The concluding chapter argues that the consolidation of the Company state in India led to a radical reconfiguration of the politics of Muslim pilgrimage. From 1818, a “paramount” Company Raj sought to secure its newly acquired sovereign supremacy by designating as legally deviant or permissible a host of circulating figures in and around India, including hajj pilgrims. Yet, against this backdrop, the British also became increasingly anxious of the supposedly subversive forces that were being smuggled into the Indian Subcontinent from Arabia by so-called Wahhabis, a colonial byword for militant jihadis. But then, in its efforts to tackle the violent insurgencies of “Muhammadan fanatics” as a specifically political problem, and so distinct from the putatively “religious” practices of pilgrim “faqirs,” the Company state and its secular legal regimes also became entangled in administrative quandaries of their own making. The result was not only pervasive forms of colonial “Mussulmanophobia” and repeated recourses to state violence against suspected Wahhabis under the cover of states of emergency. With the bigger and bloodier crisis of 1857, it was also a set of official gestures that radically recast and reified “religion” as the natural wellspring of modern Muslim politics in South Asia.

Chapter 2 uses a colloquial expression from contemporary Mauritania – “al-ḥikma kuntiyya aw fūtiyya” – to examine Mauritanian narratives that place the consolidation and localization of the Islamic esoteric sciences in the Sahara in the eighteenth century. The expression shows how Mauritanians today associate these sciences with the powerful scholarly and commercial network of the Kunta, a confederation known for its Islamic learning, and the Fulbe torodbe scholars who established theocratic states in West Africa. Both communities continue to associate these sciences as solely embedded in networks linked genealogically to Arab identity. This colloquial expression shows how Mauritanians today conceive of this esoteric religious wisdom as deployed at the very local level, spread through two regionally important religious communities, yet simultaneously connected to the longer history of Islam in the Muslim world, and circulating at the global level of Sufi networks. By the end of the nineteenth century, differences in interpretation and practice of the Islamic esoteric sciences had amplified: questions regarding which esoteric and medical techniques were permitted within Islam and which were not were intensely debated, as scholars from the Saharan West elaborated their own intellectual positions and political objectives in the ways they classified these sciences.

Chapter 1 is dedicated to the interpretation of a recently discovered, unpublished typescript by Strauss on Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. In this transcript, available as Appendix A and composed sometime after 1956, Strauss underscores the conflict between philosophy and Islam in Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. The transcript consists only of short notes and therefore, to reveal its message, it needs to be interpreted in the context of Strauss’s other writings. Strauss’s interpretation of Averroes is based on the idea that Averroes must have been aware of the incompatibility of Islamic revelation with the best regime of Plato. Unlike other scholars, who are mainly preoccupied with Averroes’s access or lack thereof to a reliable translation of Plato’s Republic, Strauss argues that the deficiencies of Averroes’s commentary do not mean that Averroes did not have access to Plato’s Republic; he claims that such apparent deficiencies might be intentional and significant for understanding Averroes’s views.

The Sultanate was a global state that interacted with regimes in North, West and East Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia. Its ideology of diplomacy focused on maintenance of the balance of power extant during the formative stage of its founding: control over the Syrian Littoral and Red Sea nautical routes to South and East Asia. Senior officers appointed from Cairo ruled Syrian provincial capitals as viceroys, tying them directly to the imperial center. On the Red Sea coast of Arabia (Hijaz), the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca exercised local political authority, but from Baybars’ reign were compelled to comply with the Sultanate’s commercial and fiduciary policies over the spice trade. Tensions in Southeastern Asia Minor heightened when objectives of territorial stasis advocated by the Mamluks clashed with aims of territorial conquest asserted by the Ottomans. Regional principalities pursued their own goals of autonomy with varying degrees of success. The international system of commerce, centered on Venetian and Mamluk exploitation of trade routes to Asia through the Red Sea, was decisively altered by the Portuguese entry to the Indian Ocean. When the Ottomans defeated the Cairo Sultanate, its centrality in the global environment was already diminished.

At the core of the politicization of Islam is the territorialization of Islamic belonging, which during the nation-building phase has manifested itself in ways previously unknown in the former Muslim Empires. This territorialization was combined with the elimination of religious and cultural diversity, leading to a specific form of religious nationalism called hegemonic. The genealogical investigation shows the conceptual and institutional changes that constitute the bedrock of the current manifestations of Political Islam from the last phase of the Ottoman Empire to the current national situations. Areas of politicization in Syria and Turkey are presented from the inception of the nation-state to today’s civil war in Syria and the role of Turkey. These areas cover the status of sharia in state law, the boundaries of the secular space, the status of political violence, and the influence of regional and transnational political and religious actors.

This chapter looks at the thinking and practice of international relations and world order in the Islamic world. It opens by setting Islam's complex geopolitical context. In terms of thinking it covers the umma, the realms of al-Harb, al-Islam, and al-Ahd, jihad, the work of Ibn Khaldun, and Ijtihad. In terms of practice it covers the relationship between the umma and the Islamic state, the division of Islam into rival empires, and the rivalry between Sunnis and Shias within Islam. A key theme is the contradictions between thinking and practice.

Chapter 5 focuses on the elusive boundary between the lazy and the industrious in the post-1908 Young Turk era. In this tumultuous period, the Ottoman culture producers employed the concepts of work and laziness to further develop the exclusionary language characteristic of the culture of productivity against their rivals. Surveying political pamphlets, journals, memoirs, and the daily press, this chapter shows how various ideological camps entered into a cultural struggle over who should be regarded as lazy and useless based on a putative association with “super Westernization” or with “anti-progressivism.” In the relatively open political atmosphere immediately following the 1908 revolution, the polemics between various political agents, usually dubbed “Westernists” and “Islamists,” signalled a vital debate on the ideal citizen required by the nation. Their views of these issues diverged greatly, as did the question of who should be labeled lazy and unproductive. Such labels marshaled the exclusionary language that has been in development, revealing a variety of models of reform in the public sphere and how each one regarded the other as the cause of laziness.

This chapter analyses a set of keywords which were used to refer to ‘Us’, that is the author of the text and the social group that they belong to, which includes the reader as a potential member of that group. The keywords examined in this chapter are Islam, Allah, Muslim, brothers, believers, Ummah and you. The chapter introduces the reader to the main method of analysis which involves identification of representation surrounding each keyword via grammatical patterns through the corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine.

This chapter functions as a literature review, beginning with a summary of some of the terminological issues surrounding the study of terrorism. This is followed by an overview of theorisations of terrorism as communication, that is, the theory that violent acts are communicative. We then discuss not the practices and (verbal) expressions related to clandestine violence undertaken by terrorist individuals or groups. We explore some of the findings from previous research relating to the patterns in terrorists’ words and communicative strategies. We then turn to violent jihadist discourse specifically considering issues around polarised language and its relation to grievance-based discourse, the creation of shared identity, intertextual use of historical and theoretical texts and evocation of authority. We conclude by suggesting why the dearth of research on terrorist discourse poses problems for the creation of viable counter-terrorism measures.

In this chapter, the focus remains on language but moves away from representations around particular words to instead consider the ways in which specific types of language are used as persuasive devices in themselves. Here, we take another meaning of discourse, one which relates to the concept of register, text-type or genre and involves issues relating to stylistic choice. We thus explore some of the specific linguistic strategies that authors use in the data in order to highlight how these might contribute to the legitimacy or persuasiveness of the extremist discourse. We examine keywords that index formal register, as well as those connected to the concepts of truth and quotation. This is followed by a consideration of how code-switching into Arabic is employed in the texts.

This chapter examines the language around harm, focussing on keywords related to the category of violence: jihad, kill, martrydom and paradise. We identify the frequent use of a religious journey metaphor which extremist writers have taken from the Qur’an and reworked to justify killing. A key stage on this path then, is the conceptualisation of jihad as literal fighting and as obligatory, desired by Allah and in is his name. Three representations around killing help to position Muslims as victims, giving a justification for killing civilians, and helping to assuage fears around losing one’s own life as the result of engaging in violent attacks, again by invoking Allah’s authority and approval. Violence is cast as heroic martyrdom and justified as occurring within the context of a war.

This chapter gives an account of our data and method, specifically outlining how we collected and prepared the texts containing extremist language that are the subject of this book, along with the different tools and techniques that were used for analysis. The chapter then carries out preliminary analyses of the data, using Biber’s multidimensional approach before moving on to describe a methodology called Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) which involves a collection of approaches that are united by their use of software to identify linguistic patterns in large, electronically-encoded sets of data. We also describe how we obtained and classified keywords across the three sub-corpora which were used as the basis of focussing our analysis on a manageable set of lexical items.

This chapter acts as a counter-point to the previous one, in that it also deals with how social actors are represented, but this time we look at those who are viewed as part of the out-group as opposed to the in-group, considering how the in-group use language to carry out ‘othering’ of the out-group. We examine how strategies of collectivisation, stereotyping, dehumanisation and separation are linguistically realised by examining the following keywords: kufr, disbelief, kuffar, disbeliever, America and evil.

In this concluding chapter we begin by reviewing our research questions, first by looking at differences between the Extreme, Fringe and Moderate texts, then by considering the aspects of language use that were frequently used to manipulate readers into accepting the ideology of violent jihad. Following these two sections we consider the implications of our findings for work aimed at creating and disseminating counter-discourses to extremism. We then reflect on the study itself in terms of the limitations and difficulties encountered, and consider how our work could be expanded in the future.

This chapter introduces the concepts that are central to the book, beginning with a discussion of the terms language, ideology, discourse and representation and then providing context around the concept of violent jihad. The chapter also introduces the data analysed in this book and considers their power to persuade people to carry out violence.

Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical foundation of this book. It elaborates on the reading of the secular and how it is calibrated to fit Shiite Islam in the context of post-revolutionary Iran. It puts forward the main argument of this book, which contends that the secularity spawned in the past four decades of Islamic rule does not denote an absence of religion, but rather, the construction of a new religion which is secular in essence. The traditional religious foundations upon which the Islamic Republic of Iran was built remain. Yet their meanings and practices have evolved and their content and distinctiveness have transformed. Moreover, this chapter will examine the three elements of Khomeini’s revolutionary religiosity (Khomeini as an Imam, jihad and martyrdom, and ascetic equality) and how these elements rendered the very notion of an election an anomaly in Iranian collective understanding during the Islamic Republic’s first decade.

This chapter explores evolving regional dynamics first through an examination of the relationship between Iran’s revolution and its foreign policy. It proceeds to analyse the Islamic Republic’s efforts to export revolution and the underpinnings of Iran’s burgeoning alignment with Syria. The second half of the chapter focusses on the other Arab states’ efforts to contain the revolution, including through manipulating state–society relations, before moving on to examine the role of the anti-Soviet ‘jihad’ in Afghanistan in the hegemonic strategies of regional states.