Apologies and Introductions

I have some good news and some bad news for you. The bad news is that I will have to stop blogging for a while, due to a combination of personal and professional reasons. From the end of this month till some time next spring, I will be posting very infrequently, although I will be working behind the scenes as editor.

The good news is that I have recruited a very exciting team of guest bloggers who will be writing for Jihadica a month or two at the time throughout this coming academic year.  I won’t reveal the whole list, but I can say that they are all established and brilliant academics who have been working on jihadism and Islamism for many years. I chose them because I admire their work.

The first one out is Jean-Pierre Filiu (see also here) a professor at Sciences-Po Paris and a leading French expert on jihadism. The scholar-diplomat Filiu has written many books, notably Les Frontieres du Jihad (2006), L’Apocalypse dans l’Islam (2008) and Les neuf vies d’al-Qaida (forthcoming). Fun fact: Filiu is also the French biographer of Jimi Hendrix. Filiu’s many articles include a piece on Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in the latest issue of the Middle East Journal.  He will start blogging for us this week.