Key Findings

+ The ”original” Al-Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden accounts for a mere fraction of jihadist media production.

+ Virtual media production and distribution entities (MPDEs) link varied groups under the general ideological rubric of the global jihadist movement. The same media entities that “brand” jihadist media also create virtual links between the various armed groups that fall into the general category of Al-Qaeda and affiliated movements.

+ Three key entities connect Al-Qaeda and affiliated movements to the outside world through the internet. These three media entities — Fajr, the Global Islamic Media Front, and Sahab — receive materials from more than one armed group and post those materials to the internet.

+ Information operations intended to disrupt or undermine the effectiveness of jihadist media can and should target the media entities that brand these media and act as the virtual connective tissue of the global movement.

+ While video is an important component of jihadist media, text products comprise the bulk of the daily media flow. Within text products, periodicals focused on specific “fronts” of the jihad are an important genre that deserves more attention from researchers.

+ The vast majority of jihadist media products focus on conflict zones: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

+ The priorities of the global jihadist movement, as represented by its media arm, are operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and North Africa.

+ Jihadist media are attempting to mimic a “traditional” structure in order to boost credibility and facilitate message control. While conventional wisdom holds that jihadist media have been quick to exploit technological innovations to advance their cause, they are moving toward a more structured approach based on consistent branding and quasi-official media entities. Their reasons for doing so appear to be a desire to boost the credibility of their products and ensure message control.

+ In line with this strategy, the daily flow of jihadist media that appears on the internet is consistently and systematically branded.

Current Trends in Islamist Ideology — Volume 6
Source: Hudson Institute

This special volume of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology is addressed to a most important subject—the subject of the organization, or group of organizations, known as the

Current Trends in Islamist Ideology — Volume 6
Source: Hudson Institute

This special volume of Current Trends in Islamist Ideology is addressed to a most important subject—the subject of the organization, or group of organizations, known as the Muslim Brotherhood. The importance of this subject partially derives from the importance of another related subject: the worldwide Islamic phenomenon and move ment variously known as Islamism, Salafism, radical Islam, militant Islam, political Islam and the like. Since the events of 9/11, we have all learned that understanding this movement properly—broadly, deeply and accurately—is a very great necessity. It is a necessity if we are to understand the present-day world situation and crisis and if we are to devise sensible policies to address them. To this end, an understanding of the Muslim Brotherhood is absolutely essential and arguably more important than anything else. Nevertheless, over the past few years the Brotherhood has not stood in the foreground of discussion and reflection. The purpose of this volume is to address—or rather, to begin to redress—that oversight or neglect.

+ Full Document (PDF; 491 KB)

Previous volumes also available here.

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Reading Khamenei: The World View of Iran’s Most Powerful Leader
By Karim Sadjadpour

There is perhaps no leader in the world more important to current world affairs but less known and understood than Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran. In a unique and timely new study Carnegie’s Karim Sadjadpour presents an in-depth political profile of Khamenei based on a careful reading of three decades’ worth of his writings and speeches.

Source: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Europe and Islam
Source: American Enterprise Institute

This pamphlet is the text of the 2007 Irving Kristol Lecture, delivered at the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C., on March 7, 2007. The Irving Kristol Award, named for the eminent author and intellectual and longtime AEI senior fellow, is the Institute’s highest honor, bestowed annually by its Council of Academic Advisers. The Irving Kristol lectures (and their predecessors before 2003, the Francis Boyer lectures) are posted on the AEI website at www.aei.org/kristolaward/.

The 2007 Kristol Award was presented to Bernard Lewis, the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University, and long the free world’s preeminent student and interpreter of Islam, the Ottoman Empire, and the modern Middle East. Professor Lewis earned his PhD from the School of Oriental Studies at the University of London in 1939 and taught there for thirty-five years, interrupting his academic pursuits only to serve during World War II in the British Army (Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps) and for a while with a department of the Foreign Office. In 1974 he moved to the United States to accept his initial appointment at Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study. Among historians and other scholars, Professor Lewis’s stature was secured through such deep and luminous studies as The Arabs in History (1950), The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), The Political Language of Islam (1988), and The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (1994).

Following the terrorist attacks of September 2001, Professor Lewis’s works attracted intense interest from a wider public seeking to understand the turmoil in the Muslim world that had exploded with such ferocity into the West. His prescient essay, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” published in the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, was widely reprinted and discussed. He lectured widely, counseled with top government officials, appeared on television, and wrote two new books. In What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Modern Middle East (2002), he analyzed the fall of Islamic civilization from superiority in almost every area of human knowledge to a “poor, weak, and ignorant” backwater dominated by “shabby tyrannies . . . modern only in their apparatus of repression and terror.” In The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003), he assessed the prospects for liberal political institutions in the Middle East. “If freedom fails and terror triumphs, the peoples of Islam will be the first and greatest victims,” he wrote. “They will not be alone and many others will suffer with them.”

+ Full Document (PDF; 296 KB)

Engineers of Jihad (PDF; 447 KB)
Source: Oxford University, Department of Sociology Working Papers

We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world, though not among the extremist Islamic groups which have emerged in Western countries more recently. We also find that engineers alone are strongly over-represented among graduates in violent groups in both realms. This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists. We consider four hypotheses that could explain this pattern. Is the engineers’ prominence among violent Islamists an accident of history amplified through network links, or do their technical skills make them attractive recruits? Do engineers have a ‘mindset’ that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism, or is their vigorous radicalization explained by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries? We argue that the interaction between the last two causes is the most plausible explanation of our findings, casting a new light on the sources of Islamic extremism and grounding macro theories of radicalization in a micro-level perspective.

The Rise of Islamists in the Near East: The EU, the US and Hamas (PDF; 228 KB)
Source: Center for Security Studies

The resurgence of Islamists in the Levant is changing the regional balance of power and confronts the West with new challenges. The EU and the US will hardly be able to curtail the polarization and radicalization of the Palestinian population with their strategy of joining with Israel and moderate Arab regimes to isolate the democratically elected Hamas. Europe is faced with the difficulty of formulating a sustainable Middle East policy that will not cause new transatlantic frictions.