Islamic terrorism

• 1. Introduction

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  Islamic terrorism is the name given to attacks by militants who invoke Islam to pursue aims such as jihad and a restored caliphate. Even the name is disputed. A 2024 study by the Fondation pour l'innovation politique counted 66,872 Islamist terrorist attacks between 1979 and April 2024. Together they killed at least 249,941 people.

  Behind that tally sit questions that scholars, officials and clerics still argue over. Who actually bears the cost of this violence, and in which parts of the world? Where did its ideas come from, and which texts do its supporters cite? What pushes a particular person to join, and is the answer faith, politics, money or friendship? And should the label itself be used at all?

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• 2. The Problem Of Naming

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  George W. Bush and Tony Blair were president and prime minister when the 11th of September 2001 attacks struck. Both repeatedly said the war against terrorism had nothing to do with Islam. Imran Khan, prime minister of Pakistan, and the academic Bruce Lawrence also reject any link between Islam and terrorism. For them, attaching the word Islamic to the violence is simply wrong.

  Barack Obama explained his own wording at a 2016 town hall meeting. He said groups like Al-Qaeda or ISIL had claimed Islam as an excuse. In his words, they "have perverted and distorted and tried to claim the mantle of Islam for an excuse for basically barbarism and death." He added that he was careful not to lump these murderers into "the billion Muslims that exist around the world."

  In January 2008 the US Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties published a report. Its title was Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims. It opened with two words: "Words matter." The office consulted leading US-based scholars and commentators on Islam. They agreed that government should avoid portraying terrorists as brave fighters, legitimate soldiers or spokesmen for ordinary Muslims.

  The experts therefore urged caution with terms such as "jihadist," "Islamic terrorist," "Islamist," and "holy warrior." Critics of the phrase have called it counter-productive and damaging to community relations. Some argue that "Islamist terrorism" is the more accurate label, since the first phrase seems to implicate the whole faith. Whatever the vocabulary, the numbers behind the argument are hard to dispute.

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• 3. Who Pays The Price

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  Studies of victims reach a result that surprises many Western listeners: 80-90% of the people killed are Muslim. Geography explains much of it. Some 96.7% of the attacks in the Fondation pour l'innovation politique count occurred in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Research by the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag found that most victims of attacks killing twelve or more people were also Muslims.

  The five countries hardest hit by terrorism of every kind remain Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria and Somalia, all of them Muslim countries. In the worst-affected regions, the attackers have been met by armed, independent resistance groups. Prominent Islamic figures and groups have also condemned the violence outright.

  The curve of deaths is steep. Annual fatalities from terrorist attacks rose sharply from 2011 and reached a peak of 33,438 in 2014. By 2019 the Global Terrorism Index put the figure at 13,826, a fall of 59% from the peak. The attacks themselves tell a similar story. Some 56,413 of them fall between 2013 and April 2024, which is 84.4% of everything recorded since 1979.

  Welt am Sonntag counted 31,221 Islamist attacks between the 11th of September 2001 and the 21st of April 2019, with at least 146,811 dead. In 2016 alone, four of the five most violent groups in the world were Islamist extremist groups. They carried out 88% of the 2,916 attacks by the top five and caused 99% of their 14,017 deaths.

  The toll is concentrated in a few hands. From 1979 to April 2024, the Taliban, Islamic State, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda were responsible for more than 80% of all victims. Whether any of this has a precedent before the 20th century is itself disputed.

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• 4. Roads To 1979

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  The writer Ibn Warraq traces the story to the beginning of Islam. He points to the Kharijites, Sahl ibn Salama, Barbahari, the Kadizadeli movement and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. In his view each was a violent movement seeking to revive a neglected, true Islam. Others insist there was no terrorism in Islam before the late 20th century. Some say the 7th-century Kharijites began as a political faction, then adopted extreme doctrines. They were notable for declaring Muslim opponents unbelievers worthy of death, and for a strong resemblance to ISIL.

  The modern wave began with secular movements. In the late 1960s Al Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine began targeting civilians outside the immediate conflict arena. After Israel's victory over Arab forces in 1967, Palestinian leaders concluded that the Arab world could not win on the battlefield. They drew lessons from the Jewish struggle against the British in Palestine. They also learned from revolutionary movements in Latin America, North Africa and Southeast Asia. The result was a turn from guerrilla war to urban terrorism.

  Meanwhile the Arab Cold War pitted US-aligned monarchies such as Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Jordan against Soviet-aligned secular governments. Those governments ruled Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Libya and Iraq. The rivalry encouraged religious movements in the Middle East, backed by Saudi Arabia, which clashed with the dominant Nasserist and Ba'athist nationalists.

  Some influences ran in surprising directions. Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun militia and later an Israeli prime minister, wrote a book called The Revolt. It influenced both Carlos Marighella's urban guerrilla theory and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda. The Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman argues in Rise and Kill First that Hezbollah's 1983 attacks in Beirut mirrored an earlier campaign. The targets were American, French and Israeli military installations. The model was the Haganah and Irgun bombing campaign against the British in 1946. An Israeli Mossad agent told Bergman: "We were teaching the Lebanese how effective a car bomb could be."

  The year 1979 is widely seen as the turning point. The Soviet-Afghan War drew unprecedented support from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the US for anti-Soviet jihadists. The Iranian Revolution, the Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty all fed the same shift. Bruce Hoffman of the RAND Corporation found that in 1980 only 2 of 64 terrorist groups were religiously motivated. By 1995 the figure was 26 of 56, most of them guided by Islam.

  The Taliban, backed by Pakistan, emerged in Afghanistan in 1994. From 1989 onward, religious extremists grew more willing to strike far from home. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center foreshadowed the attacks of 2001. The ideas that licensed such strikes had been written decades earlier, in an Egyptian prison cell.

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• 5. Manifesto And Money

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  Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Islamist theoretician, wrote his manifesto Milestones while in prison. The scholar Gilles Kepel says his ideas formed the modern Islamist movement. US Army Colonel Dale C. Eikmeier calls the resulting ideology, Qutbism, the center of gravity of al-Qaeda and related groups. Qutb also influenced Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's second-in-command.

  Milestones argued that sharia must be enforced. It said a vanguard should use preaching and physical force to clear away obstacles. It also insisted that offensive jihad should not be set aside in favor of defensive jihad. Eikmeier summarizes the creed as a belief that Muslims have strayed from the pure Islam of Muhammad's time. In this view, only a literal reading of the Quran and Hadith can restore it, and ordinary believers may interpret them without deferring to scholars. Qutb called the Muslim world apostate, or jahiliyah. Yet he did not specifically call for the execution of any apostates.

  Muhammad abd-al-Salam Faraj went further. He was the main theoretician of the group that assassinated Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In The Neglected Duty, Faraj cited a fatwa issued in 1303 by the medieval jurist Ibn Taymiyyah. The jurist ruled that fighting the Mongol invaders of Syria was obligatory because they did not follow sharia, even though they had converted. Faraj applied that logic to Sadat, calling him an apostate who had kept nothing of Islam but its name.

  Wahhabism is a separate current, sponsored by oil-exporting Saudi Arabia. It is deeply conservative, and its founder taught that Muslims owe unquestioned allegiance to a ruler who leads according to God's law. Even so, it has been accused of aiding terrorism. It shares with Islamism a revulsion toward Western influences, a demand for strict sharia and a belief in armed jihad. Al-Qaeda and similar groups are more often described as following a fusion of Qutbism and Wahhabism.

  Mir Faizal argues that only three Sunni movements have been tied to violence against civilians: Salafi, Deobandi and Barelvi. Of those, only Salafi jihadism is involved in global terrorism, through al-Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram. Barelvi terrorism is limited to attacks on alleged blasphemers in Pakistan. Deobandi groups have almost no influence beyond Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

  The money was enormous. Until at least 2017, Saudi Arabia spent many billions on spreading the Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. It financed hundreds of Islamic colleges and centers and over a thousand mosques and schools. One twelfth-grade Saudi textbook instructed students that doing battle against infidels was a religious obligation. Saudi money also helped finance the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Then Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman declared that the kingdom was returning to "moderate Islam".

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• 6. Excommunication And Massacre

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  In 1977 a group called Jama'at al-Muslimin, known to the public as Takfir wal-Hijra, kidnapped and killed Muhammad al-Dhahabi. He was an Islamic scholar and former Egyptian government minister. The group's founder had been imprisoned with Sayyid Qutb and became one of his most radical disciples. He held that Egyptian society as a whole was apostate for failing to fight the government. This practice of declaring other Muslims unbelievers is called takfir.

  Traditional Islamic law holds that the blood of someone who leaves Islam is forfeit. Yet earlier scholars warned against making such accusations carelessly. Gilles Kepel noted the danger that Muslims might excommunicate one another and propel the community to complete disaster. Some of Qutb's early followers took his charge of pre-Islamic ignorance literally and declared everyone outside their movement an unbeliever. Police broke up Jama'at al-Muslimin, but it reorganized with thousands of members. Some helped assassinate Sadat, and others joined the Algerian Civil War and al-Qaeda.

  Egypt's 1990s insurgency, led mainly by Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, targeted civilians as well as police and officials. In the single bloody year of 1993 it killed or wounded 1106 people. Across the Mediterranean, the 1991-2002 Algerian Civil War saw the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria, or GIA, declare the general public impious. Its leader Antar Zouabri claimed the Rais and Bentalha massacres as an "offering to God." He declared that "except for those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserving of death." Massacres starting in April 1998 killed tens and sometimes hundreds of civilians each. No one knows how many were the work of the GIA rather than infiltrated security forces.

  In August 1998 Taliban fighters killed 8000 mostly Shia Hazara non-combatants in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. The Taliban commander, Mullah Niazi, spoke from the city's mosques afterward. He said: "Hazaras are not Muslim, they are Shi'a." Revenge and ethnic hatred may also have played a part.

  Daesh, the Islamic State, carried the practice furthest. From 2013 to 2020, directly or through affiliates, it caused 27,947 terrorist deaths. Most victims were Muslims whom the group regarded as unbelievers. The thirteenth issue of its magazine Dabiq devoted dozens of pages to arguing that Shia must be killed. The group also revived slavery of non-Muslims, specifically the Yazidi minority, and declared any Muslim who disagreed to be an apostate. In 2015 ISIL even pronounced Jabhat al-Nusra, then al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, an apostate group.

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• 7. Martyrdom And Its Rulebooks

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  The word suicide is almost never used by the attackers themselves. They call the act istishhad, or martyrdom operation. The attacker is a shahid, literally a witness, because Islam has strong strictures against taking one's own life. The author Sadakat Kadri says the idea of Muslims blowing themselves up for God was unheard of before 1983. Not until the early 1990s did anyone try to justify killing innocent Muslims away from a battlefield. For more than a decade the tactic stayed with Hezbollah and other Lebanese Shi'a factions.

  It then spread with astonishing speed. First the targets were American soldiers, then mostly Israelis, and in Iraq mosques and shrines, with Shiite Iraqis the main intended victims. In Afghanistan, both the bombers and the victims are orthodox Sunni Muslims. One bombing in Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand Province, killed Muslims applying to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. By a conservative count, over three times as many Iraqis died from suicide bombings in 2003-6 as Israelis in the ten years from 1996-2006.

  Classical jurisprudence, developed towards the end of the 8th century, was far more restrictive. It set detailed rules for beginning, conducting and ending jihad. It also covered the treatment of prisoners and the division of booty. Unless the Muslim community was suddenly attacked, jihad was a collective duty, directed by the caliph. This was designed in part to avoid episodes like the Kharijite killing of Caliph Ali. Dying by one's own hand merited a special place in Hell. Followers of Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Ruhollah Khomeini and al-Qaeda reverse this. They treat defensive global jihad as a personal obligation needing no caliph.

  Al-Qaeda's first attack on a US target that killed civilians was a 1992 hotel bombing in Aden, Yemen. A figure named Abu Hajer defended it using Ibn Taymiyyah's fatwa. After the 11th of September 2001, al-Qaeda issued a more systematic statement. It argued that America leads a Western war on Islam. It said civilians who vote or serve as human shields can be killed, and that treaties with Western states are void. These arguments were not widely accepted by Muslims.

  Two further texts shaped the Islamic State's methods. Management of Savagery, written by Abu Bakr Naji in 2004, outlines a strategy to create a caliphate. The first step is destroying vital economic and strategic targets and terrifying the enemy with cruelty. It urges that atrocities be publicized with videos and photographs. The Jurisprudence of Blood came from the theologian Abu Abdullah al-Muhajir. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi used its 579-page manuscript at al-Qaeda in Iraq training camps. Charlie Winter of The Atlantic called it a "theological playbook used to justify the group's abhorrent acts." Orwa Ajjoub said it rationalizes suicide operations, the mutilation of corpses, beheading and the killing of children and non-combatants.

  Donald Holbrook studied 30 works by jihadist propagandists for the scripture they cite. An-Nisa 4:74-75 appeared most often. Verse 9:5, which begins "slay the idolaters wheresoever you find them," is also popular. Holbrook noted that the limiting conditions at the end of that verse are rarely quoted.

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• 8. Why People Join

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  Maajid Nawaz, Graeme Wood and Ibn Warraq blame extremist readings of Islam. Mehdi Hasan points to political grievance combined with social-psychological maladjustment. James L. Payne and Michael Scheuer see a struggle against Western aggression toward Muslim lands. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, in The Age of Sacred Terror, call the attacks an "act of redemption." Wood argues that much of what ISIS does looks nonsensical unless one accepts its commitment to a seventh-century legal order and, ultimately, the apocalypse.

  The profiles of recruits complicate the religious story. A restricted 2008 report by Britain's MI5, based on hundreds of case studies, found no typical profile. Many of those involved did not practise their faith regularly, and the proportion of converts was higher than average. MI5 found evidence that a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation. In 2015 Olivier Roy found that French radicals were young, often converts, and almost none had been pious beforehand. He argues that jihad is "the only cause on the global market." If you kill in silence, he says, the local newspaper reports it. If you kill yelling "Allahu Akbar," you make national headlines.

  Others stress politics. Payne found that 72% of Osama bin Laden's statements criticized U.S., Western or Jewish aggression, oppression and exploitation of Muslim lands. Only 1% attacked American society and culture. Michael Scheuer summarizes: "They hate us for what we do, not who we are." A US State Department graph shows attacks escalating after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5, told the Iraq inquiry that the security services had warned Tony Blair the war would raise the terrorist threat.

  Nawaz and Sam Harris answer that many acts have no link to Western intervention. Nawaz asks what the killing of Yazidis on Mount Sinjar has to do with US foreign policy. He notes that the bombers of the 7th of July 2005 were born and raised in Yorkshire and had never set foot in Iraq.

  Poverty explains less than commentators first guessed. In 2002 Alan B. Krueger and Jitka Maleckova found little reason to expect that reducing poverty or raising education would by themselves reduce international terrorism. Alberto Abadie found terrorism risk tracks political freedom more closely than national income. Martin Kramer adds that organizers are seldom poor, though their foot-soldiers often are.

  Social ties may matter most. Marc Sageman studied 172 participants in the jihad. He concluded that bonds of family and friendship drew alienated young Muslims in, not madness or poverty. Scott Atran found that group dynamics predict suicide bombing better than religion does. Terrorists, in his view, die less for a cause than for each other. A 2008 US military study in Iraq found suicide bombers were almost always single men aged 18 to 30, with a mean age of 22.

  Robert Pape argues that suicide attackers pursue a clear strategic goal of forcing democracies to withdraw their forces. Martin Kramer replies that Hezbollah began suicide bombings only after a complex reworking of the concept of martyrdom. Occupation alone, he says, would not have been enough. "The only way to apply a brake to suicide terrorism," he argues, "is to undermine its moral logic." That means encouraging Muslims to see its incompatibility with their own values.

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