Guide to Islamist Movements (2 Volume Set)
Language: English
Pages: 800
ISBN: 0765617471
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This is the first comprehensive guide to today's most important, yet least understood transnational ideology - political Islamism. The movement takes many forms, ranging from electoral participation to revolutionary terrorism and global jihad, and influences the politics of virtually every country around the globe. The guide examines the movement's diverse groups, ideas, and activities, including the beliefs, organizational structures, and interactions of the different groups. It focuses on thinkers and ideologies, movements and parties, and responding government policies and repression. The guide begins with two general essays. The first is an overview of contemporary Islamism that assesses its roots in the history of Islam and traces the rise of Islamist thought through the twentieth century to contemporary times. The second essay addresses the concept of 'global jihad' and jihadist movements, especially in relationship to terrorism, and provides background to the various groups and movements discussed in the book. Following these introductions, sections are organized geographically and cover the areas of intense, and known, Islamist activity - Sub-Shaharan Africa, Asia, Australia and the Pacific, Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. Essays within the sections examine specific countries and regions, and detail the groups and activities within these areas. The essays include detailed bibliographic information for further research.
Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror
The Dying Sahara: US Imperialism and Terror in Africa
Tolerating Terrorism in the West : An International Survey
Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century
My Guantanamo Diary: The Detainees and the Stories They Told Me
Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State
the greatest Islamic scholars of history, such as Ibn Taymiyya, Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab, xliii or Hasan al-Banna—even though he is far from being a cleric or a scholar. Yet bin Ladin’s ability to create such a tremendous turning point in Islamic history makes him a candidate for such a position in the eyes of the jihadi-Salafists. Persistent posts about the connection between al-Qa’ida—and recently the Taliban as well—and the Islamic prophecies of the apocalypse can be seen in jihadi forums.
is possible that CIPK helped al-Qa’ida set up operations in Kenya. Furthermore, an assessment by the French publication Intelligence Online suggests that “it appears improbable” the 2002 attacks in Mombassa “could have been planned without the help of elements gravitating around [CIPK].” Although not nearly approaching the levels of the Nigerian situation, small signs of Islamism’s potential to impinge on the rights of the individual—especially those who are Muslim—emerge. According to a March
became deeply involved with educational institutions, maintaining close links with Kuwait. The other group, Jama’at Ahl al-Islami, was founded by Shaykh Muhammad Mu’alim after he received his religious degrees from al-Azhar. This important figure of Somali Islam was Qadiri and initi- 23 ated tafsir (commentary on the Koran) at the Abd al-Qadir mosque in Mogadishu with modern references and a wish to address contemporary issues. After the religious scholars became openly critical of the regime
Call to God”), which, for a brief period in the early 1990s, threatened to proselytize non-Muslims and forcibly impose an Islamist orthodoxy on Sudan’s population. Such an agenda also supposes an active, sometimes violent, homogenization of the community of Muslims. Its engine is a reinterpreted, rerooted Islam, relevant to the technology of modernity but resistant to the perceived cultural pollution of liberalism and secularism. The brief Islamist rule by the Mahdist movement in the late
progress. Indifference to religion, Khomeini charged, was taken to be a symbol of civilization, while piety was a sign of backwardness to an elite that preferred to be tourists in Europe than pilgrims in Mecca. To make matters worse from Khomeini’s standpoint, this Western cultural invasion was also popular in many ways. People wanted cheaper, better-quality goods and liberating ideas. Assertions of defiance barely concealed a nagging conviction that Western ascendancy was inevitable and that one
