My brilliant friend and countryman Jacob Høigilt has just written an absolutely fascinating report on Islamism and Education in the Palestinian Territories. It’s fieldwork-based, rich and nuanced, and it undermines widespread assumptions about the link between Islamic education and militancy. While I am at it, I might as well mention my own completely unrelated CTC paper on the Failure of Jihad in Saudi Arabia.
As regular readers of jihadi literature know, the RAND Corporation is no friend of al-Qa‘ida. Supporters of the latter have a tendency to blame RAND for trying to destroy them and the rest of the world’s Muslims into the bargain. Although RAND is not alone in being perceived by jihadis as an almost conspiratorial observer of every move the jihadis make (West Point’s Counter Terrorism Center, as long-time readers of Jihadica know all too well, is another), it is probably the one that gets criticised most. (If you were not aware of this, see Jarret Brachman’s excellent post on this subject.) Recently, however, one Nur al-Islam posed a question relating to RAND that I had not seen before: Is there a connection between the RAND Corporation and extremists of takfir? Takfir and takfiris Takfir, as many readers will know, is the practice of excommunication, i.e. of declaring another Muslim to
Many Jihadica readers probably follow the academic journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, but I still want to highlight a couple of new articles that I found especially interesting: The Internet in Indonesia: Development and Impact of Radical Websites – Jennifer Yang Hui Jihadi Operational Art: The Coming Wave of Jihadi Strategic Studies – Dima Adamsky
There is a new blog in town: On War and Words. It is produced by military historian Mark Stout, who is probably best known to our readers as the lead author of the Terrorism Perspectives Project (the most comprehensive treatment available of the genre “jihadi strategic studies”). I am very excited that he has decided to blog. Do not be fooled by his understated autobiography – this man really knows a lot about jihadism and an insane number of other subjects.
I’d like to draw our readers’ attention to several interesting new academic publications have come out in the past few weeks: Nelly Lahoud – In Search of Philosopher-Jihadis: Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi’s Jihadi Philosophy A Aaron Weisburd – Comparison of Visual Motifs in Jihadi and Cholo Videos on YouTube Stig Jarle Hansen and Atle Mesøy – The Muslim Brotherhood in the Wider Horn of Africa Although not central to the Jihadica portfolio, I also strongly recommend the following indispensable contributions to the AfPak debate. Marc Sageman – Confronting al-Qaeda: Understanding the Threat in Afghanistan Nir Rosen – Something from Nothing Yours truly also has a new article out, entitled Jihad, Yes, But Not Revolution: Explaining the Extraversion of Islamist Violence in Saudi Arabia
I have some good news and some bad news for you. The bad news is that I will have to stop blogging for a while, due to a combination of personal and professional reasons. From the end of this month till some time next spring, I will be posting very infrequently, although I will be working behind the scenes as editor. The good news is that I have recruited a very exciting team of guest bloggers who will be writing for Jihadica a month or two at the time throughout this coming academic year. I won’t reveal the whole list, but I can say that they are all established and brilliant academics who have been working on jihadism and Islamism for many years. I chose them because I admire their work. The first one out is Jean-Pierre Filiu (see also here) a professor at Sciences-Po Paris and a leading French
Just a quick note to say that there is a new article on the idelogy of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi in the latest issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. The author is of course Joas Wagemakers, the world’s leading Maqdisi expert and an occasional Jihadica commentator. While I am at it, I should mention that Wagemakers published two other excellent articles on related topics last year, one on al-Maqdisi’s Qur’an interpretation and another on al-wala wa’l-bara in Salafi discourse. For more relevant academic articles, see the indispensible overview of current contents of periodicals on the Middle East by the GLORIA Center in Herzlia, Israel. On the current affairs side of things, there are two new articles on the Bin Nayif operation. Greg Johnsen of Waq al-Waq has an excellent piece in the National which gives you the big picture of the operation. Then there is a great analysis
Conference season has begun, and there is an unusually high number of jihad-related academic meetings taking place this autumn. To give you an idea of what people in our field are working on at the moment, I figured I should give you an overview of the main ones that have come to my attention. 3-6 September: The American Political Science Association Annual Meeting began yesterday in Toronto and will go on all weekend. There are a number of panels and papers on jihadism and Islamism; just search for jihad or Islam in the online program. 4-6 September: This weekend there is also a three-day conference on “Islamic Resurgence in the Age of Globalization:Myth, Memory, Emotion” in Trondheim, Norway. The conference is co-sponsored by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Haifa University (Israel), and Aarhus University (Denmark). I was supposed to be there, but I had to cancel in the
The Jihadi Websites Monitoring Group at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzlia, Israel, has produced a very interesting report about WMD discussions on jihadi internet forums (hat tip: Nawaf). I am not surprised that this original work is coming out of Herzlia, for it was Reuven Paz – the pioneer of online jihadism studies – who wrote some of the earliest serious analyses of jihadi intentions regarding WMD. Since then many have made valuable contributions this literature, including Jonathan Spyer , Jerry Long, Andrea Plebani, Sammy Salama and Lydia Hansell, Anne Speckhard, and others. At my own FFI, Anne Stenersen and others have also conducted in-depth studies on this. (In the most fascinating of these, Anne collaborated with FFI scientists to objectively assess the quality and effectiveness of the many WMD recipes and instruction manuals circulating on the forums, but this report is unfortunately exempt from public disclosure, for
The International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence led by the indefatigable Peter Neumann at King’s College London has launched a new blog called FREErad!cals. It has a very impressive team of contributors consisting of leading scholars and experienced bloggers, including Neumann himself, Ubiwar blogger Tim Stevens, deradicalisation specialist Omar Ashour, Lashar-e-Tayyiba expert Stephen Tankel, Central Asia and ideology specialist Jeni Mitchell, famous Israel scholar Ahron Bregman, Sciences-Po alumna Alex Matine and the mysterious Amm Sam. If you are reading Jihadica you are probably already familiar with ICSR, but if not, you should definitely check out their website and publications. ICSR is a multinational, multilateral initiative at the forefront of the field of terrorism and radicalisation studies. Although the name takes forever to type, FREErad!cals is a great addition the blogosphere and I look forward to learning from it the months and years to come.
