page_title: Jihadism
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Jihadism / History
caption_attribution_description: Mujahideen in Shultan Valley, Afghanistan
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.
caption: Praying Muhjahideen in Kunar Province, Afghanistan (1987)
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