bhatt (2014) - the virtues of violence: the salafi-jihadi political universe

Theory, Culture & Society

2014, Vol 31(1) 25–48

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DOI: 10.1177/0263276413500079

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Article

The Virtues of Violence:The Salafi-Jihadi PoliticalUniverse

Chetan BhattLondon School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Abstract

The article examines some recent areas of Al Qaeda and salafi-jihadi ideology and

argues that, while there has been an evolution in strategy since 9/11, the core

elements of salafi-jihadi ideology have remained unchanged. The article explores

ideological, technical and aesthetic aspects of Al Qaeda and salafi-jihadi literature.

It is argued that salafi-jihadi ideology is characterized by a particular association

between political virtue and visceral violence, an association that dominates the

aesthetic and cultural universe created by salafi-jihadis. Existing views that salafi-

jihadi thought represents an ethical project or a project for humanity or a response

to military occupations are, it is argued, consequences of a broader philosophical and

social theory tradition that privileges a specifically theological idea of sacrifice.

Instead, it is argued that salafi-jihadi ideology is characterized by an array of sharp

oppositions. These contrasting doublets of ideas include ones about the temporal

world and the afterlife, authoritarian law and violent chaos, loyalty and enmity, defile-

ment and plenitude, tangible lands and imagined spaces. These severe theoretical

oppositions in salafi-jihadi thinking are outlined and considered in relation to broader

social theory. The article also considers the sociological importance of ideas of

Paradise and the afterlife in salafi-jihadi thought. The distinct nature of salafi-jihadi

thought, and the understanding of political violence it contains, are considered in

relation to nationalist jihadi and political Islamist tendencies.

Keywords

Al Qaeda, political violence, sacrifice, salafi-jihadi, virtue

Introduction

The aftermath of the decade that separates 9/11 from the assassination ofOsama Bin Laden remains dominated by several violent conflicts. Much

Corresponding author:

Chetan Bhatt, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A

2AE, UK.

Email: [email protected]

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of Al Qaeda’s1 older leadership in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen hasbeen killed. At the same time, there has been the rise of a range of small,highly sectarian salafi-jihadi militia in the aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring’,including in northern Mali. In Syria, the direction of the tracks of thesalafi-jihadi corridors into Iraq was reversed and Al Qaeda’s ally becamean unwelcome military force among others opposing the Assad dictator-ship. Following the death of Bin Laden, some elements of Al Qaedacalled for a concerted focus on Syria and Yemen, the forcible ‘expulsion’of minorities, indiscriminate sectarian killings, a change in its name, andthe development of broader military alliances, such as those exemplifiedby the Nusra Front in Syria and the Ansar as-Sharia in Yemen, Tunisiaand Libya (bin Muhammad, 2011; al-Adam 2012). The aim of thesemilitia is not to oppose an external military intervention but is insteadto re-ignite Al Qaeda’s original vision of establishing the nucleus ofGod’s Caliphate on earth, a task which only the Taliban regime inAfghanistan prior to 9/11 had most been successful in fulfilling sincethe medieval period (bin Muhammad, 2011.) This original salafi-jihadivision is important and remains fully intact despite over a decade of warsand invasions. This vision contains an overwhelming emphasis on polit-ical violence against formal civilians.

A common approach to salafi-jihadi political thought seeks to explainit through largely exogenous factors, primarily ‘anti-imperialism’, orresistance to oppression or illegitimate occupation (Pape, 2005;Honderich, 2006). Others similarly place Al Qaeda’s ideas2 and actions,especially ones related to suicide bombing and the killing of civilians,within a theoretical understanding of ‘sacrifice’ and global humanity(Devji, 2008; c.f. Honderich, 2006). This article is a critical rejection ofthese ideas, ones which are symptomatic of an implicit characterizationby some on the political left of Al Qaeda and salafi-jihadi ideology ascontemporary examples of anti-western anti-imperialism. Such a charac-terization is plausible if the massive opposition to salafi-jihadis in theMiddle East, north Africa and south Asia is evaded, as is salafi-jihadithinking about visceral violence, death and the killing of civilians. Somesalafi-jihadis demonstrate a commitment to ‘the visceral’ to such adegree, and with such aesthetic force, that it is difficult to find a suitablecomparison.

This article presents a different series of arguments about the contentof Al Qaeda’s more recent ideas related to violence and wars and aboutthe nature of its relationship to political modernity. It is argued that, insalafi-jihadi ideology, politics and violence are presented as co-extensiveand in an immediate relation with each other, but are articulated in a waythat forwards a different preoccupation with visceral violence and death.Salafi-jihadi ideology exhibits important aesthetic and philosophicaldimensions through which an association between virtue, political vio-lence, aesthetics and killing is figured. In particular, it is argued in the

26 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)



latter part of this article that this powerful association cannot be redactedto theoretical arguments about ‘sacrifice’ as a constitutive feature ofmodern politics, nor can Al Qaeda’s ideas and actions be pounded intoan ethical shape if ethics is to have any meaning.

Because the argument is complex, some areas are briefly outlined inthis introduction and expanded upon later. It is argued that salafi-jihadipolitical ideology is one response to the question: what field of modernpolitics becomes thinkable and then possible when moral excellence isidentified with martial virtue? Virtue in its Latin form (virtus) invokes‘moral excellence’ (as it does in the Arabic fadaa’il). However, thisRoman conception of virtue is linked to a violent, masculine idealderived from arete, an attribute of the mythic Greek god of war, Ares.The cognate Sanskrit word, vir, similarly invokes masculine heroism in away that makes it coextensive with martial violence. This older history ofvirtue is about the virtue of violence, a theme that also animates salafi-jihadi ideology. ‘Virtue’ is present in salafi-jihadi political thought in apure form. However, the mobilization of ‘virtue’ is a key sociologicalfeature of much modern politics despite the seeming triumph of deonto-logical political forms as characteristic of modern politics and govern-ance. A politics of virtue is the ‘hazardous’ supplement to the ‘empty’,rule-based politics that is advocated in deontological foundationalism.Therefore, acknowledging the importance of ideas of virtue in mostmodern political forms also situates salafi-jihadi ideology as a modernpolitical venture, though one that unusually apprehends every temporalspace as a state of exception (Schmitt, 2005). As with traditional virtueethics, one conception of virtue in salafi-jihadi writings relates to desir-able politics as grounded in the ‘character of character’, with the qualityof character defined pithily in terms of righteousness, strength of piety,knowledge (ibn Abdil-Aziz, n.d.) and in the language of honour, strongmindedness and charismatic devoutness. These are attributes of theauthentic leader (amir, sheikh) that one is obliged to obey. The aestheticadjudication of the character of a leader that one might give oneself upfor trumps any genuinely moral or ethical deed they might perform.

It is a further aim of this article to demonstrate that salafi-jihadi ideol-ogy generates as its logical consequence several severely clashing ideasthat are viciously regressive and which determine the limited repertoire ofsalafi-jihadi political action. Perhaps the most important of these ideas isthe definitive opposition between unlimited destructive chaos and tota-lizing order, somewhat like a constitutive tension between anarchism andfascism that emerges in a different way in salafi-jihadi thought. It isargued that salafi-jihadis have generated not only a system of ideas butan aesthetic and ‘cultural’ universe of meaning through which theirappeals are made, a ‘universe’ comprised of a massive and diversevolume of auditory, textual and visual products (artefact, image, songand video) in numerous ‘classical’ and demotic forms. Little scholarly

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attention has focused on the dense aesthetic universe created byAl Qaeda and associated salafi-jihadi groups (Devji, 2005). This ‘uni-verse’ will continue to appeal to various regional groups long after BinLaden’s organization is a memory. A visual example is used later to drawout three main salafi-jihadi political visions of destruction, regional con-flict and planetary law.

The appeal of salafi-jihadi political aesthetics is avowedly based oncultivating a highly demarcated repository of emotions. If aesthetics andemotions are imbricated in each other, then they also provide a way ofunderstanding how certain ideas capture us, and how in the face of anaesthetically-charged idea that generates an affective response within me,I make that idea a part of myself such that it becomes for me an elementof how I desire to reflexively apprehend my identity at the moment that Iarticulate my identity to others. Of exceptional aesthetic and emotionalimportance in salafi-jihadi writings is ‘Paradise’. Paradisology has animportant sociological purpose in salafi-jihadi ideology. For commenta-tors from the political right, the attention given by salafi-jihadis to ‘therewards of Paradise’ exemplifies irrationality or political insanity. Forwriters from the political left, the substantive ideological content about‘Paradise’ is evaded or rendered epiphenomenal to social and politicaldeterminants – typically, salafi-jihadi ideology is seen solely as a responseto wars and occupations. The argument below distances from both per-spectives, but nevertheless focuses attention on aspects of salafi-jihadiparadisology. ‘Coveting Paradise’ is an overwhelming theme in salafi-jihadi literature and it is there for reasons that deserve sociologicalconsideration.

The focus below is on a range of salafi-jihadi ideological and ‘tech-nical’ material obtained over more than a decade.3 This material com-prises a very large and dispersed salafi-jihadi online corpus of ideologicalwritings, technical and military instructions, creedal debates, and aes-thetic artefacts. Many writers argue that salafi-jihadi ideological writingsare essentially anti-theological and dominated by a narrow and impov-erished version of creedal thinking (Roy, 2004) and a dogmatic approachto what salafis refer to as their ‘methodology’ (manhaj). It is thereforenecessary to distinguish theology from creed (Halverson, 2010). Salafi-jihadi renditions of war, violence, death and Paradise bear little relationto discussions that have occupied theological considerations of violence,death and the afterlife in customary Muslim philosophical traditions(Smith and Haddad, 2002). As others have pointed out, the writings ofAbdullah Azzam about ‘the defence of Muslim lands’ have created afirmament for salafi-jihadi discussions of war and violence. Manysalafi-jihadi treatments of war are also based on a war treatise writtenby Ibn an-Nahhas, an early 15th-century cleric from Damascus (al-Dumyati, n.d.). An-Nahhas based his text on the work of the major13th- and 14th-century cleric Ibn Taymiyyah. This lineage is important




because key medieval texts about war were written about from the 1980sby those who became salafi-jihadis. In this process, they became inter-polated with contemporary concerns and became new texts that wererewritten by other salafi-jihadi operatives. This process, acceleratingsince 2001, has generated a current of thinking that is so distant fromeven creedal traditions that questions of authenticity become meaning-less. A large field of ‘legal’ opinion is available online and concerns theintricate details of actions one might feel compelled to take in fighting ‘inthe path of God’. There is a very large and consistent library of suchdocuments in English, Arabic, Urdu and other languages. Sociologically,the transmission of salafi-jihadi ideas is para-institutional and cannot begeneralized easily. For example, there is not yet an adequate sociologicaldescription for transnational aterritorial paramilitia that may take insti-tutional form in some countries and, simultaneously, may be virtualelsewhere, or which may comprise small kinship groups in one countrythat are linked with large state-supported militias in another country, butwhich communicate online in encrypted form with another group else-where and may also be relatively open in an online forum operated fromyet another country and by another group.

Setting the World on Fire

During a police raid in May 2000 at the home of Al Qaeda’s Anas al-Liby in Manchester, England, a document was discovered titled ‘MilitaryStudies in Jihad against the Tyrants’. Anas al-Liby was wanted in con-nection with attacks by Al Qaeda (USA v Usama Bin Laden et al.,Indictment, S(9) 98 Cr. 1023 LBS, SDNY, 1998: 2). Both HumanRights Watch and Amnesty International have implied that al-Liby iscurrently a ghost prisoner. (There is indeed a further backstory regardinghis alleged involvement in a much earlier secret services plot to assassin-ate Muammar Gaddafi.)

The purpose of the Manchester document is to instruct its readers intechniques for concealment, surveillance, assassination, and makingexplosives and poisons, including ricin (Anonymous, n.d.). The docu-ment appears occasionally as an exhibit in counter-terrorism trials inthe UK and US. It is regularly referred to as an ‘al-Qaeda manual’. Itis an early example of what now exists as a large and dispersed onlinelibrary of text and video files, regional periodicals, posters and audio filesthat constitute an instructional military and technical sub-genre withinan overall salafi-jihadi corpus. Some of this material is parasitic uponmanuals produced by some western armies, security services and armstraders. The body of salafi-jihadi literature is very wide, without clearboundaries and not by any means internally coherent in ideological orstrategic senses. Its technical materials contain knowledge that traversesmilitary strategy, light arms, surveillance, fitness training, light

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engineering and physics, chemistry and elements of human biology.Instructions on the use of light arms weapons, making explosives(including IEDs) and concocting poisons predominate.

The visual quality of Al Qaeda’s materials has transformed dramatic-ally since its early, gritty State of the Umma video to ones that cancombine high production values, witty editing, narrative coherence, aversion of ‘war reportage’, personal testament, and visually attractive3D animations. Shehzad Tanweer’s ‘martyrdom’ video was precededby a computer animated depiction of Kings Cross station, a tube trainand the fatal explosion of 7 July 2005. The transformation in designquality is also apparent in technical materials and manuals. If theManchester document was handwritten and typed, contemporary tech-nical materials are well-designed, often slick and less reliant on Arabiclanguage instructions. A recently-released ‘course’ for making explosives,aimed at a youthful audience in the UK and North America, depictsnumerous chemical processes for making a variety of substances, includ-ing a ‘fedayeen’ recipe and another for making a suicide jacket in whichthe fuel is an explosive filling and the detonator is impregnated in thesurface cloth (thereby avoiding any detectable components): if the weareris shot or knifed the jacket is intended to explode. Flash movie bomb-making films illustrate, for example, preparing the charge, detonator andfuel, positioning explosives in an open truck and so forth, some withvirtually no written instructions.

If this is a new genre and nothing else quite like it exists, it presents alarge and sophisticated corpus about explosives and munitions, surveil-lance, assassinations and the like. The most recent examples of its evo-lution are the ‘open source jihad’ sections of the Inspire magazinesproduced by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The rationale is signifi-cant: you don’t have to travel to us for training, we will bring the trainingto you; you can make everything yourselves using commonly foundmaterials; you do not need anyone’s permission to undertake operations,you just need to take the first step. A public key for encryption is pro-vided for readers to communicate with Al Qaeda in the Arabian penin-sula using the Asrar al-Muhajideen (‘secrets of the mujahideen’) software.Like a distance-learning course, each issue elaborates in a well-illu-strated, often humorous way various methods by which one might killand maim a large number of formal civilians (only civilians arementioned).

Yet there is substantial ideological continuity between these and theManchester document. The front cover of the Manchester document hasan illustration of the Earth with a sword being violently rammed throughit by an angry fist. While the official (police) translation stated that Africaand the Middle East were prominent in the image, the illustration issimply like the ubiquitous Atlantic-centric image of the globe. There isno geographical specificity concerning the violence enacted: the sword




enters somewhere in Antarctica and emerges somewhere near the NorthPole. No particular enemy country or distressed and beleaguered land isplucked for attention. The Manchester image is not a call to arms againstthe occupation of a particular country or region but represents an alto-gether different political vision: the planet as a whole is the subject ofsuch conclusive violence.

This illustration represents a signal moment when some old ideasslipped back into the contemporary political world, this time throughthe medium of salafi-jihadi ideology. They include the need to violentlydestroy the temporal world so as to delight the God that had taken thetrouble to create that world. The temporal order is to be expunged so asto will into being the desirable afterlife. If the sacred time of revelationmight have ended many centuries ago, salafi-jihadi ideology reinstitutescontemporary time as sacred, a time in which suicide bombing can bewritten about as a cosmic act that harbours not simply a discourse ofresurrection but ‘immortality’. The ‘paradox’ is that this is a consequenceof hadith literalism and dogmatism. This is the stultifying literalist orien-tation, definitive of most self-styled salafi methods, towards selectedelements from early medieval treatises on war, or from war hadith.One consequence of the domination of salafi-jihadi ‘creed’ and ‘method-ology’ over ‘theology’ is the diminution of the Quran and the customaryhadith corpus (Brown, 2009: 256–7; Halverson, 2010).

The will to destroy the planet in the Manchester document is a call totranscend the this-worldly. In this political vision, the world of the livingand the world of the dead are mixed up with each other and both areconsidered necessary for meaningful political action. This arrangementof thought sets in motion a challenging series of logics for secular socialand political theory. Adjacently, because of salafi literalism, the world ofthe dead becomes a legitimate horizon of political possibility againstwhich the world of the living is a preparatory interlude. To borrow anidea from the German conservative revolutionary Ernst Junger, temporalhistory is a hallucination one (‘being’) enters for a time. This living in twoworlds, apprehending this world constantly in reference to the sphere ofthe dead, characterized elements of medieval Christian theology. Buthere this idea emerges in a contemporary political formation thatannounces an intimacy between the two worlds. Their proximity issuch that the distinction that is assumed to be vital in modern politicsbetween the living and the dead, which also conducts other oppositionsbetween living vitality and obsolete history or the inside and the outside,seems to vanish.

This mixing up is not an ‘irreal’ that can be contrasted with actualpolitical actions: Mohammed Siddique Khan, the main organizer of theLondon bombings in July 2007 that killed 52 people, said ‘our words aredead until we give them life with our blood’. If, in those last four words,political life is written with death, this represents a political eschatology

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that is riddled with a range of dualisms that characterize the salafi-jihadiideological universe. There are only two authentic agents of history inthis universe, the ‘scholar’ and the ‘martyr’. As the late ideologue of theAfghan jihad Abdullah Azzam put it, the ‘map of Islamic history’ iscoloured with two lines from the black ink of the scholar and the redblood of the martyr. More beautiful than this, he said, is when ‘the handof the scholar which expends the ink and moves the pen’ is the same asthe ‘hand that expends his blood and moves the nations’ (Azzam, n.d.):

. . . history does not write its lines except with blood. Glory does notbuild its lofty edifice except with skulls. Honour and respect cannotbe established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses.(Azzam, n.d.)

The grandeur of civilizational achievements is absent in this historicalvision. There is no lineage of kings, no people’s history. History here isalso not simply the dead past but a past vitalized by deaths; war is itsmotor force.

If the empirical distinction between life and death is destabilized (byits transformation into a metaphysical idea), then a further argumentcan be made, and some salafi-jihadis do make it, that it is honourableto kill civilians because the people one might have physically killed arenot actually dead and in giving them physical death, they have beengiven ‘the aim of life’. Like the human bomber, they might only experi-ence a ‘gnat’s bite’ or ‘pinprick’ (the feeling of being ‘pinched’ as BinLaden put it in his 1998 declaration of war against America) as they arephysically killed and move into the supra-temporal world. The distancebetween the world of the living and the world of the dead is a pinprickof pain. In this imaginary, the human bomber does not die, but nor dothe people he or she has killed. The frequently-made consequentialistargument that civilians in a democracy are legitimate targets becausethey elect belligerent governments that attack other countries is rarelyarticulated inside salafi-jihadi circles but regularly to those outside.Instead, a regular ‘creedal’ argument by which salafi-jihadis (includingBin Laden) often justify killing civilians is based on an idea of ‘equalretaliation’ (qisas) and another idea of ‘behaviour in likeness’ (mu’a-malah bil-mithl) (At-Tibyan, 2004a: 89, 99, esp. al-Uyayri’s discussionon pages 40–68).

A key driver for these views is a potent philosophical anthropology ofthe believer and the non-believer, al wala wa al bara, that is central tosalafi-jihadi thought (Wagemakers, 2008, 2009; al-Qahtani, 1999; al-Adhal, 2009; al-Abab, 2010; al-Maqdisi, n.d.). The concept of al walawa al bara can mean loyalty and disavowal in its creedal form and can beseen as a version of the Schmittian distinction between ‘friend’ and‘enemy’. In Mohammed al-Maqdisi’s thought, it is transformed into a




political ideology of loyalty and enmity and in demotic form it becomesan ideology of ‘love’ and hate. It is at the core of salafi-jihadi thinkingand it constitutes perhaps its most powerful xenology directed againstthose who do not share this vision. A common salafi-jihadi ‘declaration’of enmity states: ‘there has emerged between us and you Hostility andHatred forever until you return to Tawhid [“monotheism”]’ (quoted inibn Abdillah, 2004: 4).

It is because of this idea of absolute loyalty and enmity that in themidst of fighting the invasion of Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ofAl Qaeda in Iraq decided that a mass slaughter of Shias had to takeplace in a Shia-dominated country. The ‘instrumental’ view of the mas-sacres was that he wanted to draw the US into a sectarian war, but thisis not how Ayman al-Zawahiri or others viewed it when they criticizedthese acts (al-Zawahiri, 2005; al-Rahman, 2005). More recent salafi-jihadi documents openly call for slaughter of the Alawites, amongother minorities in Syria (al-Adam, 2012) (indeed, much currentsalafi-jihadi strategy is dominated by a focus on an international‘Shia’ enemy axis in Syria (the Alawites), Lebanon (Hizbollah) andIran working in alliance with Israel and the US!). Similarly, it isbecause of this ideology that the word ‘kuffar’ has become highlypejorative. ‘When we kill the Kuf, this is because we know Allahhates the Kufs’, as a defendant in the important Crevice bombingplot trial was reported to have said (R. v Omar Khyam et al., 2008,EWCA Crim 1612, Opening Statement). Similarly, a text by Al Qaeda’sAttiyatalla, ostensibly aimed at showing the ‘mercy’ of salafi-jihadistowards those they consider to be unbelievers, says:

Know that the infidel’s non-belief and disobedience of his Lord andhis Great, Exalted, and Almighty Creator is a great crime. He there-fore deserves the harshest punishment imaginable. To reject God,His messengers, and His religion is the greatest iniquity and crimeon Earth. (al-Rahman, 2010a)

In salafi-jihadi hands, such ideas legitimize not only retaliatory mili-tary action but also the deliberate kiling of civilians, women and chil-dren, the elderly or infirm. ‘Equal retaliation’ includes holding anygroup collectively responsible for the actions of a few, mutilatingcorpses (‘cutting noses and ears and splitting open bellies’, At-Tibyan,2004a: 53), inflicting painful death, short of the impermissible raping orsodomizing of an enemy to death, though the reader is informed thatone minor opinion allows for the raping of a man with a metal roduntil he dies.

A key calculus of human numbers is important in the salafi-jihadiideological universe and one particular calculation emerges regularly.In the Saudi cleric Nasir bin Hamd al-Fahd’s jurisprudential opinion

Bhatt 33



on the legitimate use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,he said:

One of the brothers has added up the number of Muslims they havekilled with their direct and indirect weapons. The total is nearly 10million . . . If a bomb were dropped on them, destroying 10 millionof them and burning as much of their land as they have burned ofMuslim land, that would be permissible without any need to men-tion any other proof. We might need other proofs if we wanted todestroy more than this number of them! (al-Fahd, 2003)

Since America has killed ‘10 million’ Muslim civilians, it is, asAl Qaeda’s Yusuf al-Uyayri says, ‘perfectly permissible for [Muslims]to kill around 10 million American civilians’ (At-Tibyan, 2004a: 63),a statement echoed regularly, including by Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri (2008). This founding idea of incalculable deaths and environ-mental destruction, against which ‘the legislation of equal retaliation’ ismobilized, also means that for salafi-jihadis there is in principle littlelimitation to the scale of killing and devastation that is permissible (al-Fahd, 2003). As a matter of ideology, many salafi-jihadis have permittedthemselves virtually any act of violence against civilians without anyaccountability.

The original apocalyptic imagination, as in the Manchester illustrationof the temporal destruction of the planet, has not receded in contempor-ary salafi-jihadi discourse during the past decade of wars and militaryinvasions. Indeed, that vision has magnified substantially. For example,in 2010, the late Anwar al-Awlaki, a key figure in Al Qaeda in theArabian Peninsula, wrote in its English-language magazine that the ‘blas-phemy’ represented by the 2005 Jyllands Posten cartoons of Mohammedmeant that: ‘It is the honour of the best of creation that is at stake and itis not much to set the world on fire for his sake’ (al-Awlaki, 2010a: 28).By ‘setting the world on fire’, al-Awlaki meant that a massive campaignof bombings, assassinations and arson against civilians be undertaken inEurope, the US and elsewhere. This campaign, called ‘The Dust WillNever Settle Down’, is a small part of a cosmic (but physical)war between believers and unbelievers that has to continue until theend-time. As al-Awlaki says:

. . . Jihad will also carry on until the Day of Judgment since we aretold to wipe out kufr from the world. On a side note, Jihad will endwhen ‘Isa [Jesus] rules the world. Why’s that? Because ‘Isa will fightkufr and there will be no more disbelief whatsoever. And after ‘Isa’sdeath, there will be no more Jihad because Allah will take away thesouls of the believers and leave all the kuffar left on earth to go




through the Last Hour. In addition, there is no Jihad against Ya’jujand Ma’juj because there is no capability of fighting them; they willbe destroyed by a miracle. (al-Awlaki, 2005: 19)

Here, physical war against unbelievers is not about any existing con-flicts, invasions or occupations, nor is it concerned with any particularland or geographical territory (al-Awlaki, 2005). Instead, it has to con-tinue up to the point that Gog and Magog make their (no doubt star-tling) appearance on the battlefield. Al-Awlaki says that in this war it is abounden obligation to kill any unbelievers anywhere by any means at anytime, indeed for all time. Hence, al-Awlaki dismisses the ‘kuffar theories’that human bombers are a product of poverty, oppression or suicidalideation. He similarly dismisses the Islamist view that jihad can only be‘defensive’, aimed at freeing occupied land in a manner authorized byreligious traditions. Instead, its importance for salafi-jihadis relates to theglobal martial victory of a prophetic idea.

The Manchester image and similar imagery of planetary destructionare one of three main representations of conflict within the salafi-jihadivisual universe. A second potent aesthetic vision, which complements thisfirst vision of worldly destruction, is usually preoccupied with a particu-lar country or region of conflict: hence, the copious blood-soaked ima-gery of Iraq, Kashmir, Palestine, Chechnya, among numerous otherregions. Here, the aesthetic repertoire is similar to the symbolic field ofolder revolutionary nationalisms: lands, flags, weapons, uniformed men,blood and constitution. Partly, this reflects the promiscuous nature ofsalafi-jihadi visual production: the usurpation of the aesthetic inventoriesof older revolutionary nationalism, including those produced duringsecular nationalist and regional jihads, and their reinvention into a dif-ferent ideological constellation of cosmic warriors, battles and blood.This second set of salafi-jihadi representations of territory is not dissimi-lar to that used by nationalist or regionalist jihadis engaged in removingactual external occupiers from tangible historic lands, but it represents adifferent political project.

It is therefore important to distinguish the political ideology ofregional movements focused on secular military mobilization againstexternal military occupation (but not having military ambitions beyondthis) from the political ideology of salafi-jihadis, who wish to displaceregionalist and even irredentist political ideologies with their own extra-territorial cosmic vision. The conclusive distinction is between the ima-gined cosmic war and a variety of actual regional and subnational‘jihads’ (al-Rahman, 2010b). It is the latter, collectively, that many west-ern commentators usually refer to as ‘global jihad’, whereas for salafi-jihadis these typically represent the temporary materialization of a vaster,more important cosmic conflict (which salafi-jihadis indeed refer to as‘global jihad’) that has nothing to do with regional conflicts in principle.

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If the aim for nationalist jihadis is to liberate an historical territoryfrom actual external military occupation, for salafi-jihadis the aim is togenerate insurgencies in any feasible territory in order to create thenucleus of the legal Caliphate of the kind that Taliban Afghanistanapproached, one which will lead ultimately to global legal sovereignty(bin Muhammad, 2011). If apocalyptic violence constitutes a ‘millenar-ian’ strand, then the Caliphate’s nucleus (a salafi-jihadi state of a veryspecific kind) offers an ‘instrumental’ strand. Both the ‘millenarian’ and‘instrumental’ visions are necessary in the salafi-jihadi world-view.Recently, the ‘embryo of the Caliphate’ is seen to be present in the pol-itical vacuum created by the ‘Arab Spring’. The territories currentlyidentified by some in Al Qaeda as candidates for the core of theCaliphate include Syria, Yemen, northern Mali and Tunisia. If, from anationalist perspective, none are under external occupation, for salafi-jihadis any temporal government is legally criminal and all countries areunder ‘occupation’ by the ‘system of kufr’. There is a conclusive differ-ence between fighting according to the laws of war against occupation byan external armed force and fighting against the ‘occupation’ of theplanet by disbelief.

If the erasure of temporal life represents one key salafi-jihadi theme,and if the second representation is that of a region under war, then thethird salafi-jihadi ‘global’ representation is that of the sovereignty ofprimordial, transcendental law over the planet. Symbolically, a singlefinger pointing upwards symbolizes both monotheism and the directionof the supreme authority; resting open is the sacred book of law; aweapon is present as a force of order; and there is the globe that is tobe subjected to the divine law it has lost. It is the first (‘apocalypse’) andthe third (‘law’) global visions that are definitive of salafi-jihadism, withthe idea of the Caliphate forming an instrumental link between them. Ifthe visions announce liberation from territorial sovereignty, they alsoprovide us with two political hallucinations: the annihilation of God’splanet on the one hand, and the dominance of salafi-jihadi law overGod’s planet on the other. These two ideas – the planet as criminaldelusion that needs to be eradicated and the planet under a cosmiclegal order – create a constitutive, fractured couplet. They present avision of apparently nihilistic revolutionary destruction and a vision oforder under authoritarian law and governance. Neither is realizable, butit is precisely their repetitive aspect that makes these hallucinations sopowerful locally in certain political circumstances. Both ideas are neces-sary consequences of the ‘creedal’ literalism of salafi-jihadi politicalthought. This is one of the reasons why critics have been unable toanalogize neatly this theopolitical form as either anarchism or fascism(compare Ali, 2002 with Hitchens, 2007).

The analogical problem can be thought about in a different way. If onelogic of political anarchism is the realization of the total sovereignty of




the individual, then this logic can mean the rejection of the state, or ofcollective society. But it can also mean disavowing the actualized sover-eignty of any other individual. We are already approaching a politicalspace where anarchism and fascism coalesce. The coupling of anarchismand fascism makes available political trajectories that appeal simultan-eously to extremely violent impulses for order and for disorder. Hence, itis consistent that a salafi-jihadi text, The Management of Savagery,argues that the greatest problem facing the global Muslim communityis not the enemy as such, but the problem of order under legitimate lawthat follows the state of ‘savagery’ people descend into after the ‘liber-ation’ of their territory by the mujahideen (Naji, 2006: 47). If the ‘state ofnature’ is the sheer savagery of those outside law, ones who must becoaxed or disciplined into legal order, the savagery is nevertheless a con-sequence of the chaos that is generated when one sets fire to the earth(cf. Naji, 2006: 11).

Inevitably, the ‘millenarian’ vision of cleansing, apocalyptic violencecomes into severe conflict with the vision of lawful order. This key ten-sion between ‘apocalypse’ and ‘order’ manifests in simultaneously incit-ing and denouncing indiscriminate violence. It is illustrated well inAl Qaeda’s recent orientations towards anti-civilian violence. Al Qaedahas been critical of some forms of salafi-jihadi violence against civilians,especially when it has alienated Muslim populations. However, it haslegitimized that same violence (al-Zawahiri, 2005; Lahoud, 2010, 2012).Similarly, Al Qaeda vigorously continues to defend its indiscriminateviolence against those who now reject it (al-Zawahiri, 2008). This is aninevitable consequence of the salafi-jihadi cosmology of unconstrainedviolence and formidable restraint.

The Sacrifice for Desire

When Mohammed Bouazizi, a poor street trader in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia,killed himself by setting himself on fire on 17 December 2010, that act ofself-sacrifice symbolically unleashed the revolutions, uprisings and massprotests in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabiaand other countries. If these events demonstrated the failure of salafi-jihadi strategies of destroying the regimes they despised, some salafi-jihadis quickly attempted to characterize the events as ‘the Islamicawakening’. Mohammed Bouazizi’s death was followed by many othertragic self-immolations in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia andelsewhere, continuing a ‘tradition’ of self-immolations against unendur-able circumstances that have been seen regularly in Afghanistan, espe-cially among women.

The ethics of self-sacrifice represented by the deaths of MohammedBouazizi and others is a world away from that of the suicide bomber andhis (or her) desire to kill others. Yet much of the academic literature that

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seeks to explain the human bomber is dominated by theopolitical ideas ofsacrifice and how these might invoke ethics. If sacrifice is ‘the oldest formof realizing meaning in the West’ (Kahn, 2008: 98), and if ‘sacrifice’ alsoassists in organizing the political state and its constitutional arrangement,then it might appear to make sense to interpolate the suicide bomberwithin a recognizable modern narrative of someone who is willing to diefor their political ideals. The latter is a figure whose presence is a con-stitutive element in modern politics – the human rights defender, theprisoner of conscience, the war martyr.

Yet Devji’s characterization of Al Qaeda as an ethical project strivingfor a global humanity (2005) or Bin Laden as a figure comparable toM.K. Gandhi (2008), Honderich’s consequentialist idea of ‘terrorism forhumanity’ (2006), or Pape’s argument that salafi-jihadi suicide bombingsare explained by the presence of ‘occupations’ (2005) become problem-atic. In their disparate ways, each writer mobilizes a perspective in whichthe human bomber is primarily theorized through a metaphysics of ‘sac-rifice’. These examples form part of a wider, seductive universe of intel-ligibility that is supposed to account theoretically for the rationale of thehuman bomber and associate him with some version of an ethical orpolitical project for ‘humanity’ or ‘against occupation’. Arguments thatthe violent act of the human bomber is a form of ‘sacrifice’ reflectbroader Western philosophical traditions regarding how we understandpolitical violence.

Two themes related to ‘sacrifice’ are important to outline beforemoving further with the argument of this article. The first theme isthat violent sacrifice is a necessary constitutive excess for creatingsocial and political order, community or identity. This idea has astrong lineage in 20th-century social theory (Agamben’s homo sacer isa recent demonstration). Within this theme, ritual political violence is animperative, whether conceived in sociology (Sorel), anthropology(Girard) or psychoanalysis (Freud). The ‘limited’ ritual violence of warrepresents the spilling out of the bounds of social restraint so as to con-stitute anew that restraint as the political order of the social body or asthe renewed boundaries of the nation (Girard, 2005; Kahn, 2008). Thosewho were killed in war are a sacrificial necessity and their deaths recon-stitute the boundaries of the peaceful national order. Violent excess andrestraint exist as a doublet: the eruption of the former is a constitutiveemergence that regenerates the field and rules of the latter. However, ifthe sacrifice of the body is a requirement so that a new community ofbelief and order is constituted, then we are already committed to anarrow theologically-defined field that can limit how we might thinkabout political violence. The figure of the Christ is an obvious proteanform, as is the Abrahamic filicidal intent that re-institutes divine, patri-archal authority. Commitment to this theological ground is also commit-ment to a mode of explanation based ultimately on a philosophical




anthropology of the primordial horde and its scapegoat. This commit-ment marks the boundaries of what remains unthought, including thepossibility that the most lethal political violence may require no deeperexplanation than that its protagonists desire to inflict pain and death (c.f.Theweleit, 1987).

The second theme concerns a further theological argument about mar-tyrology. The archaic Greek concept martu&, referring to ‘one whoremembers, who has knowledge of something by recollection, and whocan thus tell about it’ while also expanding to include the meaning of a‘witness for God’, one who might suffer death, did not have this lattermeaning as necessary to it until the concept was Christianized (Kittle,1965: 476–81). The dual meaning of the martyr as both a ‘witness’ and a‘person who suffers death’ is shared by orthodox forms of the three mainmonotheistic religions. The link between these two meanings is the bodythat becomes sacred, and therefore significant, at precisely the moment itdies and only because it dies (Kahn, 2008). The body, in its death,becomes a transcendental witness to truth and is identified with an eman-ation that sees everything and in that sentinel form, like The GreatWatcher, bears witness and judgement. In so ‘judging’, it invites theentry of an ethical orientation.

It is at this point that the two themes about sacrifice described abovecoalesce: we are this transcendental witness through our apprehension ofthe dead body and why it elected to die, and in the form of that collectivewitnessing, our humanity becomes emergent. Something like this isimportant for the kinds of positions advocated by Honderich, Devjiand others. Writing about the suicide-bomber’s ‘sacrifice’, Devji makesthe unusual claim that:

Martyrdom, then, might well constitute the purest and therefore themost ethical of acts, because in destroying himself its soldierbecomes fully human by assuming complete responsibility for hisfate beyond the reach of any need, interest or idea. As such, mar-tyrdom constitutes an act of inauguration rather than one of retali-ation. (Devji, 2005: 120)

However, if a genuine sacrifice is one in which the person who intends tokill themselves, and only themselves, believes that in doing so theywill haveceasedtoexistasadesiringentity,but thatbecauseof themodeof theirdeathit canbehoped that agreater ethical,moralorpolitical recognitionwill haveoccurred, then this is not the salafi-jihadi understanding.Nor, indeed, is the‘witnessing’ described above the same as in salafi-jihadi thinking. Similarly,the assertion that in lying dead with his victims the salafi-jihadi suicidebomber demonstrates a common humanity (Devji, 2008) is significantonly in the most trivial of senses since, for the suicide bomber, his victims,though fully human, were never part of an ethically legitimate humanity.

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Salafi-jihadi understandings of ‘martyrdom’ and ‘sacrifice’ are quitefar from accounts that burden them with sanitized languages of ethics,rectitude or a common humanity. The dominant themes of sacrifice insalafi-jihadi writings are related to an economy of ‘reward’ and ‘retali-ation’. There are several different discussions of ‘sacrifice’ in salafi-jihadithought. One relates to copious and detailed discussions about how to‘sacrifice’ those considered unbelievers. One of the clearest discussions of‘sacrifice’ in salafi-jihadi literature relates to the ritual killing of an‘unbeliever’ (who is typically a Muslim). It forms a distinct sectionof the material related to the killing of civilians and the treatment of‘prisoners of war’ (At-Tibyan, 2004a, 2004b; Abu Sabaayaa, 2006).Hence also the glut of videos of prolonged individual and collectivebeheadings and torture emerging from mainly Iraq and Afghanistan.The ‘legal’ debates regarding beheading and torture are extensive andinclude ones about the methods and instruments that can be used to cut avictim’s head from their spine, whether their throat needs to be slit first tobleed them, and other such details. Perhaps exposing the paucity of jus-tifications for such acts in the religious traditions, the ‘creedal argument’is overwhelmingly based on halal methods for the slaughter of animals,an intriguing discursive movement from nutrition to the treatment ofhuman captives. As is repetitively pleaded in salafi-jihadi literature, theinitial slitting of the throat is a ‘mercy’ that exemplifies the virtuousattributes of the beheader (al-Rahman, 2010a).

There is one important instance in which salafi-jihadis do attempt tomobilize the conception of the sacrificed martyr testifying to the truthof faith in their death and because of their death. However, this has tobe considered critically. In the broader hadith traditions, the categoriesof people who might be considered ‘martyrs’ can expand furiously (forexample, they can include those who died through illness or accident).Against these traditions, the salafi-jihadi ‘martyr’ is only ever the sui-cide bomber or a victim of battle. Salafi-jihadi discussions of martyr-dom are often prefaced by the magical hadith story of ‘the peopleof the ditch’ (Surur, n.d.). A recent version aimed at young people inthe US and Europe and written by the late Anwar al-Awlaki putsit thus:

In the story of the boy which led to the Trench, the King tried to killhim by throwing him off of a mountain and failed. Then he trieddrowning him in the sea and he failed. So then the young man cameto the King and told him, ‘If you want to kill me, then take one ofmy arrows, and say Bismillah, then strike me, and you will kill me;but you have to do it in the name of Allah.’ The young man alsohad set a condition that the King had to do this in front of everyone.So when everyone saw that the King succeeded in killing the young




man in the name of Allah, what happened? They all becameMuslim. (al-Awlaki, 2005: 50)

The boy allows himself to be killed by an arrow shot at his head at themoment at which the supreme authority of God is recognized both in hisact of self-sacrifice and in the ruler’s act. The angry ruler then seeks todestroy the newly converted and they go willingly to their deaths in a pitof fire, a baby speaking to its fearful mother urging her to leap into thefire as her death will symbolize acknowledgement of the only possibletruth (Surur, n.d.). The traditional story of the people of the ditch pre-sents a complex pedagogy about the essence of authentic faith. Yet insalafi-jihadi hands it serves only one purpose: to expunge the customaryadmonishment against suicide.

Central also to salafi-jihadi political ideology is virtuous vanguardism.Salafi-jihadis have mobilized the linked ideas of the manifested ‘victori-ous group’ (at-ta’ifah al-mansurah) and ‘the saved sect’ (al firqahan-najiyah), both prophetic entities that propel a political and militaryvanguardism that is unaccountable to anyone (al-Awlaki, 2005). In add-ition, salafi-jihadis mobilize a different idea of a group that ‘enjoins good’and ‘forbids evil’. In salafi-jihadi renditions, the ‘victorious group’ is abelligerent group that is wholly immune to criticism or accountability.Salafi-jihadi political thought attempts to progressively subvert eachelement of authentic religious authority in order to legitimize anunaccountable vanguardism of the violent deed, one that can manifestas almost unconstrained violence against civilians. In the late Anwar al-Awlaki’s vision, members of the small group who died while carrying outextremely violent acts against civilians will rush to Paradise (al-Awlaki,2010b: 64). Like in end-times Christianity, they are transported instantlyto the Garden where they reside in the crops of birds (in the traditionalconception), or where their souls will be carried in the hearts of the greenbirds of Paradise.

The Tropics of Paradise

Many commentators have noted the importance of the influential cas-settes (then CDs and now digital files) In the Hearts of Green Birds, aboutthe stories of those from salafi-jihadi militias who died fighting in theBosnian war, and this tape was indeed ubiquitous in the UK. The para-disology represented in In the Hearts of Green Birds has become a gen-eralized, highly sophisticated aesthetic form that shapes much of thecultural produce of Al Qaeda and other salafi-jihadi militia. Mostrecently, As-Sahab (Al Qaeda’s media organization) has produced sev-eral chapters of a video series, Winds of Paradise, that exemplifies avariant of this form. If much of the natural landscape in salafi-jihadiaesthetic representations is of the desert, of warriors on horseback,

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then Paradise is characteristically represented as a tropical rain forestwith misty waterfalls (many other stylized representations of theGarden exist, including computer-generated green fields and even theEnglish country garden). The representation of lush rainforest and ariddesert might seem to say much about two aesthetic elements at workhere, but they are by no means the only representations of the naturallandscape. They are, of course, unnatural representations that only havedigitized relevance.

‘Paradise’ in salafi-jihadi writings has a structure and a hierarchy,and its detailed elaboration consumes a substantial amount of salafi-jihadi labour. Of importance here are not the familiar accounts con-cerning intercession for one’s relatives or the sexual pleasure offeredto men. Instead, it is the spatial architecture and the hierarchy ofsocial status that is significant. Two sociological themes stand out insalafi-jihadi renditions of their paradisiacal entity: wealth and socialstatus.

Here it is worth considering the writings on Paradise of MasoodAzhar, head of the powerful Jaish-e Mohammed (JeM) militia movementin Pakistan.4 Azhar’s text, The Virtues of Jihad, written probably in thelate 1980s, presents several sociologically important themes aboutParadise (Azhar, 1996). His text is heavily interspersed with other suchwritings, such is the replicating nature of this material. The subtitle to histext is translated as ‘the shortest path to Jannah’, reflecting a persistenttheme in salafi-jihadi literature in which fighting and dying ‘in the path ofGod’ is promoted as the fastest route to Paradise: in a single move, a‘disinterested’ path is instigated and diminished.

As with other similar texts, Azhar’s tract explains that in Paradise,the martyr has a palace, robes of the finest silk, bowls of rubies, gold,silver, and many other delights, including concupiscent ones that revealthe profoundly masculine gender ideology at work. If an infinitesimalsliver of time separates the worlds of the living and the dead, then thatsliver is also an inverting mirror: the sinful material goods and criminalsensual pleasures, the delusions of this criminal world that one is obli-gated to disavow or destroy, are available comprehensively in the next.This point is sociologically significant. For example, during theOperation Crevice trial (which related to plots to bomb sites inLondon), one defendant was reported to have said of customers atthe Ministry of Sound nightclub, a potential target: ‘no one can puttheir hands up and say they are innocent – those slags dancing around’(R. v. Omar Khyam et al., 2008, EWCA Crim 1612, OpeningStatement). The salafi-jihadi coupling of austerity and plenitude withliving and dead, body and soul, is highly suggestive. But in the starkreduction of the afterlife to a transactional world of goods and pleas-ures, we are distant from the theologies of the afterlife that exist in thereligious traditions, as indeed we are from salafi-jihadi claims about a




disinterested pursuit of a pure deed. For Azhar, virtue (faza’il in Urdu)is gross material reward:

A further reason for this great virtue of spending time in Jihad isthat Allah has bought the Muslims lives and worth in exchange forJannah. This business transaction can only be fulfilled in the battle-field. Clearly, a Muslim is so happy and pleased with this transac-tion that he offers his life to Allah in the battlefield of Jannah tobecome the buyer of Jannah. (Azhar, 1996: 31)

To be sure, the ‘economic’ calculus of deed and reward exists in severalsectarian traditions and numerous religions. But in salafi-jihadi writings,the idea of divine ‘reward’ as purely material property is a strikingtransgression.

Of adjacent importance is imagined social status. The salafi-jihadivision of Paradise represents an architecture of esteem and admirationfor the ‘martyr’. This is manifested by the honouring received by themartyr, the recognition of his nobility, of other entities in servitude tohim, apprehending him as if he was royal. (One might see how being acosmic warrior, the ruler of a fantastical realm, immensely wealthy or asecret agent evokes video games and fantasy cinema more powerfullythan it ever can religious philosophy.) Azhar says, however, that themartyr’s greatest desire is to return to temporal life to fight and dieand return again, indeed a hundred times. On each return to theGarden, he will get closer to the governor of this realm (Azhar, 1996:43). In addition to a world of goods and pleasures, of significance is adiscourse of honour and nobility, of etiquette and place, the theoreticalphenomenology of the visitor to the palace of the king.

Masood Azhar’s text represents a vision that has been superseded inrendition rather than essence. In the English language magazine ofAl Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, Anwar al-Awlaki says aboutParadise: ‘people are free to do what they like, whenever they like andfor as long as they like’ (2010b: 64). If the sliver of time that separates lifefrom death is like an inverting mirror, the political desire represented insalafi-jihadi thinking is strikingly unoriginal: a desired world of rectitudeand authoritarian law set against a hedonism that has to be eliminated,though it is precisely a version of this hedonism that becomes available tothe martyr once he has slaughtered it on Earth.

Masood Azhar’s The Virtues of Jihad draws on Abdullah Azzam’swork and exemplifies the imitative nature of salafi-jihadi ideological writ-ing. This body of ideology, and al wala wa al bara in particular, generatean anarchic sectarianism and unrestrained declarations of apostasy andexcommunication (takfir). The medieval cleric Ibn Taymiyyah’s opinionis often cited: ‘Anybody who supports the kuffar in their kufr, or (sup-ports them) against Muslims, then they are a kaffir.’ Also used is a

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version of the 19th-century text The Slicing Sword against the One WhoForms Allegiances with the Disbelievers (al-Adhal, 2009). Anwar Al-Awlaki stated that even if a believer killed every single non-believer onthe planet, one is obliged to defend him and must not betray him (al-Awlaki, 2009). Hence, one is commanded to be loyal to the global com-munity of believers, the overwhelming majority of whom detest you anddo not support your ideology. At the same time, as Al-Awlaki said, one isobliged to kill any unbelievers anywhere. However, if one does not do so,then one becomes an unbeliever. One important salafi-jihadi opinionstates: ‘whoever denies that terrorism is part of Islam, has disbelieved’(ibn Abdul Aziz, n.d.). Significantly, the word ‘terrorism’ (‘irhab) is usedhere, rather than jihad or qital, which can both refer to physical battle.The circular regress unleashed by salafi-jihadis leads to the excommuni-cation of virtually everyone. Their political form leaves no space for anentity between one and cosmic law, no civil society, not even the familyunless it is rendered into a cosmic natality (brotherhood/motherhood).We are led back to that narcissistic salafi-jihadi vision of temporaldestruction: the entire world, other than oneself, is a defilement.

Conclusion

Salafi-jihadi ideology comprises an array of oppositions. These doubletsof ideas include: the temporal world and the afterlife; authoritarian lawand violent chaos; loyalty and enmity; defilement and plenitude; tangiblelands and imagined spaces; authentic history and sacred time; disinterestand desire; virtue and reward; piety and profanity. If this is an absolutistworld, it is riddled with its own incongruities. The internal oppositionsthat characterize contemporary salafi-jihadi ideology are irresolvableones and their presence leads to a violently regressive focus, at onceinwardly directed towards its adherents and outwardly towards others,mainly co-religionists. This leads to a ‘path towards self-destruction’ thathas been well described (Lahoud, 2010). The themes of indiscriminate,cleansing, cosmic violence co-exist with ones obsessed with authoritarianorder. If the imagined ‘Caliphate’ forms a tangible link between cosmosand nomos, salafi-jihadis have failed to accomplish anything like creatingits ‘nucleus’.

The political vision of salafi-jihadis projects an intriguing associationbetween the worlds of the living and the dead. It is difficult to view this asa religious conception, so removed is its discursive apparatus regardingviolence, death and sacrifice from the lineages it claims. The literalist,rote-like nature of salafi-jihadi political material is dogmatic in the extremeregarding its righteousness and its ideology of enmity. That its producersfeel compelled to repetitively generatemore justifications for their ideologyis the clearest demonstrationof the extent towhich this ideology is sowidelyrejected. Rather than presenting a recognizable ethical project, salafi-jihadi




ideology promises a world of imagined material reward and noble socialstatus that only enmity and violence can supply.

Notes

1. The term ‘Al Qaeda’ refers to the core group formerly led by Bin Laden andto militia that claim affiliation to it and sometimes use ‘Al Qaeda’ in theirnames. Of this larger cluster of militia, their formal relation to the core groupwas deeply contested (see Lahoud et al., 2012). The term ‘salafi-jihadi’ is usedto distinguish a specific ideological constellation from political Islamists (suchas the Muslim Brotherhood), nationalist and regionalist jihadis, and non-violent political or quietist salafis. An ‘Al Qaeda’ text distinguishes salafi-jihadism differently, distancing it from Hassan al-Turabi’s former Sudaneseregime, the Muslim Brotherhood and the salafi sahwa (‘awakening’) move-ment originating in Saudi Arabia (Naji, 2006). One presentation of salafi-jihadi ideology is given in al-Maqdisi (n.d.) and a typical creedal statement isgiven in Abu Qatada (n.d.: 12–18). ‘Salafi-jihadi’ is a contested conceptamong those who identify with it as well as within the academic literature(Hegghammer, 2009).

2. Relatively little of Al Qaeda’s expansive ideological and creedal literature wasauthored by Bin Laden. The main ideological, strategic and technical writingswere written by a diverse array of clerics and operatives. Some, such asAyman al-Zawahiri, Mohammed al-Maqdisi, Abu Qatada, Abu Musab as-Suri, Abu Yahya al-Libi or the late Anwar al-Awlaki, are relatively wellknown. Others, such as the late Yusuf al-Uyayri, ideological figures likeAttiyatalla and clerics such as Abu Basir al-Tartusi or Abu’l Mundhiral-Shinqiti, less so.

3. Some of the material used below was collected as part of a Leverhulme TrustMajor Research Fellowship (2005–8), reference F07605F, titled ‘TheGeosociology of Religious Violence’. It is in the nature of some of the tech-nical material that document names and site or server locations are not givenhere.

4. Though the JeM has been part of the Al Qaeda combine, it arises from adifferent lineage, termed here ‘revolutionary Deobandism’. The JeM (with arange of other Deobandi militia and the salafi-jihadi Lashkar-e Tayyiba) hasbeen associated with training for many ‘Al Qaeda’ plots in the UK andelsewhere.

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Chetan Bhatt is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology,London School of Economics and Political Science.




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