On 2 August 2009, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi announced the opening of an English version of his jihadi library. In the announcement, he requested that Falluja Forum members spread the word regarding his new website and to send him any trustworthy translations.
The English website is similar to the Arabic site but it currently does not contain the same amount of content. It has translations of several of al-Maqdisi’s books, articles, and interviews such as the book “Democracy … A Relegoin [sic],” downloaded 45 times, and the article “Balancing Between Negligence and Paranoia,” downloaded 13 times.
It also has several non-attributed articles like “Advice for the Seeker of Knowledge,” downloaded 13 times, an interview with Abu Qatadah al-Filistini regarding Islam and democracy that was downloaded 11 times, and several books and articles by different authors under the headings “Paradise People Creed” and “The Absent Obligation.” Additionally, it has a series of lectures by Yusuf al-Uyayri titled, “Constants on the Path of Jihad” and two articles in Russian.
Beginning a library of translations in different languages is not just an attempt to replicate al-Maqdisi’s efforts with the Arabic library, which is quite extensive, but also to make it easier to spread the jihadi-Salafi ideology beyond Arabic speakers.
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This website with translations of jihadi literature has actually been planned for quite some time. I’m surprised it didn’t appear any earlier. At the moment, it doesn’t seem to contain any material that hasn’t already been translated before by others, such as Tibyaan Publications. This implies that the people behind the website are not actively translating documents themselves or have other people do it for them, at least not yet. As long as that doesn’t happen, the translations website is unlikely ever to become as huge as the Arabic one, which I doubt will happen anyway.
Who/what runs Tibyaan, exactly?
I don’t know who runs Tibyan Publications. On their website (http://tibyan.wordpress.com/), they describe themselves as people who have studied all over the world. It is probably an international group of people because I know that, apart from their translations into English, they also do some work in Dutch. Some of it is translated from English, however, not from the original Arabic.
By the way, I know from a colleague of mine that among radical Muslims in the Netherlands, it’s especially the women who are involved in the translating business. It might very well be that individuals like them send their translations to Tibyan, which then distributes them. That would mean that Tibyan is more a loosely-connected network of like-minded people than a real organisation, which wouldn’t surprise me at all.
In the article “Operation Praline: The Realization of Al-Suri’s Nizam, la Tanzim?” Raffaello Pantucci writes that Younis Tsouli and Aabid Khan ran the Tibyan websites. But this were probably old websites which don’t exist anymore.
So Tsouli and Khan were supposable in this loosely-connected network, J. Wagemakers is writing about.
Here the excerpt of the article:
In addition, Tsouli’s computer provided police with a wealth of access to websites and password-protected areas. Tsouli, his conspirators and Khan shared managing rights to an extremist website called At-Tibyan….
I think, they even built jihadi-websites on their own. Read this good article from Pantucci.