Article

Theory, Culture & Society

2014, Vol 31(1) 2548
The Virtues of Violence: ! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276413500079

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Chetan Bhatt
London 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 of
Osama Bin Laden remains dominated by several violent conicts. Much

Corresponding author:
Chetan Bhatt, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A
2AE, UK.
Email: c.bhatt@lse.ac.uk
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/
26 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)

of Al Qaedas1 older leadership in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen has

been killed. At the same time, there has been the rise of a range of small,
highly sectarian sala-jihadi militia in the aftermath of the Arab Spring,
including in northern Mali. In Syria, the direction of the tracks of the
sala-jihadi corridors into Iraq was reversed and Al Qaedas ally became
an unwelcome military force among others opposing the Assad dictator-
ship. Following the death of Bin Laden, some elements of Al Qaeda
called for a concerted focus on Syria and Yemen, the forcible expulsion
of minorities, indiscriminate sectarian killings, a change in its name, and
the development of broader military alliances, such as those exemplied
by the Nusra Front in Syria and the Ansar as-Sharia in Yemen, Tunisia
and Libya (bin Muhammad, 2011; al-Adam 2012). The aim of these
militia is not to oppose an external military intervention but is instead
to re-ignite Al Qaedas original vision of establishing the nucleus of
Gods Caliphate on earth, a task which only the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan prior to 9/11 had most been successful in fullling since
the medieval period (bin Muhammad, 2011.) This original sala-jihadi
vision is important and remains fully intact despite over a decade of wars
and invasions. This vision contains an overwhelming emphasis on polit-
ical violence against formal civilians.
A common approach to sala-jihadi political thought seeks to explain
it through largely exogenous factors, primarily anti-imperialism, or
resistance to oppression or illegitimate occupation (Pape, 2005;
Honderich, 2006). Others similarly place Al Qaedas ideas2 and actions,
especially ones related to suicide bombing and the killing of civilians,
within a theoretical understanding of sacrice and global humanity
(Devji, 2008; c.f. Honderich, 2006). This article is a critical rejection of
these ideas, ones which are symptomatic of an implicit characterization
by some on the political left of Al Qaeda and sala-jihadi ideology as
contemporary examples of anti-western anti-imperialism. Such a charac-
terization is plausible if the massive opposition to sala-jihadis in the
Middle East, north Africa and south Asia is evaded, as is sala-jihadi
thinking about visceral violence, death and the killing of civilians. Some
sala-jihadis demonstrate a commitment to the visceral to such a
degree, and with such aesthetic force, that it is dicult to nd a suitable
comparison.
This article presents a dierent series of arguments about the content
of Al Qaedas more recent ideas related to violence and wars and about
the nature of its relationship to political modernity. It is argued that, in
sala-jihadi ideology, politics and violence are presented as co-extensive
and in an immediate relation with each other, but are articulated in a way
that forwards a dierent preoccupation with visceral violence and death.
Sala-jihadi ideology exhibits important aesthetic and philosophical
dimensions through which an association between virtue, political vio-
lence, aesthetics and killing is gured. In particular, it is argued in the
Bhatt 27

latter part of this article that this powerful association cannot be redacted
to theoretical arguments about sacrice as a constitutive feature of
modern politics, nor can Al Qaedas ideas and actions be pounded into
an ethical shape if ethics is to have any meaning.
Because the argument is complex, some areas are briey outlined in
this introduction and expanded upon later. It is argued that sala-jihadi
political ideology is one response to the question: what eld of modern
politics becomes thinkable and then possible when moral excellence is
identied with martial virtue? Virtue in its Latin form (virtus) invokes
moral excellence (as it does in the Arabic fadaail). However, this
Roman conception of virtue is linked to a violent, masculine ideal
derived from arete, an attribute of the mythic Greek god of war, Ares.
The cognate Sanskrit word, vir, similarly invokes masculine heroism in a
way that makes it coextensive with martial violence. This older history of
virtue is about the virtue of violence, a theme that also animates sala-
jihadi ideology. Virtue is present in sala-jihadi political thought in a
pure form. However, the mobilization of virtue is a key sociological
feature 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 most
modern political forms also situates sala-jihadi ideology as a modern
political venture, though one that unusually apprehends every temporal
space as a state of exception (Schmitt, 2005). As with traditional virtue
ethics, one conception of virtue in sala-jihadi writings relates to desir-
able politics as grounded in the character of character, with the quality
of character dened pithily in terms of righteousness, strength of piety,
knowledge (ibn Abdil-Aziz, n.d.) and in the language of honour, strong
mindedness and charismatic devoutness. These are attributes of the
authentic leader (amir, sheikh) that one is obliged to obey. The aesthetic
adjudication of the character of a leader that one might give oneself up
for trumps any genuinely moral or ethical deed they might perform.
It is a further aim of this article to demonstrate that sala-jihadi ideol-
ogy generates as its logical consequence several severely clashing ideas
that are viciously regressive and which determine the limited repertoire of
sala-jihadi political action. Perhaps the most important of these ideas is
the denitive opposition between unlimited destructive chaos and tota-
lizing order, somewhat like a constitutive tension between anarchism and
fascism that emerges in a dierent way in sala-jihadi thought. It is
argued that sala-jihadis have generated not only a system of ideas but
an aesthetic and cultural universe of meaning through which their
appeals are made, a universe comprised of a massive and diverse
volume of auditory, textual and visual products (artefact, image, song
and video) in numerous classical and demotic forms. Little scholarly
28 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)

attention has focused on the dense aesthetic universe created by

Al Qaeda and associated sala-jihadi groups (Devji, 2005). This uni-
verse will continue to appeal to various regional groups long after Bin
Ladens organization is a memory. A visual example is used later to draw
out three main sala-jihadi political visions of destruction, regional con-
ict and planetary law.
The appeal of sala-jihadi political aesthetics is avowedly based on
cultivating a highly demarcated repository of emotions. If aesthetics and
emotions are imbricated in each other, then they also provide a way of
understanding how certain ideas capture us, and how in the face of an
aesthetically-charged idea that generates an aective response within me,
I make that idea a part of myself such that it becomes for me an element
of how I desire to reexively apprehend my identity at the moment that I
articulate my identity to others. Of exceptional aesthetic and emotional
importance in sala-jihadi writings is Paradise. Paradisology has an
important sociological purpose in sala-jihadi ideology. For commenta-
tors from the political right, the attention given by sala-jihadis to the
rewards of Paradise exemplies irrationality or political insanity. For
writers from the political left, the substantive ideological content about
Paradise is evaded or rendered epiphenomenal to social and political
determinants typically, sala-jihadi ideology is seen solely as a response
to wars and occupations. The argument below distances from both per-
spectives, but nevertheless focuses attention on aspects of sala-jihadi
paradisology. Coveting Paradise is an overwhelming theme in sala-
jihadi literature and it is there for reasons that deserve sociological
consideration.
The focus below is on a range of sala-jihadi ideological and tech-
nical material obtained over more than a decade.3 This material com-
prises a very large and dispersed sala-jihadi online corpus of ideological
writings, technical and military instructions, creedal debates, and aes-
thetic artefacts. Many writers argue that sala-jihadi ideological writings
are essentially anti-theological and dominated by a narrow and impov-
erished version of creedal thinking (Roy, 2004) and a dogmatic approach
to what salas refer to as their methodology (manhaj). It is therefore
necessary to distinguish theology from creed (Halverson, 2010). Sala-
jihadi renditions of war, violence, death and Paradise bear little relation
to 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 of
Abdullah Azzam about the defence of Muslim lands have created a
rmament for sala-jihadi discussions of war and violence. Many
sala-jihadi treatments of war are also based on a war treatise written
by Ibn an-Nahhas, an early 15th-century cleric from Damascus (al-
Dumyati, n.d.). An-Nahhas based his text on the work of the major
13th- and 14th-century cleric Ibn Taymiyyah. This lineage is important
Bhatt 29

because key medieval texts about war were written about from the 1980s
by those who became sala-jihadis. In this process, they became inter-
polated with contemporary concerns and became new texts that were
rewritten by other sala-jihadi operatives. This process, accelerating
since 2001, has generated a current of thinking that is so distant from
even creedal traditions that questions of authenticity become meaning-
less. A large eld of legal opinion is available online and concerns the
intricate details of actions one might feel compelled to take in ghting in
the path of God. There is a very large and consistent library of such
documents in English, Arabic, Urdu and other languages. Sociologically,
the transmission of sala-jihadi ideas is para-institutional and cannot be
generalized easily. For example, there is not yet an adequate sociological
description for transnational aterritorial paramilitia that may take insti-
tutional form in some countries and, simultaneously, may be virtual
elsewhere, or which may comprise small kinship groups in one country
that are linked with large state-supported militias in another country, but
which communicate online in encrypted form with another group else-
where and may also be relatively open in an online forum operated from
yet another country and by another group.

Setting the World on Fire

During a police raid in May 2000 at the home of Al Qaedas Anas al-
Liby in Manchester, England, a document was discovered titled Military
Studies 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 Human
Rights Watch and Amnesty International have implied that al-Liby is
currently a ghost prisoner. (There is indeed a further backstory regarding
his alleged involvement in a much earlier secret services plot to assassin-
ate Muammar Gadda.)
The purpose of the Manchester document is to instruct its readers in
techniques for concealment, surveillance, assassination, and making
explosives and poisons, including ricin (Anonymous, n.d.). The docu-
ment appears occasionally as an exhibit in counter-terrorism trials in
the UK and US. It is regularly referred to as an al-Qaeda manual. It
is an early example of what now exists as a large and dispersed online
library of text and video les, regional periodicals, posters and audio les
that constitute an instructional military and technical sub-genre within
an overall sala-jihadi corpus. Some of this material is parasitic upon
manuals produced by some western armies, security services and arms
traders. The body of sala-jihadi literature is very wide, without clear
boundaries and not by any means internally coherent in ideological or
strategic senses. Its technical materials contain knowledge that traverses
military strategy, light arms, surveillance, tness training, light
30 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)

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 Qaedas materials has transformed dramatic-
ally since its early, gritty State of the Umma video to ones that can
combine high production values, witty editing, narrative coherence, a
version of war reportage, personal testament, and visually attractive
3D animations. Shehzad Tanweers martyrdom video was preceded
by a computer animated depiction of Kings Cross station, a tube train
and the fatal explosion of 7 July 2005. The transformation in design
quality is also apparent in technical materials and manuals. If the
Manchester document was handwritten and typed, contemporary tech-
nical materials are well-designed, often slick and less reliant on Arabic
language instructions. A recently-released course for making explosives,
aimed at a youthful audience in the UK and North America, depicts
numerous chemical processes for making a variety of substances, includ-
ing a fedayeen recipe and another for making a suicide jacket in which
the fuel is an explosive lling and the detonator is impregnated in the
surface cloth (thereby avoiding any detectable components): if the wearer
is shot or knifed the jacket is intended to explode. Flash movie bomb-
making lms illustrate, for example, preparing the charge, detonator and
fuel, positioning explosives in an open truck and so forth, some with
virtually no written instructions.
If this is a new genre and nothing else quite like it exists, it presents a
large 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 magazines
produced by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The rationale is signi-
cant: you dont have to travel to us for training, we will bring the training
to you; you can make everything yourselves using commonly found
materials; you do not need anyones permission to undertake operations,
you just need to take the rst 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 kill
and maim a large number of formal civilians (only civilians are
mentioned).
Yet there is substantial ideological continuity between these and the
Manchester document. The front cover of the Manchester document has
an illustration of the Earth with a sword being violently rammed through
it by an angry st. While the ocial (police) translation stated that Africa
and the Middle East were prominent in the image, the illustration is
simply like the ubiquitous Atlantic-centric image of the globe. There is
no geographical specicity concerning the violence enacted: the sword
Bhatt 31

enters somewhere in Antarctica and emerges somewhere near the North

Pole. No particular enemy country or distressed and beleaguered land is
plucked for attention. The Manchester image is not a call to arms against
the occupation of a particular country or region but represents an alto-
gether dierent political vision: the planet as a whole is the subject of
such conclusive violence.
This illustration represents a signal moment when some old ideas
slipped back into the contemporary political world, this time through
the medium of sala-jihadi ideology. They include the need to violently
destroy the temporal world so as to delight the God that had taken the
trouble to create that world. The temporal order is to be expunged so as
to will into being the desirable afterlife. If the sacred time of revelation
might have ended many centuries ago, sala-jihadi ideology reinstitutes
contemporary time as sacred, a time in which suicide bombing can be
written about as a cosmic act that harbours not simply a discourse of
resurrection but immortality. The paradox is that this is a consequence
of hadith literalism and dogmatism. This is the stultifying literalist orien-
tation, denitive of most self-styled sala methods, towards selected
elements from early medieval treatises on war, or from war hadith.
One consequence of the domination of sala-jihadi creed and method-
ology over theology is the diminution of the Quran and the customary
hadith corpus (Brown, 2009: 2567; Halverson, 2010).
The will to destroy the planet in the Manchester document is a call to
transcend the this-worldly. In this political vision, the world of the living
and the world of the dead are mixed up with each other and both are
considered necessary for meaningful political action. This arrangement
of thought sets in motion a challenging series of logics for secular social
and political theory. Adjacently, because of sala literalism, the world of
the dead becomes a legitimate horizon of political possibility against
which the world of the living is a preparatory interlude. To borrow an
idea from the German conservative revolutionary Ernst Junger, temporal
history is a hallucination one (being) enters for a time. This living in two
worlds, apprehending this world constantly in reference to the sphere of
the dead, characterized elements of medieval Christian theology. But
here this idea emerges in a contemporary political formation that
announces an intimacy between the two worlds. Their proximity is
such that the distinction that is assumed to be vital in modern politics
between the living and the dead, which also conducts other oppositions
between 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 actual
political actions: Mohammed Siddique Khan, the main organizer of the
London bombings in July 2007 that killed 52 people, said our words are
dead 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
32 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)

that is riddled with a range of dualisms that characterize the sala-jihadi

ideological universe. There are only two authentic agents of history in
this universe, the scholar and the martyr. As the late ideologue of the
Afghan jihad Abdullah Azzam put it, the map of Islamic history is
coloured with two lines from the black ink of the scholar and the red
blood of the martyr. More beautiful than this, he said, is when the hand
of the scholar which expends the ink and moves the pen is the same as
the hand that expends his blood and moves the nations (Azzam, n.d.):

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

The grandeur of civilizational achievements is absent in this historical

vision. There is no lineage of kings, no peoples history. History here is
also not simply the dead past but a past vitalized by deaths; war is its
motor force.
If the empirical distinction between life and death is destabilized (by
its transformation into a metaphysical idea), then a further argument
can be made, and some sala-jihadis do make it, that it is honourable
to kill civilians because the people one might have physically killed are
not actually dead and in giving them physical death, they have been
given the aim of life. Like the human bomber, they might only experi-
ence a gnats bite or pinprick (the feeling of being pinched as Bin
Laden put it in his 1998 declaration of war against America) as they are
physically killed and move into the supra-temporal world. The distance
between the world of the living and the world of the dead is a pinprick
of pain. In this imaginary, the human bomber does not die, but nor do
the people he or she has killed. The frequently-made consequentialist
argument that civilians in a democracy are legitimate targets because
they elect belligerent governments that attack other countries is rarely
articulated inside sala-jihadi circles but regularly to those outside.
Instead, a regular creedal argument by which sala-jihadis (including
Bin Laden) often justify killing civilians is based on an idea of equal
retaliation (qisas) and another idea of behaviour in likeness (mua-
malah bil-mithl) (At-Tibyan, 2004a: 89, 99, esp. al-Uyayris discussion
on pages 4068).
A key driver for these views is a potent philosophical anthropology of
the believer and the non-believer, al wala wa al bara, that is central to
sala-jihadi thought (Wagemakers, 2008, 2009; al-Qahtani, 1999; al-
Adhal, 2009; al-Abab, 2010; al-Maqdisi, n.d.). The concept of al wala
wa al bara can mean loyalty and disavowal in its creedal form and can be
seen as a version of the Schmittian distinction between friend and
enemy. In Mohammed al-Maqdisis thought, it is transformed into a
Bhatt 33

political ideology of loyalty and enmity and in demotic form it becomes

an ideology of love and hate. It is at the core of sala-jihadi thinking
and it constitutes perhaps its most powerful xenology directed against
those who do not share this vision. A common sala-jihadi declaration
of enmity states: there has emerged between us and you Hostility and
Hatred forever until you return to Tawhid [monotheism] (quoted in
ibn Abdillah, 2004: 4).
It is because of this idea of absolute loyalty and enmity that in the
midst of ghting the invasion of Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of
Al Qaeda in Iraq decided that a mass slaughter of Shias had to take
place 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 this
is not how Ayman al-Zawahiri or others viewed it when they criticized
these acts (al-Zawahiri, 2005; al-Rahman, 2005). More recent sala-
jihadi documents openly call for slaughter of the Alawites, among
other minorities in Syria (al-Adam, 2012) (indeed, much current
sala-jihadi strategy is dominated by a focus on an international
Shia enemy axis in Syria (the Alawites), Lebanon (Hizbollah) and
Iran working in alliance with Israel and the US!). Similarly, it is
because of this ideology that the word kuar has become highly
pejorative. When we kill the Kuf, this is because we know Allah
hates the Kufs, as a defendant in the important Crevice bombing
plot trial was reported to have said (R. v Omar Khyam et al., 2008,
EWCA Crim 1612, Opening Statement). Similarly, a text by Al Qaedas
Attiyatalla, ostensibly aimed at showing the mercy of sala-jihadis
towards those they consider to be unbelievers, says:

Know that the indels non-belief and disobedience of his Lord and
his 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 crime
on Earth. (al-Rahman, 2010a)

In sala-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 inrm. Equal retaliation includes holding any
group collectively responsible for the actions of a few, mutilating
corpses (cutting noses and ears and splitting open bellies, At-Tibyan,
2004a: 53), inicting painful death, short of the impermissible raping or
sodomizing of an enemy to death, though the reader is informed that
one minor opinion allows for the raping of a man with a metal rod
until he dies.
A key calculus of human numbers is important in the sala-jihadi
ideological universe and one particular calculation emerges regularly.
In the Saudi cleric Nasir bin Hamd al-Fahds jurisprudential opinion
34 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)

on the legitimate use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,

he said:

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

Since America has killed 10 million Muslim civilians, it is, as

Al Qaedas 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 is
mobilized, also means that for sala-jihadis there is in principle little
limitation to the scale of killing and devastation that is permissible (al-
Fahd, 2003). As a matter of ideology, many sala-jihadis have permitted
themselves virtually any act of violence against civilians without any
accountability.
The original apocalyptic imagination, as in the Manchester illustration
of the temporal destruction of the planet, has not receded in contempor-
ary sala-jihadi discourse during the past decade of wars and military
invasions. Indeed, that vision has magnied substantially. For example,
in 2010, the late Anwar al-Awlaki, a key gure in Al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula, wrote in its English-language magazine that the blas-
phemy represented by the 2005 Jyllands Posten cartoons of Mohammed
meant that: It is the honour of the best of creation that is at stake and it
is not much to set the world on re for his sake (al-Awlaki, 2010a: 28).
By setting the world on re, al-Awlaki meant that a massive campaign
of bombings, assassinations and arson against civilians be undertaken in
Europe, the US and elsewhere. This campaign, called The Dust Will
Never Settle Down, is a small part of a cosmic (but physical)
war between believers and unbelievers that has to continue until the
end-time. As al-Awlaki says:

. . . Jihad will also carry on until the Day of Judgment since we are
told to wipe out kufr from the world. On a side note, Jihad will end
when Isa [Jesus] rules the world. Whys that? Because Isa will ght
kufr and there will be no more disbelief whatsoever. And after Isas
death, there will be no more Jihad because Allah will take away the
souls of the believers and leave all the kuar left on earth to go
Bhatt 35

through the Last Hour. In addition, there is no Jihad against Yajuj

and Majuj because there is no capability of ghting them; they will
be destroyed by a miracle. (al-Awlaki, 2005: 19)

Here, physical war against unbelievers is not about any existing con-
icts, invasions or occupations, nor is it concerned with any particular
land 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 battleeld. Al-Awlaki says that in this war it is a
bounden obligation to kill any unbelievers anywhere by any means at any
time, indeed for all time. Hence, al-Awlaki dismisses the kuar theories
that human bombers are a product of poverty, oppression or suicidal
ideation. He similarly dismisses the Islamist view that jihad can only be
defensive, aimed at freeing occupied land in a manner authorized by
religious traditions. Instead, its importance for sala-jihadis relates to the
global martial victory of a prophetic idea.
The Manchester image and similar imagery of planetary destruction
are one of three main representations of conict within the sala-jihadi
visual universe. A second potent aesthetic vision, which complements this
rst vision of worldly destruction, is usually preoccupied with a particu-
lar country or region of conict: hence, the copious blood-soaked ima-
gery of Iraq, Kashmir, Palestine, Chechnya, among numerous other
regions. Here, the aesthetic repertoire is similar to the symbolic eld of
older revolutionary nationalisms: lands, ags, weapons, uniformed men,
blood and constitution. Partly, this reects the promiscuous nature of
sala-jihadi visual production: the usurpation of the aesthetic inventories
of older revolutionary nationalism, including those produced during
secular nationalist and regional jihads, and their reinvention into a dif-
ferent ideological constellation of cosmic warriors, battles and blood.
This second set of sala-jihadi representations of territory is not dissimi-
lar to that used by nationalist or regionalist jihadis engaged in removing
actual external occupiers from tangible historic lands, but it represents a
dierent political project.
It is therefore important to distinguish the political ideology of
regional movements focused on secular military mobilization against
external military occupation (but not having military ambitions beyond
this) from the political ideology of sala-jihadis, who wish to displace
regionalist 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 sala-
jihadis these typically represent the temporary materialization of a vaster,
more important cosmic conict (which sala-jihadis indeed refer to as
global jihad) that has nothing to do with regional conicts in principle.
36 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)

If the aim for nationalist jihadis is to liberate an historical territory

from actual external military occupation, for sala-jihadis the aim is to
generate insurgencies in any feasible territory in order to create the
nucleus of the legal Caliphate of the kind that Taliban Afghanistan
approached, one which will lead ultimately to global legal sovereignty
(bin Muhammad, 2011). If apocalyptic violence constitutes a millenar-
ian strand, then the Caliphates nucleus (a sala-jihadi state of a very
specic kind) oers an instrumental strand. Both the millenarian and
instrumental visions are necessary in the sala-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 currently
identied by some in Al Qaeda as candidates for the core of the
Caliphate include Syria, Yemen, northern Mali and Tunisia. If, from a
nationalist perspective, none are under external occupation, for sala-
jihadis any temporal government is legally criminal and all countries are
under occupation by the system of kufr. There is a conclusive dier-
ence between ghting according to the laws of war against occupation by
an external armed force and ghting against the occupation of the
planet by disbelief.
If the erasure of temporal life represents one key sala-jihadi theme,
and if the second representation is that of a region under war, then the
third sala-jihadi global representation is that of the sovereignty of
primordial, transcendental law over the planet. Symbolically, a single
nger pointing upwards symbolizes both monotheism and the direction
of the supreme authority; resting open is the sacred book of law; a
weapon is present as a force of order; and there is the globe that is to
be subjected to the divine law it has lost. It is the rst (apocalypse) and
the third (law) global visions that are denitive of sala-jihadism, with
the idea of the Caliphate forming an instrumental link between them. If
the visions announce liberation from territorial sovereignty, they also
provide us with two political hallucinations: the annihilation of Gods
planet on the one hand, and the dominance of sala-jihadi law over
Gods planet on the other. These two ideas the planet as criminal
delusion that needs to be eradicated and the planet under a cosmic
legal order create a constitutive, fractured couplet. They present a
vision of apparently nihilistic revolutionary destruction and a vision of
order under authoritarian law and governance. Neither is realizable, but
it is precisely their repetitive aspect that makes these hallucinations so
powerful locally in certain political circumstances. Both ideas are neces-
sary consequences of the creedal literalism of sala-jihadi political
thought. This is one of the reasons why critics have been unable to
analogize neatly this theopolitical form as either anarchism or fascism
(compare Ali, 2002 with Hitchens, 2007).
The analogical problem can be thought about in a dierent way. If one
logic of political anarchism is the realization of the total sovereignty of
Bhatt 37

the individual, then this logic can mean the rejection of the state, or of
collective society. But it can also mean disavowing the actualized sover-
eignty of any other individual. We are already approaching a political
space where anarchism and fascism coalesce. The coupling of anarchism
and fascism makes available political trajectories that appeal simultan-
eously to extremely violent impulses for order and for disorder. Hence, it
is consistent that a sala-jihadi text, The Management of Savagery,
argues that the greatest problem facing the global Muslim community
is not the enemy as such, but the problem of order under legitimate law
that follows the state of savagery people descend into after the liber-
ation of their territory by the mujahideen (Naji, 2006: 47). If the state of
nature is the sheer savagery of those outside law, ones who must be
coaxed or disciplined into legal order, the savagery is nevertheless a con-
sequence of the chaos that is generated when one sets re to the earth
(cf. Naji, 2006: 11).
Inevitably, the millenarian vision of cleansing, apocalyptic violence
comes into severe conict 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 in
Al Qaedas recent orientations towards anti-civilian violence. Al Qaeda
has been critical of some forms of sala-jihadi violence against civilians,
especially when it has alienated Muslim populations. However, it has
legitimized that same violence (al-Zawahiri, 2005; Lahoud, 2010, 2012).
Similarly, Al Qaeda vigorously continues to defend its indiscriminate
violence against those who now reject it (al-Zawahiri, 2008). This is an
inevitable consequence of the sala-jihadi cosmology of unconstrained
violence and formidable restraint.

The Sacrifice for Desire

When Mohammed Bouazizi, a poor street trader in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia,
killed himself by setting himself on re on 17 December 2010, that act of
self-sacrice symbolically unleashed the revolutions, uprisings and mass
protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia
and other countries. If these events demonstrated the failure of sala-
jihadi strategies of destroying the regimes they despised, some sala-
jihadis quickly attempted to characterize the events as the Islamic
awakening. Mohammed Bouazizis death was followed by many other
tragic self-immolations in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and
elsewhere, 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-sacrice represented by the deaths of Mohammed
Bouazizi and others is a world away from that of the suicide bomber and
his (or her) desire to kill others. Yet much of the academic literature that
38 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)

seeks to explain the human bomber is dominated by theopolitical ideas of

sacrice and how these might invoke ethics. If sacrice is the oldest form
of realizing meaning in the West (Kahn, 2008: 98), and if sacrice also
assists in organizing the political state and its constitutional arrangement,
then it might appear to make sense to interpolate the suicide bomber
within a recognizable modern narrative of someone who is willing to die
for their political ideals. The latter is a gure whose presence is a con-
stitutive element in modern politics the human rights defender, the
prisoner of conscience, the war martyr.
Yet Devjis characterization of Al Qaeda as an ethical project striving
for a global humanity (2005) or Bin Laden as a gure comparable to
M.K. Gandhi (2008), Honderichs consequentialist idea of terrorism for
humanity (2006), or Papes argument that sala-jihadi suicide bombings
are explained by the presence of occupations (2005) become problem-
atic. In their disparate ways, each writer mobilizes a perspective in which
the human bomber is primarily theorized through a metaphysics of sac-
rice. These examples form part of a wider, seductive universe of intel-
ligibility that is supposed to account theoretically for the rationale of the
human bomber and associate him with some version of an ethical or
political project for humanity or against occupation. Arguments that
the violent act of the human bomber is a form of sacrice reect
broader Western philosophical traditions regarding how we understand
political violence.
Two themes related to sacrice are important to outline before
moving further with the argument of this article. The rst theme is
that violent sacrice is a necessary constitutive excess for creating
social and political order, community or identity. This idea has a
strong lineage in 20th-century social theory (Agambens homo sacer is
a recent demonstration). Within this theme, ritual political violence is an
imperative, whether conceived in sociology (Sorel), anthropology
(Girard) or psychoanalysis (Freud). The limited ritual violence of war
represents 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 as
the renewed boundaries of the nation (Girard, 2005; Kahn, 2008). Those
who were killed in war are a sacricial necessity and their deaths recon-
stitute the boundaries of the peaceful national order. Violent excess and
restraint exist as a doublet: the eruption of the former is a constitutive
emergence that regenerates the eld and rules of the latter. However, if
the sacrice of the body is a requirement so that a new community of
belief and order is constituted, then we are already committed to a
narrow theologically-dened eld that can limit how we might think
about political violence. The gure of the Christ is an obvious protean
form, as is the Abrahamic licidal 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
Bhatt 39

anthropology of the primordial horde and its scapegoat. This commit-

ment marks the boundaries of what remains unthought, including the
possibility that the most lethal political violence may require no deeper
explanation than that its protagonists desire to inict 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 who
remembers, who has knowledge of something by recollection, and who
can thus tell about it while also expanding to include the meaning of a
witness for God, one who might suer death, did not have this latter
meaning as necessary to it until the concept was Christianized (Kittle,
1965: 47681). The dual meaning of the martyr as both a witness and a
person who suers death is shared by orthodox forms of the three main
monotheistic religions. The link between these two meanings is the body
that becomes sacred, and therefore signicant, at precisely the moment it
dies and only because it dies (Kahn, 2008). The body, in its death,
becomes a transcendental witness to truth and is identied with an eman-
ation that sees everything and in that sentinel form, like The Great
Watcher, bears witness and judgement. In so judging, it invites the
entry of an ethical orientation.
It is at this point that the two themes about sacrice described above
coalesce: we are this transcendental witness through our apprehension of
the dead body and why it elected to die, and in the form of that collective
witnessing, our humanity becomes emergent. Something like this is
important for the kinds of positions advocated by Honderich, Devji
and others. Writing about the suicide-bombers sacrice, Devji makes
the unusual claim that:

Martyrdom, then, might well constitute the purest and therefore the
most ethical of acts, because in destroying himself its soldier
becomes fully human by assuming complete responsibility for his
fate 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 sacrice is one in which the person who intends to

kill themselves, and only themselves, believes that in doing so they will have
ceased to exist as a desiring entity, but that because of the mode of their death
it can be hoped that a greater ethical, moral or political recognition will have
occurred, then this is not the sala-jihadi understanding. Nor, indeed, is the
witnessing described above the same as in sala-jihadi thinking. Similarly,
the assertion that in lying dead with his victims the sala-jihadi suicide
bomber demonstrates a common humanity (Devji, 2008) is signicant
only in the most trivial of senses since, for the suicide bomber, his victims,
though fully human, were never part of an ethically legitimate humanity.
40 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)

Sala-jihadi understandings of martyrdom and sacrice are quite

far from accounts that burden them with sanitized languages of ethics,
rectitude or a common humanity. The dominant themes of sacrice in
sala-jihadi writings are related to an economy of reward and retali-
ation. There are several dierent discussions of sacrice in sala-jihadi
thought. One relates to copious and detailed discussions about how to
sacrice those considered unbelievers. One of the clearest discussions of
sacrice in sala-jihadi literature relates to the ritual killing of an
unbeliever (who is typically a Muslim). It forms a distinct section
of 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 collective
beheadings and torture emerging from mainly Iraq and Afghanistan.
The legal debates regarding beheading and torture are extensive and
include ones about the methods and instruments that can be used to cut a
victims head from their spine, whether their throat needs to be slit rst to
bleed them, and other such details. Perhaps exposing the paucity of jus-
tications 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 of
human captives. As is repetitively pleaded in sala-jihadi literature, the
initial slitting of the throat is a mercy that exemplies the virtuous
attributes of the beheader (al-Rahman, 2010a).
There is one important instance in which sala-jihadis do attempt to
mobilize the conception of the sacriced martyr testifying to the truth
of faith in their death and because of their death. However, this has to
be considered critically. In the broader hadith traditions, the categories
of people who might be considered martyrs can expand furiously (for
example, they can include those who died through illness or accident).
Against these traditions, the sala-jihadi martyr is only ever the sui-
cide bomber or a victim of battle. Sala-jihadi discussions of martyr-
dom are often prefaced by the magical hadith story of the people
of the ditch (Surur, n.d.). A recent version aimed at young people in
the US and Europe and written by the late Anwar al-Awlaki puts
it thus:

In the story of the boy which led to the Trench, the King tried to kill
him by throwing him o of a mountain and failed. Then he tried
drowning him in the sea and he failed. So then the young man came
to the King and told him, If you want to kill me, then take one of
my 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 also
had 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
Bhatt 41

man in the name of Allah, what happened? They all became

Muslim. (al-Awlaki, 2005: 50)

The boy allows himself to be killed by an arrow shot at his head at the
moment at which the supreme authority of God is recognized both in his
act of self-sacrice and in the rulers act. The angry ruler then seeks to
destroy the newly converted and they go willingly to their deaths in a pit
of re, a baby speaking to its fearful mother urging her to leap into the
re as her death will symbolize acknowledgement of the only possible
truth (Surur, n.d.). The traditional story of the people of the ditch pre-
sents a complex pedagogy about the essence of authentic faith. Yet in
sala-jihadi hands it serves only one purpose: to expunge the customary
admonishment against suicide.
Central also to sala-jihadi political ideology is virtuous vanguardism.
Sala-jihadis have mobilized the linked ideas of the manifested victori-
ous group (at-taifah al-mansurah) and the saved sect (al rqah
an-najiyah), both prophetic entities that propel a political and military
vanguardism that is unaccountable to anyone (al-Awlaki, 2005). In add-
ition, sala-jihadis mobilize a dierent idea of a group that enjoins good
and forbids evil. In sala-jihadi renditions, the victorious group is a
belligerent group that is wholly immune to criticism or accountability.
Sala-jihadi political thought attempts to progressively subvert each
element of authentic religious authority in order to legitimize an
unaccountable vanguardism of the violent deed, one that can manifest
as almost unconstrained violence against civilians. In the late Anwar al-
Awlakis vision, members of the small group who died while carrying out
extremely violent acts against civilians will rush to Paradise (al-Awlaki,
2010b: 64). Like in end-times Christianity, they are transported instantly
to the Garden where they reside in the crops of birds (in the traditional
conception), or where their souls will be carried in the hearts of the green
birds of Paradise.

The Tropics of Paradise

Many commentators have noted the importance of the inuential cas-
settes (then CDs and now digital les) In the Hearts of Green Birds, about
the stories of those from sala-jihadi militias who died ghting in the
Bosnian 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 the
cultural produce of Al Qaeda and other sala-jihadi militia. Most
recently, As-Sahab (Al Qaedas media organization) has produced sev-
eral chapters of a video series, Winds of Paradise, that exemplies a
variant of this form. If much of the natural landscape in sala-jihadi
aesthetic representations is of the desert, of warriors on horseback,
42 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)

then Paradise is characteristically represented as a tropical rain forest

with misty waterfalls (many other stylized representations of the
Garden exist, including computer-generated green elds and even the
English country garden). The representation of lush rainforest and arid
desert might seem to say much about two aesthetic elements at work
here, but they are by no means the only representations of the natural
landscape. They are, of course, unnatural representations that only have
digitized relevance.
Paradise in sala-jihadi writings has a structure and a hierarchy,
and its detailed elaboration consumes a substantial amount of sala-
jihadi labour. Of importance here are not the familiar accounts con-
cerning intercession for ones relatives or the sexual pleasure oered
to men. Instead, it is the spatial architecture and the hierarchy of
social status that is signicant. Two sociological themes stand out in
sala-jihadi renditions of their paradisiacal entity: wealth and social
status.
Here it is worth considering the writings on Paradise of Masood
Azhar, head of the powerful Jaish-e Mohammed (JeM) militia movement
in Pakistan.4 Azhars text, The Virtues of Jihad, written probably in the
late 1980s, presents several sociologically important themes about
Paradise (Azhar, 1996). His text is heavily interspersed with other such
writings, such is the replicating nature of this material. The subtitle to his
text is translated as the shortest path to Jannah, reecting a persistent
theme in sala-jihadi literature in which ghting and dying in the path of
God is promoted as the fastest route to Paradise: in a single move, a
disinterested path is instigated and diminished.
As with other similar texts, Azhars tract explains that in Paradise,
the martyr has a palace, robes of the nest silk, bowls of rubies, gold,
silver, and many other delights, including concupiscent ones that reveal
the profoundly masculine gender ideology at work. If an innitesimal
sliver of time separates the worlds of the living and the dead, then that
sliver is also an inverting mirror: the sinful material goods and criminal
sensual 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 signicant. For example, during the
Operation Crevice trial (which related to plots to bomb sites in
London), one defendant was reported to have said of customers at
the Ministry of Sound nightclub, a potential target: no one can put
their hands up and say they are innocent those slags dancing around
(R. v. Omar Khyam et al., 2008, EWCA Crim 1612, Opening
Statement). The sala-jihadi coupling of austerity and plenitude with
living and dead, body and soul, is highly suggestive. But in the stark
reduction of the afterlife to a transactional world of goods and pleas-
ures, we are distant from the theologies of the afterlife that exist in the
religious traditions, as indeed we are from sala-jihadi claims about a
Bhatt 43

disinterested pursuit of a pure deed. For Azhar, virtue (fazail in Urdu)

is gross material reward:

A further reason for this great virtue of spending time in Jihad is

that Allah has bought the Muslims lives and worth in exchange for
Jannah. This business transaction can only be fullled in the battle-
eld. Clearly, a Muslim is so happy and pleased with this transac-
tion that he oers his life to Allah in the battleeld of Jannah to
become the buyer of Jannah. (Azhar, 1996: 31)

To be sure, the economic calculus of deed and reward exists in several

sectarian traditions and numerous religions. But in sala-jihadi writings,
the idea of divine reward as purely material property is a striking
transgression.
Of adjacent importance is imagined social status. The sala-jihadi
vision of Paradise represents an architecture of esteem and admiration
for the martyr. This is manifested by the honouring received by the
martyr, the recognition of his nobility, of other entities in servitude to
him, apprehending him as if he was royal. (One might see how being a
cosmic warrior, the ruler of a fantastical realm, immensely wealthy or a
secret agent evokes video games and fantasy cinema more powerfully
than it ever can religious philosophy.) Azhar says, however, that the
martyrs greatest desire is to return to temporal life to ght and die
and return again, indeed a hundred times. On each return to the
Garden, he will get closer to the governor of this realm (Azhar, 1996:
43). In addition to a world of goods and pleasures, of signicance is a
discourse of honour and nobility, of etiquette and place, the theoretical
phenomenology of the visitor to the palace of the king.
Masood Azhars text represents a vision that has been superseded in
rendition rather than essence. In the English language magazine of
Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula, Anwar al-Awlaki says about
Paradise: people are free to do what they like, whenever they like and
for as long as they like (2010b: 64). If the sliver of time that separates life
from death is like an inverting mirror, the political desire represented in
sala-jihadi thinking is strikingly unoriginal: a desired world of rectitude
and authoritarian law set against a hedonism that has to be eliminated,
though it is precisely a version of this hedonism that becomes available to
the martyr once he has slaughtered it on Earth.
Masood Azhars The Virtues of Jihad draws on Abdullah Azzams
work and exemplies the imitative nature of sala-jihadi ideological writ-
ing. This body of ideology, and al wala wa al bara in particular, generate
an anarchic sectarianism and unrestrained declarations of apostasy and
excommunication (takr). The medieval cleric Ibn Taymiyyahs opinion
is often cited: Anybody who supports the kuar in their kufr, or (sup-
ports them) against Muslims, then they are a kar. Also used is a
44 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)

version of the 19th-century text The Slicing Sword against the One Who
Forms Allegiances with the Disbelievers (al-Adhal, 2009). Anwar Al-
Awlaki stated that even if a believer killed every single non-believer on
the 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 and
do not support your ideology. At the same time, as Al-Awlaki said, one is
obliged to kill any unbelievers anywhere. However, if one does not do so,
then one becomes an unbeliever. One important sala-jihadi opinion
states: whoever denies that terrorism is part of Islam, has disbelieved
(ibn Abdul Aziz, n.d.). Signicantly, the word terrorism (irhab) is used
here, rather than jihad or qital, which can both refer to physical battle.
The circular regress unleashed by sala-jihadis leads to the excommuni-
cation of virtually everyone. Their political form leaves no space for an
entity between one and cosmic law, no civil society, not even the family
unless it is rendered into a cosmic natality (brotherhood/motherhood).
We are led back to that narcissistic sala-jihadi vision of temporal
destruction: the entire world, other than oneself, is a delement.

Conclusion
Sala-jihadi ideology comprises an array of oppositions. These doublets
of ideas include: the temporal world and the afterlife; authoritarian law
and violent chaos; loyalty and enmity; delement and plenitude; tangible
lands and imagined spaces; authentic history and sacred time; disinterest
and desire; virtue and reward; piety and profanity. If this is an absolutist
world, it is riddled with its own incongruities. The internal oppositions
that characterize contemporary sala-jihadi ideology are irresolvable
ones and their presence leads to a violently regressive focus, at once
inwardly directed towards its adherents and outwardly towards others,
mainly co-religionists. This leads to a path towards self-destruction that
has been well described (Lahoud, 2010). The themes of indiscriminate,
cleansing, cosmic violence co-exist with ones obsessed with authoritarian
order. If the imagined Caliphate forms a tangible link between cosmos
and nomos, sala-jihadis have failed to accomplish anything like creating
its nucleus.
The political vision of sala-jihadis projects an intriguing association
between the worlds of the living and the dead. It is dicult to view this as
a religious conception, so removed is its discursive apparatus regarding
violence, death and sacrice from the lineages it claims. The literalist,
rote-like nature of sala-jihadi political material is dogmatic in the extreme
regarding its righteousness and its ideology of enmity. That its producers
feel compelled to repetitively generate more justications for their ideology
is the clearest demonstration of the extent to which this ideology is so widely
rejected. Rather than presenting a recognizable ethical project, sala-jihadi
Bhatt 45

ideology promises a world of imagined material reward and noble social

status that only enmity and violence can supply.

Notes
1. The term Al Qaeda refers to the core group formerly led by Bin Laden and
to militia that claim affiliation to it and sometimes use Al Qaeda in their
names. Of this larger cluster of militia, their formal relation to the core group
was deeply contested (see Lahoud et al., 2012). The term salafi-jihadi is used
to distinguish a specific ideological constellation from political Islamists (such
as 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-Turabis former Sudanese
regime, 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 is
given in Abu Qatada (n.d.: 1218). Salafi-jihadi is a contested concept
among those who identify with it as well as within the academic literature
(Hegghammer, 2009).
2. Relatively little of Al Qaedas expansive ideological and creedal literature was
authored by Bin Laden. The main ideological, strategic and technical writings
were written by a diverse array of clerics and operatives. Some, such as
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohammed al-Maqdisi, Abu Qatada, Abu Musab as-
Suri, Abu Yahya al-Libi or the late Anwar al-Awlaki, are relatively well
known. Others, such as the late Yusuf al-Uyayri, ideological figures like
Attiyatalla and clerics such as Abu Basir al-Tartusi or Abul Mundhir
al-Shinqiti, less so.
3. Some of the material used below was collected as part of a Leverhulme Trust
Major Research Fellowship (20058), reference F07605F, titled The
Geosociology 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 given
here.
4. Though the JeM has been part of the Al Qaeda combine, it arises from a
different lineage, termed here revolutionary Deobandism. The JeM (with a
range of other Deobandi militia and the salafi-jihadi Lashkar-e Tayyiba) has
been associated with training for many Al Qaeda plots in the UK and
elsewhere.

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Chetan Bhatt is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology,

London School of Economics and Political Science.