page_title: Jihadism
section_title: Islamic revivalism and Salafism (1990s to present)
hierarchical_section_title: Jihadism / History / Islamic revivalism and Salafism (1990s to present)
caption_attribution_description: English: The flag reportedly used by the Majlis of Muslims of Ichkeria and Dagestan (also known as the Congress of the Peoples of Ichkeria and Dagestan). The image was created by António Martins on 09 Jun 2005, based on this photograph taken in July 2002. This particular design shows the phrase al-jihad fi sabilillah above the takbir and two crossed swords. On 3 August 2000, Jaume Ollé quoted an unidentified source as saying: "...here is our flag, the flag of the Majlis of Muslims of Ichkeria and Dagestan. There is an inscription at the bottom — Ikhda al-Khusnayin. It is a verse from the Koran, which, translated literally, means one of the two goods, (i.e.) victory or paradise."
context_page_description: "Jihadism" is a 21st-century neologism found in Western languages to describe Islamist movements perceived as military movements "rooted in Islam" and "existentially threatening" to the West. It has been described as a "difficult term to define precisely", because it remains a recent neologism with no single, generally accepted meaning. The term "jihadism" first appeared in South Asian media; Western journalists adopted it in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks of 2001. It has since been applied to various insurgent and terrorist movements whose ideology is based on the Islamic notion of jihad.
  Contemporary jihadism ultimately has its roots in the late 19th- and early 20th-century ideological developments of Islamic revivalism, which developed into Qutbism and related ideologies during the mid-20th century.
  The terrorist organisations partaking in the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979 to 1989 reinforced the rise of jihadism, which has been propagated in various armed conflicts throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Gilles Kepel has diagnosed a specifically Salafi jihadism within the Salafi movement of the 1990s.
context_section_description: According to scholar of Islam and Islamic history Rudoph Peters, contemporary traditionalist Muslims "copy phrases of the classical works on fiqh" in their writings on jihad; Islamic Modernists "emphasize the defensive aspect of jihad, regarding it as tantamount to bellum justum in modern international law; and the contemporary fundamentalists (Abul Ala Maududi, Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, etc.) view it as a struggle for the expansion of Islam and the realization of Islamic ideals."
  Jihad has been propagated in modern fundamentalism beginning in the late 19th century, an ideology that arose in the context of struggles against colonial powers in North Africa in the late 19th century, as in the Mahdist War in Sudan, and notably in the mid-20th century by Islamic revivalist authors such as Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala Maududi.
  The term jihadism (earlier Salafi jihadism) has arisen in the 2000s to refer to the contemporary jihadi movements, the development of which was in retrospect traced to developments of Salafism paired with the origins of Al-Qaeda in the Soviet–Afghan War during the 1990s.
  Jihadism has been called an "offshoot" of Islamic revivalism of the 1960s and 1970s. The writings of Sayyid Qutb and Mohammed Abdul-Salam Farag provide inspiration. The Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989) is said to have "amplified the jihadist tendency from a fringe phenomenon to a major force in the Muslim world." It served to produce foot soldiers, leadership and organization. Abdullah Yusuf Azzam provided propaganda for the Afghan cause. After the war veteran jihadists returned to their home countries and dispersed to other sites of conflicts involving Muslim populations such as Algeria, Bosnia and Chechnya creating a "transnational jihadist stream."
  Kashmir conflict (Lashkar-e-Taiba, 1990–present)
  Somali Civil War (1991–present)
  Algerian Civil War (1991-2002)
  Bosnian war (Bosnian mujahideen, 1992–1995)
  Afghan civil war (Taliban 1994–present)
  East Turkestan irredentism (East Turkestan Islamic Movement, 1997–present)
  Chechen war and Insurgency in the North Caucasus (Arab Mujahideen in Chechnya, 1994–present)
  Nigerian Sharia conflict (Boko Haram 2001–present)
  Iraqi insurgency (Islamic State of Iraq, 2003–present)
  Al-Qaeda insurgency in Yemen (Abyan Governorate, 2010–present)
  Syrian Civil War (Al-Nusra Front to Protect the Levant 2011–present)
  Syrian Civil War (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant 2013–present)
  An explanation for jihadist willingness to kill civilians and self-professed Muslims on the grounds that they were actually apostates (takfir) is the vastly reduced influence of the traditional diverse class of ulama, often highly educated Islamic jurists. In "the vast majority" of Muslim countries during the post-colonial world of the 1950s and 60s the private religious endowments (awqaf) that had supported the independence of the  Islamic scholars/jurists for centuries were taken over by the state.  The jurists were made salaried employees and the nationalist rulers naturally encouraged their employees (and their employees interpretations of Islam) to serve the rulers' interests. Inevitably the jurists came to be seen by the Muslim public as doing so.
  Into this vacuum of religious authority came aggressive proselytizing funded by tens of billions of dollars of petroleum-export money. The version of Islam being propagated (Saudi doctrine of Wahhabism) billed itself as a return to pristine, simple, straightforward Islam, not one school among many, and not interpreting divine law historically or contextually, but the one, orthodox "straight path" of Islam. Unlike the  traditional teachings of the jurists who tolerated and even celebrated divergent opinions and schools of thought and kept extremism marginalized, Wahhabism had "extreme hostility" to "any sectarian divisions within Islam".
caption: A black flag reportedly used by Caucasian jihadists in 2002 displays the phrase al-jihad fi sabilillah above the takbir and two crossed swords.
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