Jihadism

Political Islam portalThe term 'Jihadism' (also 'jihadist movement', 'jihadi movement' and variants) is a 21st-century neologism found in Western languages to describe Islamist militant movements perceived as military movements 'rooted in Islam' and 'existentially threatening' to the West. It has been described as a 'difficult term to define precisely', because it remains a recent neologism with no single, generally accepted meaning. The term 'jihadism' first appeared in South Asian media; Western journalists adopted it in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks of 2001. It has since been applied to various insurgent and terrorist movements whose ideology is based on the Islamic notion of jihad. The term 'Jihadism' (also 'jihadist movement', 'jihadi movement' and variants) is a 21st-century neologism found in Western languages to describe Islamist militant movements perceived as military movements 'rooted in Islam' and 'existentially threatening' to the West. It has been described as a 'difficult term to define precisely', because it remains a recent neologism with no single, generally accepted meaning. The term 'jihadism' first appeared in South Asian media; Western journalists adopted it in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks of 2001. It has since been applied to various insurgent and terrorist movements whose ideology is based on the Islamic notion of jihad. Contemporary jihadism ultimately has its roots in the late 19th- and early 20th-century ideological developments of Islamic revivalism, which developed into Qutbism and related ideologies during the mid-20th century. The terrorist organisations partaking in the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979 to 1989 reinforced the rise of jihadism, which has been propagated in various armed conflicts throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Gilles Kepel has diagnosed a specifically Salafi jihadism within the Salafi movement of the 1990s. Jihadism with an international, Pan-Islamist scope in this sense is also known as global jihadism. 'Jihadism' is usually defined as Sunni Islamist armed struggle, and fighters often target Shia Islam, as well as Sufism and Ahmadiyya. The term 'jihadism' has been in use since the 1990s more widely after 9/11 attacks. It was first used in the Indian and Pakistani media, and by French academics who used the more exact term 'jihadist-Salafist'. According to Martin Kramer as of 2003, 'jihadism is used to refer to the most violent persons and movements in contemporary Islam, including al-Qaeda.' David Romano has defined his use of the term as referring to 'an individual or political movement that primarily focuses its attention, discourse, and activities on the conduct of a violent, uncompromising campaign that they term a jihad'. Following Daniel Kimmage, he distinguishes the jihadist discourse of jihad as a global project to remake the world from the resistance discourse of groups like Hizbullah, which is framed as a regional project against a specific enemy. Most Muslims do not use the term, disliking the association of illegitimate violence with a noble religious concept and instead prefer the use of delegitimising terms like 'deviants'. The term 'jihadist globalism' is also often used in relation to jihadism. Academic Manfred Steger proposes an extension of the term 'jihadist globalism' to apply to all extremely violent strains of religiously influenced ideologies that articulate the global imaginary into concrete political agendas and terrorist strategies (these include Al Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah, Hamas and Hezbollah, which he finds 'today's most spectacular manifestation of religious globalism'). 'Jihad Cool' is a term used by Western security experts concerning the re-branding of militant jihadism into something fashionable, or 'cool', to younger people through social media, magazines, rap videos, toys, propaganda videos, and other means. It is a sub-culture mainly applied to individuals in developed nations who are recruited to travel to conflict zones on jihad. For example, jihadi rap videos make participants look 'more MTV than Mosque', according to NPR, which was the first to report on the phenomenon in 2010.