Are we really seeing the rise of a ‘new jihad’?

DIY terrorism
The world is host to a wide array of violent Islamist movements with differing ideologies, aims and tactics. They cannot be taken as a single phenomenon – the very public ideological battles between contemporary al-Qaeda and IS being a telling point.

Where violent strategies differ, they do so less by virtue ideological reasoning and more in reflection of a group’s political pragmatism and real capabilities (or lack thereof). That the terrain of Islamist violence is constantly shifting says plenty about these groups’ past failures, but offers little with which to predict future successes. What we can identify is the rise of a very particular idea: that it’s an individual’s duty to engage in violence.

This began in the 1980s, influenced by the 13th-century fatwas of theologian Ibn Tamiyya and reinterpreted Islamic concepts from Egyptian fundamentalist scholar Sayyid Qutb. The idea of individual duty was expounded by Palestinian fighter Abdullah Azzam, commonly considered the mentor of Osama bin Laden, in his 1984 declaration Defense of Muslim Lands, which clearly outlines jihad as an individual obligation.

It also comes up in The Absent Obligation, a much-overlooked 2000 work by Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement. It argues that the “lesser” armed jihad should be elevated to the status of a sixth pillar of Islam and become a duty for all Muslims.

The idea that violence is justified as the duty of individuals has proved to be an invaluable recruiting tool. For years now, it has been attracting fighters from across the globe to places as diverse as Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya and elsewhere. In this sense, then, the individualistic “jihadi” strategies and practices on display in recent attacks in Europe are far from new.

What is in fact new about this violence is the terrain on which it is now being incubated and unleashed.

Breaking up
Europe is witnessing a worrying surge in acts of violence perpetrated not by “aliens” or foreigners, but by its own citizens. As the story of the Manchester bomber also demonstrates, the “training grounds” for such attackers are also shifting – in this case, to Libya, which remains a violent and weakly governed state with ample space for violent extremist groups. It’s a perfect place for even a tiny number of potential terrorists to gain experience with whatever forms of violence and weaponry are on offer.

But again, this is not new. Various Islamist movements over the years have learnt from previous groups’ failures to protect themselves and have survived by aborting centralized hierarchical structures and opting to work in “cells” with little or no direct contact to a central organization. Al-Suri seized on the strategic potential of this approach: “These spontaneous operations performed by individuals and cells here and there over the whole world, without connection between them, have put the local and international intelligence apparatus in a state of confusion, as arresting the [members] of aborted cells does not influence the operational activities of others who are not connected to them.”

If this is indeed the principal strategy behind the various violent, extremism-motivated actions taking place in Europe, then the continents’ security services should know not to look for centralized command structures which simply won’t exist. And if radical Islamist terrorism really is moving in this direction, that poses a problem to Kepel’s assertion that “jihad fatigue” is setting in. As new terrains and individuals emerge to incubate and cause havoc, the concepts they use and the actions they take will keep evolving – as they have done for decades now.

Samantha May is Research Fellow, International Relations, University of Aberdeen. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution / No derivative).