are looking for.” At the same speech, he also told the listeners what awaits the martyrs in paradise, namely “sweet kisses and the pleasures of bathing with scores of women.”( Ibid., A1.)The veneration of martyrdom so important for the Salafi-Jihadists makes frequent  references to the benefits that await the martyr in paradise. Much of the literature that describes the characteristics in paradise flourished in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, yet most original references to the benefits of the martyr in paradise can be found in hadiths that were collected following the prophet Muhammad’s death. The martyr is usually said to have six privileges with God:- He is forgiven his sins on the shedding of the first drop of his blood- He has a place in paradise- He is redeemed from the torments of the grave and the fear of hell- A crown of glory is placed on his head of which one ruby is worth more than the world and all that is in it-He will marry seventy-two of the huris with black eyes- His intercession will be accepted for seventy of his kinsmen.

Most Westerners, and some Muslims, believe that ‘martyrdom operations’ are tantamount to suicide. Traditionally, however, Islam sanctions suicide (intihar), which is regarded as a sin. Salafi-Jihadists, therefore, must draw a sharp distinction between martyrdom and suicide. They solve this problem by placing the emphasis on the intent of the perpetrator, arguing that the ordinary suicide kills himself for personal reasons, such as distress or depression, while the martyr kills himself for the sake of God and the umma. Since most conservative Sunni Islamic preachers would agree with this distinction, Salafi-Jihadists and many conservative Muslims have a common understanding that the tactic in itself may be legitimate.A second issue that jihadis must come to grips with is the targeting of innocent civilians in the course of martyrdom operations. There is a broad consensus among Muslims, however, that targeted civilians cannot be purposely targeted. As a result, Al Qaeda must stress that the civilians in question are not ‘noncombatants,’ but participants in the conflict between true Muslims and their enemies. 54 Salafi-Jihadists achieve that by constantly expanding their definition of the enemy. On the one hand, as was discussed above, they lower the threshold by which a person or group counts as a supporter of infidels. On the other hand, through the process of takfir, Salafi-Jihadists broaden the circle of infidels itself, and with it the range of people who do not count as innocent civilians. The strong sense of conspiracy theories rampant in and integral to Jihadi culture further hastens this process.

 

Theoretical Antecedents of Salafi-Jihadism

Salafism, and especially Salafi-Jihadism, can be traced back to Imam Ahmed bin Hanbal(780-855), a Muslim scholar and theologian who founded the Hanbali fiqh, the most conservative of Islam’s four schools of jurisprudence with the most stringent guidelines regarding social and personal conduct. Yet, the individual who had the deepest impact on Salafism was the 13th century above mentioned theologian Taqi al-din ibn Taymiyyah, a professor of Hanbali law whose family had to flee Syria as a result of repeated invasions by the Mongols. Ibn Taymiyyah was a strong opponent of the distinction between religion and politics in Islam. Among the many legacies he left for future Salafi-Jihadists, his justification of jihad against both external and internal opponents of Islam ranks high. As Benjamin and Simon point out, this elevation of jihad “planted a seed of revolutionary violence in the heart of Islamic thought.”56 The particular Salafi interpretation of tawhid, the unity of God, also goes back to ibn Taymiyyah. For him, tawhid represented more than simply the unity of God. Tawhid stood for the unity of worship, which entailed that God only was to be worshipped and obeyed. Abiding by human-made laws was an act of apostasy, because it was tantamount to the worship of someone other than God. Ibn Taymiyyah also applied the concept of jahiliyya to modern times. Jahiliyya is the term that refers to the state of ignorance, disorder, and paganism that existed prior to the arrival of Islam. Ibn Taymiyyah argued that Muslims who strayed from the path of Islam and who do not abide by God’s laws were jahilis. Specifically, he declared the king of the Mongols to be jahili because of his refusal to implement Sharia law. The next major theorist of Salafism was Muhammad ibn Abd-el Wahhab (1703-1792), an Arab theologian born in the Najd region of modern-day Saudi Arabia. Abd-el Wahhab, who wasdrawn to the works of ibn Taymiyya, preached a puritanical version of Islam that would abide closely by the traditional sources of Islam—the Quran and the hadith. He resisted all forms of folk practices as dangerous innovation (bida) to Islam, and firmly opposed any form of veneration of saints as a breach of the principle of tawhid. As a result, under his leadership the ikhwan, as his followers were called, vandalized many Islamic shrines. (The Arabic name of the Muslim Brotherhood, al ikhwan al-muslimun, is derived from that name.) Abd-el Wahhab’s most relevant work for radical Islamists was a small book titled The Ten Voiders of Islam where he described ten things that would automatically lead to the expulsion of Muslims from their religion. One of these is the support of non-believers against Muslims, which is apostasy, a point that has frequently been cited by Al Qaeda to justify its opposition to Muslim regimes in the Middle East, including the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia beginning in 1990/91. In the late 19th and early 20th century, at a time in which Islam was in decline, as we have seen, Salafism re-emerged most strongly in India and Egypt, and for good reason, these were two countries with large Muslim populations who were among the first to feel the impact of modern Western culture and power. Understandably, the intellectual discussion during that time revolved around how to reconcile Islam with modernity and the advent of Western ideas and institutions. (Benjamin and Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, 55.)

In Egypt, this debate, and the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924, paved the way for the establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood four years later by an Egyptian teacher,the in our above case study discussed  Hassan al-Banna. The Muslim Brotherhood’s goal was the revival of Islam by creating an Islamic system that would be incompatible with the West and its institution, as reflected in its credo: “God is our objective; the Quran is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; Struggle is our way; and Death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.”Meanwhile, in India, Western colonialism increasingly met with an Islamic reaction after the mid-19th century. The reaction was based in the dar ul-ulum (Realm of Learning), an institution of Islamic learning second in stature only to Egypt’s al-Azhar. As seen above, established 1867 in Deoband, in the Indian Uttar Pradesh province, dar ul-ulum became the “wellspring of South Asian Islamic orthodoxy” whose alumni and followers, known as Deobandis until today,propagate Salafi tenets of Islam. One of the products of Indian Wahhabism was Abu al-Ala Maududi, a journalist bent on purifying Muslim society of Western influence and corrupt Muslim traditions alike. In 1941, he founded Jamaat i-Islami, a Salafi party that eventually became the dominant religious party in Pakistan, where Maududi moved in 1947. Maududi picked up ibn Taymiyyah’s jahiliyya theory and went a step further. While ibn Taymiyyah limited his charge of jahiliyya mostly to the Mongols, Maududi suggested that most Muslim rules had veered off the original doctrines of Islam, and were thus apostates. By crafting their own, man-made laws, Maududi charged that these Muslims had usurped the authority reserved for God alone through hubris. He accused all governments in Muslim countries that refused to abide by Sharia as apostate (ridda), and called upon the true believers to wage jihad against them. Few thinkers were as crucial for the development of Salafi-Jihadism as the in our above case study mentioned Egyptian Sayyed Qutb, who combined Maududi’s beliefs of ‘modern jahiliyya,’ Taymiyyah’s propagation of the need to wage jihad against apostates, and the notion of tawhid as unity of worship. Qutb influenced many Afghan Arabs, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, and his book Milestones, which was published in 1964, became a manifesto of sorts for the global Salafi jihad.  Qutb’s arguments were in line with traditional Salafism, but went further than any of the other theologians in calling upon true Muslims to engage in violent jihad as a method to create the genuine Muslim state, including against their own regimes. This posed a problem of fitna, however, Muslim internecine fighting, which required Qutb to justify the use of violence against Muslims. To bypass the problem of fitna, Qutb argued that righteous Muslims were fighting not other Muslims, but instead infidels. Qutb wrote that what stood in the way of mere dawa, the peaceful spread of Islam, were illegitimate and oppressive regimes like those in Egypt under Nasser. These regimes, he said, prevented their Muslim citizens from freely choosing Islam, and were thus heretical. Qutb referred to the Nasserite regime, and almost all other governments, for that matter, as jahili regimes, tantamount to a morally corrupt entity. Da’wa by itself, he argued, could not bring about God’s rule on earth because the jahili regimes would not give up their power. Hence, to remove this obstacle, a Muslim vanguard movement was needed that would engage in jihad by the sword (jihad bis sayf). Qutb also inherited from ibn Taymiyya a deep anti-Semitism, which he passed on to modern day Salafi-Jihadists as well. Qutb wrote that anybody who led the Islamic community astray could only be a Jewish agent. To him, the Jews were the epitome of all that is un-Islamic, and he portrayed them as the archenemy of Islam who longed for that religion’s destruction. (Benjamin and Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror , 66-68.) Qutb’s influence on Al Qaeda is particularly striking in the writings of Ayman al-Zawahiri. In his book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, Al Qaeda’s deputy leader credits Qutb with being the catalyst of the Islamic revolution. Qutb’s “call for loyalty to God’s oneness and to acknowledge God’s sole authority and sovereignty was the spark that ignited the Islamic revolution against the enemies of Islam at home and abroad,” Zawahiri writes. The Al Qaeda deputy leader greatly admires Qutb as “an example of sincerety and adherence to justice. He spoke justice in the face of the tyrant [Gamal abd-el-Nasser] and paid his life as a price for this.The value of his words increased when he refused to ask for pardon from [Nasser].” (Al-Zawahiri, Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, Part III. In FBIS-NES-2001-1202.)

Among the most influential disciples of Qutb was Muhammad abd al-Salam Faraj (1954-1982), who led the Cairo branch of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and authored one of the most important books for the jihad movement, The Neglected Duty. Like Taymiyya, Faraj viewed jihad as central in Islam. Jihad was the “neglected duty,” and should be placed alongside the other pillars of the faith. Faraj echoed Qutb’s belief that the strategy of using da’wa was useless because mass communication was controlled by the state, which in turn was run by apostates who deserved death. He concluded that rather than waiting for the defeat of imperialism, the ‘far enemy,’ Muslims should focus on overthrowing their own apostate governments first. Faraj made local rulers responsible for the existence of imperialism in Muslim lands, but thought that fighting the imperialists directly was a waste of time. Instead, he argued, We must concentrate on our own Islamic situation: we have to establish the rule of God’s Religion in our own country first, and to make the Word of God supreme…. There is no doubt that the first battlefield for jihad is the extermination of these infidel leaders and to replace them by a complete Islamic Order. From here we should start.” (Mohammed Abd-al-Salam Faraj, The Neglected Duty. Quoted in Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks , 15.)

The attacks of September 11, 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 individuals, were a strategic success for the group, but Al Qaeda was unable to rest on its laurels for long, given the swiftness and magnitude of the American response that followed under the framework of the ‘global war on terrorism’ declared by the United States. Its first stage was Operation Enduring Freedom, which consisted of an attack on Afghanistan by a U.S.-led alliance that aimed to destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime, which had provided a safe haven to bin Laden and his cohorts during the previous five years. From Al Qaeda’s standpoint, the situation immediately following 9/11 looked bleak. In the first year and a half, Al Qaeda had lost up to 75 % of its original members and had lost its infrastructure of training camps to other groups. The loss of its operational bases severely disrupted the group’s command and control capabilities. Cells affiliated with Al Qaeda were rounded up in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and successes were made in disrupting terrorist financing and in foiling a number of terrorist plots. The plots included a plan disrupted in late 2001 to attack several embassies and other targets in Singapore using simultaneous truck bombs, and the planned suicide boat attack in May 2002 against U.S. and British warships in the Straits of Gibraltar. See "Interrogation of Suspect Reveals New Details of Singapore Plot," International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, 19 December 2002; and Burke, Al- Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, 264.

As a result of these initial successes, a number of intelligence analysts and officials of the Bush administration believed that the United States was winning the war against Al Qaeda. (See, for example, Dana Priest and Susan Schmidt, "Al Qaeda's Top Primed to Collapse, U.S. Says,"Washington Post, 16 March 2003, A1.)  Others were more cautious and warned of the dispersal of jihadists into a global movement. But what might have helped make jihad a concept accepted on a global level was the adoption by more and more Muslims of the view that jihad is a religious duty designed to fend off a perceived global conspiracy against Islam. It also resulted from a growing acceptance by Muslims of the notion of the non-territorial Islamic state, itself an outcome of a more intense global interaction of different Muslim communities that helps strengthen the perception that Muslims are under threat. “The globalization of the reaction to this threat, has led to the doctrine of a global Jihad.” (Reuven Paz, "Global Jihad and the European Arena,"paper presented at the International Conference on Intelligence and Terrorism, Priverno, Italy, 15-18 May 2002) Most likely even before Operation Enduring Freedom, Al Qaeda, which could hardly have been surprised by the U.S. reaction to the attacks on the American homeland, began to plan the dispersal of its fighters to the Afghan countryside, Pakistan, Central Asia, and their various home countries. In Pakistan, many Al Qaeda figures would remain in the mountainous region near the Afghan border, or would abscond in the larger cities like Karachi and Rawalpindi, where some key Al Qaeda figures, such as KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh, would be arrested in subsequent years. Other Al Qaeda leaders fled to Iran, aided most likely by the Revolutionary Guards. (Josh Meyer, "Some U.S. Officials Fear Iran Is Helping Al Qaeda," Los Angeles Times, 21 March 2006.)

Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s bin Laden unit, adds that Al Qaeda used its ties to Pashtun tribes and to Afghan heroin smuggling networks for its dispersal. It was also assisted by members of Pakistan’s bureaucracy and Islamists in Pakistan’s army and security services, Islamic NGOs, as well as insurgent and terrorist groups in Kashmir such as Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Taybeh, and Hizb-ul Mujahideen. (Anonymous, Imperial Hubris , 64-65. See also David Rhode and James Risen, "A Hostile Land Foils the Quest for Bin Laden," 13 December 2004, 1. In forming the global jihad movement over the next years, jihadists benefited from and exploited the links they had made while undergoing training in Afghanistan or subsequent ‘holy wars’ fought in places like Bosnia and Chechnya. (See, for example, Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network, New York: Berg, 2004).

These common experiences and bonds enabled the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and experience. Thanks to shared funding, training, and logistics, as well as the benefits of globalization, notably a greater ease of travel and access to modern technologies and communication systems such as the internet, jihadists would now be able to form a dedicated and empowered brotherhood that was truly global in nature and aspiration. As Al Qaeda members and insurgents dispersed in late 2001, bin Laden reportedly gave money to jihadists with workable plans to attack U.S. and other Western targets of interest. One jihadist, Mohammed al-Tubaiti, reportedly received $5,000 from a bin Laden lieutenant. With the money, he planned to dispatch a cell to organize a suicide boat attack against U.S. and British warships in the Straits of Gibraltar. The attack was to occur in May 2002, but never took place. According to Burke, the SA on a synagogue in the Tunisian island of Djerba described in the previous chapter had also originated in Afghanistan during the last days of fighting in the fall of 2001.The bomber, Nizar Nawar, apparently received money and was sent off to perpetrate an attack while the Taliban collapsed. Several SAs that took place in Saudi Arabia between 2002 and 2004 were similarly perpetrated by jihadists who were directed by ‘Saudi Afghans.’(Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, 264.)

Saif al-Adel, one of the top lieutenants of Al Qaeda, confirmed the group’s post-9/11 strategy to scatter and broaden the front of attacks against infidels and apostates. “Our plan was to spread in the territory and open new and several battlefronts with the Americans to disperse their forces and deny them the chance to focus on one region,” he told journalist Fuad Husayn. The dispersal was “very important for the project to survive…,” he continued. “The young men who spread all over the world would open new battlefields with the Americans, polytheists, and hypocrites.” (Robert Windrem, "The Frightening Evolution of Al-Qaida," MSNBC.com, 24 June 2005.) In November 2002, while Al Qaeda continued to suffer the loss of key leaders, the group was reported to have convened a strategic summit in northern Iran. At the summit, the shura majlis was said to have decided that it could no longer act as a hierarchy. According to Spanish counterterrorism judge Baltasar Garzon, the summit was held without bin Laden present, but with many of the top leaders attending. The discussion was led by Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, also known as Abu Musab al-Suri, a key strategist whose impact on global jihad will be discussed later. Al-Suri suggested that Al Qaida was no longer capable to survive as a hierarchical organization, and would need to transform into a network, with operations spread out over the entire globe, carried in large part by individuals, rather than organizations.. Suri apparently referred to the February 23, 1998, fatwa for inspiration, given its emphasis on individual activity, rather than organizational responsibility to act. In retrospect, Al Qaeda’s decision in late 2001 to disperse its members and fighters and to decentralize its operations, formalized in the meeting of the shura majlis in Iran in late 2002, guaranteed the group’s survival in the face of massive military pursuit by the United States and its allies. Al Qaeda’s diffusion, of course, did not originate out of nowhere. It was the logical consequence of its deliberate attempt to breed a network of affiliated fighters, cells, and organizations long before September 11, 2001, as was described earlier. Since its years in the Sudan, the group had been primus inter pares in a network of affiliated and like-minded groups eager to wage jihad in places where Muslims were deemed to be threatened, oppressed, or besieged. It is therefore incorrect to assume that September 11 transformed Al Qaeda from an organization into a network, Al Qaeda had been the leading part of a network at least since 1992. The real change that Al Qaeda was forced to undergo after September 11 was its transformation from a mostly operational leader of an international terrorist network to becoming a mostly inspirational leader of a global network.

As a result of these transformations, and given Al Qaeda’s loss of a safe haven and operational command post, the aftermath of 9/11 witnessed the relative increase in attacks planned and executed by Al Qaeda affiliates, when compared to the period before 9/11. Even after 9/11, many attacks by Al Qaeda affiliates were planned with financial, operational, or material support of the remaining leadership of Al Qaeda, now often referred to as ‘Al Qaeda Central’ or the ‘Al Qaeda Core.’ The extent of this support, however, was and remains different from case to case, as is the extent of the affiliate’s support by Al Qaeda.One factor that worked in Al Qaeda’s favor is that the aftermath of 9/11 did not alter the fact that individuals who had trained in camps in Afghanistan were present in a multitude of countries in the world. In many cases, these fighters, who were affiliated with Al Qaeda, had been present in these regions before 9/11, including in Africa (Somalia, Kenya), South East Asia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Central Asia, Western Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Training camps would soon re-emerge first in Central Asia, then spread to Asia, South East Asia, the Far East, and Africa. Now that the center of gravity of Al Qaeda shifted increasingly to its affiliates, Al Qaeda suddenly appeared not only as highly robust, but also as a truly global network of terrorists and insurgents, whose members were able to strike in such distant places as Aceh, Chechnya, Indonesia, Iraq, Kashmir, Kenya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. In sum, Al Qaeda’s forced reliance on local groups, brought about by the pressures exerted on the group after September 11, helped render the group more resilient. As Bruce Hoffman put it a year after the most deadly terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland, “Al Qaeda has, in fact, proved to be remarkably nimble and adaptive—and the group’s strength derives precisely from this flexibility.” (Hoffman, “The Leadership Secrets of Osama Bin Laden: The Terrorist as Ceo,” Atlantic Monthly,April 2003, 26.)

 

The Global Jihad Movement After 2003

During the course of 2003, U.S. officials began acknowledging that Al Qaeda had survived the onslaught of the United States and was a reinvigorated entity, with bases of operations established in places like Kenya, Sudan, Pakistan, and Chechnya. By 2004, the optimism reflected in the statements of American officials shortly after 9/11 appeared to have vanished almost entirely. Reports that Al Qaeda had suffered a death blow as a result of Operation Enduring Freedom and the war in Iraq, which began in March 2003, were overturned. More importantly, perhaps, was the admission, based in part on evidence gathered after the arrest of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, an Al Qaeda computer engineer, that Al Qaeda’s senior command structure may not have taken as strong a hit as had long been assumed. Officials now believed that Al Qaeda had retained some of its previous command and communications structure. (David Johnston and David E. Sanger, "New Leaders Are Emerging for Al Qaeda," New York Times, 10 August 2004, A1).

Experts credited this resiliency on Al Qaeda’s ability to continue to recruit, mobilize, and animate actual and potential fighters, supporters and sympathizers. Jessica Stern, for example, attributed Al Qaeda’s survivability to its “protean nature,” which involved the group’s adoption of tactics of “leaderless resistance” used prominently by right-wing American extremists in order to evade law enforcement agencies. (Stern, "The Protean Enemy," Foreign Affairs 82, no. 4 (July/August 2003). Popularized by Louis Beam of the Aryan Nations, Beam warned that hierarchical organizations endangered the survival of insurgencies. Instead, he suggested, individuals and groups should operate independently of one another, and avoid reporting to a central headquarters or single leader for directions.Bruce Hoffman likened Al Qaeda memorably to the archetypal “shark in the water, having to constantly move forward, albeit changing direction slightly, in order to survive.” (Hoffman, "Al Qaeda, Trends in Terrorism, and Future Potentialities: An Assessment," 435.)

In late 2003 and 2004, a growing number of analysts and members of the U.S. intelligence community began to describe the main threat to the United States as emanating from a global jihad movement rather than from a single organization or network. A task force chaired by Richard Clarke, for example, defined the threat against America as a “Jihadist threat,” which it described as a “revivified radical and violent minority Islamist movement that has taken on greater international dimensions in the twenty-first century than it has previously in history.” (Clarke et al., Defeating the Jihadists, 9.) Others went as far as arguing that Al Qaeda has, for all purposes, ceased to be an organization, and was now better understood as a movement. (Jason Burke, "Think Again: Al Qaeda " Foreign Policy May/June 2004.)

In a testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence made in February 2004, then-Director of National Intelligence (DCI) George Tenet warned of “a movement infected by al-Qaeda’s radical agenda…” He added that “successive blows to al-Qaeda’s central leadership have transformed the organization into a loose collection of regional networks that operate more autonomously.” (Challenges in a Changing Global Context. Testimony of Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 24 February 2004.) The next wave of the terrorist threat, he said, came from dozens of groups within the movement influenced by Al Qaeda. The movement consists of “smaller international Sunni extremist groups who have benefited from al-Qa’ida links,” such as the Zarqawi network, Ansar al-Islam, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. A second level of threats was posed by “small local groups, with limited domestic agendas, that work with international terrorist groups in their own countries…” These small local groups have an autonomous leadership, pick their own targets, and plan their own attacks. Beyond these groups, Tenet said, were the so-called ‘foreign jihadists.’ Tenet described these foreign jihadists as Muslims who are ready to fight anywhere where they perceive that Muslim lands are under attack by ‘infidel invaders.’ The foreign jihadists draw on broad support networks, have wide appeal, and enjoy a growing sense of support from Muslims are not necessarily supporters of terrorism, Tenet said, and see Iraq as “a golden opportunity.”Tenet’s testimony pointed at a highly complex composition of the radical jihadist threat to the United States, and appeared to support the notion of Al Qaeda being the “vanguard of a violent Muslim revivalist social movement,” as Marc Sageman put it before the 9/11 Commission, rather than equivalent to a movement itself. Nearly two years after George Tenet’s testimony, in February 2006, it was the turn of John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), to address the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on the terrorist threat. Much had happened in the two years since Tenet presented his conclusions to the same committee. On March 11, 2004, 191 people were killed and some 1,700 wounded when ten backpack bombs exploded on four commuter trains as they approached Madrid at the height of the morning rush hour. On July 5, 2005, four British Muslims detonated themselves in Underground trains and on the deck of a double-decker bus, killing 52 people and wounding 700. In November 2005, three Iraqis, including one woman, bombed three hotels in Amman, killing some 60 people and injuring twice as many. In many of these cases, the perpetrators were not known as members of Al Qaeda, and while they may have trained in jihadist training camps, this training appears to have occurred after these cells had radicalized themselves in small groups. DNI Negroponte’s testimony took account of the constantly changing threat of Jihadist terrorism. Some analysts saw the Madrid bombings, as well as suicide attacks against Shiite targets in Iraq as manifestations of Al Qaeda’s new “acephalous structure.” They also cited increased cooperation among more diverse groups, and the increased targeting of U.S. interests by groups that traditionally had a more local agenda. (See, for example, Scott Atran, "The 'Virtual Hand' of Jihad," Terrorism Monitor 3, no. 10, 19 May 2005).

Negroponte described the threat as the global Jihad movement which, the intelligence community believed, consisted of three different types of groups and individuals: The first constituent part of the global Jihad movement is Al Qaeda, “a battered but resourceful organization.” Secondly, the movement consists of other Sunni jihadist groups, some of whom are affiliated, and some that are not. All of them, however, are allied with or inspired by Al Qaeda’s global anti-Western agenda. Negroponte added that these groups posed less of a danger to the U.S. homeland than Al Qaeda, but they posed a growing threat to U.S allies and U.S. interests abroad. Further, these Sunni jihadist groups persisted in their attempts “to expand their reach and capabilities to conduct multiple and/or mass casualty attacks outside their traditional areas of operation.”101 Thirdly, the global jihad movement consisted of networks and cells that are the “self-generating progeny of al-Qaida” The DNI went on to describe the origin, nature, and threat posed by these networks and cells: Emerging new networks and cells… reflect aggressive jihadist efforts to exploit feelings of frustration and powerlessness in some Muslim communities, and to fuel the perception that the US is anti-Islamic… This has led to the emergence of a decentralized and diffused movement, with minimal centralized guidance or control and numerous individuals and cells—like those who conducted the May 2003 bombing in Morocco, the March 2004 bombings in Spain, and the July 2005 bombings in the UK. Members of these groups have drawn inspiration from al-Qaida but appear to operate on their own. Such unaffiliated individuals, groups and cells represent a different threat than that of a defined organization. They are harder to spot and represent a serious intelligence challenge. (John D. Negroponte, to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 2 February 2006.)

 

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