Jihadism
Jihadism is a neologism for militant Islamic movements that are perceived as existentially threatening to the West.[1][2] It is a form of religious violence and has been applied to various insurgent Islamic extremist, militant Islamist, and terrorist individuals and organizations whose ideologies are based on the Islamic notion of lesser jihad from the classical interpretation of Islam.[7] It has also been applied to various Islamic empires in history, such as the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates of the early Muslim conquests, and the Ottoman Empire, who extensively campaigned against non-Muslim nations in the name of jihad.[8][9]
"Jihadist" redirects here. For the Islamic doctrine, see Jihad.
Modern jihadism mostly has its roots in the late 19th- and early 20th-century ideological developments of Islamic revivalism, which further developed into Qutbism and related Islamist ideologies during the 20th and 21st centuries.[4][10][11] The jihadist ideologues envisioned jihad as a "revolutionary struggle" against the secular international order to unite the Muslim world under the "rule of God".[12] The Islamist volunteer organisations which participated in the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979 to 1989 reinforced the rise of jihadism, which has been propagated during various armed conflicts throughout the 1990s and 2000s.[13][14]
Jihadist organizations and rebel groups have become more prominent since the 1990s; by one estimate, 5 percent of civil wars involved jihadist groups in 1990 but more than 40 percent in 2014.[15] French political scientist Gilles Kepel has diagnosed a specific Salafist form of jihadism within the Salafi movement of the 1990s.[16] Jihadism with an international, pan-Islamist scope is also known as global jihadism.[19] Studies show that with the rise of the Islamic State, some Muslim volunteers that came both from Western countries and Muslim-majority countries traveled to join the global jihad in Syria and Iraq.[25]