ji·had·ica

Jihadi-Salafism Makes Strange Bedfellows: On the Death of Muhammad Ibrahim Shaqra

Last month (on 17 July, to be precise), the Jordanian Jihadi-Salafi scholar Abu Qatada al-Filastini posted a brief obituary on his Facebook page about his fellow Jordanian Muhammad Ibrahim Shaqra, who had died that day. In his obituary, Abu Qatada called him “the father shaykh” and praised him for his qualities. This is not surprising, perhaps, since Shaqra had also appeared in a YouTube video in which he seemed to be quite chummy with another Jordanian Jihadi-Salafi scholar, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. When I interviewed Shaqra in his home in Amman a few years ago, he praised Abu Qatada, al-Maqdisi and the Syrian-British Jihadi-Salafi scholar Abu Basir al-Tartusi. All of this seems quite consistent. Yet when Shaqra died, his passing away was also lamented on the website of the Jordan Islamic Scholars League, a decidedly un-radical organisation of traditional scholars. This organisation praised Shaqra as having lived “a life filled with knowledge

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Joas Wagemakers August 26, 2017

Who is Iyad Qunaybi?

For years, many Jihadi-Salafi scholars and fighters from several countries have been dealt with in articles about global jihad (and here on Jihadica, of course). One country that has supplied quite a number of these people is Jordan. Men such as Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Abu Qatada al-Filastini have long been involved in or have commented upon all things jihad. One person who could be included in this group but has not received anywhere near the attention that the three mentioned above have received is the relatively unknown Iyad Qunaybi. Kuwait According to Qunaybi’s website, he was born in Kuwait on 22 October 1975, although he and his family moved to Amman in Jordan when he was still a baby. Given that his parents were Palestinians from Hebron, they were officially Jordanian citizens (the Hashimite kingdom controlled the West Bank from 1948-1967 and made all its inhabitants

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Joas Wagemakers June 15, 2016

Maqdisi in the middle: An inside account of the secret negotiations to free a Jordanian pilot

It’s that time of the year again: the well-known Jordanian radical Islamic ideologue Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi is released from prison and speculation about why this happened and whether he cooperated with the Jordanian regime to get freed starts all over. I’ve commented on this before on Jihadica when he was released on a previous occasion and I’ve also briefly analysed his latest release in a Facebook post, so I won’t go into this here. Much more interesting, however, are the recent statements al-Maqdisi has made on the execution of the Jordanian pilot Mu’adh al-Kasasiba, who had been captured by the Islamic State (IS) and was subsequently burned alive by them. These comments were made during a recent interview with al-Ru’ya, a Jordanian television channel, and a letter al-Maqdisi reportedly sent to IS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. These give an inside account of the secret negotiations that have taken place to

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Joas Wagemakers February 11, 2015

IS’s beheadings of Western hostages: Jihadi ideologues speak out

The recent beheadings of American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and the British aid worker David Haines by the Islamic State (IS) have been the subject of much media attention. Some of this attention has focussed on the question of whether IS is actually “Islamic” or not. World leaders like the American President Barack Obama and the British Prime Minister David Cameron have weighed in on this question by stating, respectively, that “[IS] is not Islamic” and “they are not Muslims; they are monsters”. The shock of seeing one’s countrymen being beheaded, Obama and Cameron’s wish to distinguish between the Islamic State and Islam as a religion and the fact that it is Muslims themselves who are often the victims of IS’s policies make such statements seem obvious. Still, one may wonder whether the question “Is IS Islamic?” is really one that non-Muslim politicians such as Obama and Cameron

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Joas Wagemakers September 22, 2014

A purity contest: Abu Basir and al-Maqdisi slug it out

The policies of the Islamic State (IS) have already led to some fierce debates and scholarly disputes among radical Islamic ideologues. This post looks at one of these disputes that is interesting for various reasons, one of them being that it takes place not between proponents and opponents of IS, but between two men who are both critics of IS. Regular readers of Jihadica will recall that one of the latest developments in the discussions surrounding the Islamic State, as Cole Bunzel recently pointed out, is the Mauritanian scholar Abu l-Mundhir al-Shinqiti’s reversal on IS. Whereas al-Shinqiti used to be a strong supporter of what was then still called the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), the latter’s announcement of the caliphate apparently caused him to switch sides. As Cole pointed out, there were some doubts about the authenticity of al-Shinqiti’s critical book of the caliphate. These doubts seemed

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Joas Wagemakers September 12, 2014

Did al-Maqdisi make a deal with the Jordanian regime?

On 16 June, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, the well-known Jordanian radical Islamic ideologue, was released from prison. In the six weeks since his release, many people have argued that there must have been some sort of deal between al-Maqdisi and the Jordanian regime that caused the latter to release him. This blog post looks into these claims. A Secret Deal The idea that al-Maqdisi has made a secret deal with the Jordanian regime is widespread. On Twitter, for example, several people expressed their suspicion about al-Maqdisi’s release, claiming that its timing amidst the turmoil involving the Islamic State (of Iraq and Sham, IS(IS)) could not have been a coincidence. Similarly, The Economist stated that al-Maqdisi was released only after “he had been persuaded to issue two fatwas declaring followers of ISIS as ‘deviants’ and telling them not to make attacks in Jordan”. The connection between al-Maqdisi’s release and his criticism of

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Joas Wagemakers July 29, 2014

The Verdict of Abu Qatada al-Filastini

Well, the moment has finally come: after years of legal wrangling in Britain and a lengthy trial in Jordan, Abu Qatada al-Filastini has heard his verdict against him at the State Security Court in Amman at last. Abu Qatada has been the subject of several publications in the past few years (see here, for example, and for context of his stay in “Londonistan”, see also here) and a new chapter of his life has presumably just begun, although we’ll have to wait till September to be sure. I have closely followed the case against him in Jordan, both through media reports and through having been present at his trial in Amman several times and this post is an account of that trial and the final verdict. Deportation Abu Qatada was obviously notorious as a scholar for North African radical groups long before he ever went to Jordan, but it was his deportation

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Joas Wagemakers June 26, 2014

Three new books

As readers of Jihadica know quite well, jihad – the core subject of this weblog – is quite different from Salafism and even from terrorism, although they are, sadly, all too often equated. This does not mean, however, that studies on any of these three subjects may not benefit students of one of the others. With this is mind, Jihadica readers may be interested to know that three books that I have personally been involved in have recently been published. Two of them deal with Salafism and one with terrorism. Utopian ideals The first of these books was published in Dutch – sorry about that, but there are bound to be some Dutch readers among you – and was written by two of my colleagues at Radboud University Nijmegen (the anthropologist Martijn de Koning and the political scientist Carmen Becker) and myself. The book is called Salafisme: Utopische idealen in

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Joas Wagemakers June 18, 2014

What role does the Palestinian question play in global jihad?

In policy circles as well as among both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian activists, the question of whether, how and why the Palestinian-Israeli conflict plays a role in al-Qaida’s global jihad is hotly debated. The reason for this is clear: pro-Israeli politicians and activists obviously don’t want to conclude that American support for Israel, for example, causes people to become jihadis fighting the US, while people with a more pro-Palestinian point of view are often keen to point out that there is a correlation between the two, presumably hoping for a more even-handed American approach towards the conflict. Research Despite the fact that this question has often come up in debates, suprisingly little research has been done on the connection between transnational or global jihad on the one hand and the Palestinian question on the other. To address this issue, Jihadica alumnus Thomas Hegghammer and yours truly have edited a special issue

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Joas Wagemakers December 17, 2013

A Little-Known Syrian Jihadi Magazine

In various previous posts, I have paid attention to the Syrian-British Jihadi-Salafi ideologue Abu Basir al-Tartusi, for example because of his criticism of other jihadis and his support for the Free Syrian Army at the expense of Jabhat al-Nusra. His position, differing somewhat from that of other major radical scholars, was interesting because it was more conciliatory towards non-Islamists and remnants of previous regimes and also because it was less dismissive of the widespread calls for democracy that the Arab Spring showed. The Arab Spring also pulled Abu Basir out of the semi-isolation that he was in when he was still living in Britain. Since the early protests against the Syrian regime, he has been very active in promoting the downfall of President Bashar al-Asad, with an unprecedented amount of footage of his speeches, lessons, etc. appearing on YouTube. Part of this greater exposure in the media was a Facebook

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Joas Wagemakers November 8, 2013
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