Jihadism

Jihadism is a neologism for modern, armed militant Islamic movements that seek to establish states based on Islamic principles. In a narrower sense, it refers to the belief that armed confrontation is an efficient and theologically legitimate method of socio-political change towards an Islamic system of governance. The term "jihadism" has been applied to various Islamic extremist or Islamist individuals and organizations with militant ideologies based on the classical Islamic notion of lesser jihad.

Jihadism has its roots in the late 19th- and early 20th-century ideological developments of Islamic revivalism, which further developed into Qutbism and Salafi jihadism related ideologies during the 20th and 21st centuries. Jihadist ideologues envision jihad as a "revolutionary struggle" against the international order to unite the Muslim world under Islamic law.

The Islamist organizations that participated in the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979 to 1989 reinforced the rise of jihadism, which has since propagated during various armed conflicts. Jihadism rose in prominence after the 1990s; by one estimate, 5 percent of civil wars involved jihadist groups in 1990, but this grew to more than 40 percent by 2014. With the rise of the Islamic State (IS) militant group in 2014—which a large contingent of Jihadist groups have opposed—large numbers of foreign Muslim volunteers came from abroad to join the militant cause in Syria and Iraq.

French political scientist and professor Gilles Kepel also identified a specific Salafist version of jihadism in the 1990s. Jihadism with an international, pan-Islamist scope is also known as global jihadism. The term has also been invoked to retroactively characterise the military campaigns of historic Islamic empires, and the later Fula jihads in West Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The concept of jihad ("exerting"/"striving"/"struggling") is fundamental to Islam and has multiple uses, with greater jihad (internal jihad), meaning internal struggle against evil in oneself, and lesser jihad (external jihad), which is further subdivided into jihad of the pen/tongue (debate or persuasion) and jihad of the sword (warfare). The latter form of jihad has meant conquest and conversion in the classical Islamic interpretation, usually excepting followers of other monotheistic religions, while modernist Islamic scholars generally equate military jihad with defensive warfare. Much of the contemporary Muslim opinion considers internal jihad to have primacy over external jihad in the Islamic tradition, while many Western writers favor the opposite view. Today, the word jihad is often used without religious connotations, like the English term crusade.

The term "jihadism" has been in use since the 1990s, more widely in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. It was first used by the Indian and Pakistani mass media, and by French academics who used the more exact term "jihadist-Salafist". Historian David A. Charters defines "jihadism" as "a revolutionary program whose ideology promises radical social change in the Muslim world... [with] a central role to jihad as an armed political struggle to overthrow "apostate" regimes, to expel their infidel allies, and thus to restore Muslim lands to governance by Islamic principles." According to Reuven Firestone, the term "jihadism" as commonly used in the Western world describes "militant Islamic movements that are perceived as existentially threatening to the West."

David Romano, researcher of political science at the McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, has defined his use of the term as referring to "an individual or political movement that primarily focuses its attention, discourse, and activities on the conduct of a violent, uncompromising campaign that they term a jihad". Following Daniel Kimmage, he distinguishes the jihadist discourse of jihad as a global project to remake the world from the resistance discourse of groups like Hezbollah, which is framed as a regional project against a specific enemy.

"Jihadism" has been defined otherwise as a neologism for militant, predominantly Sunnī Islamic movements that use ideologically motivated violence to defend the Ummah (the collective Muslim world) from foreign Non-Muslims and those that they perceive as domestic infidels. The term "jihadist globalism" is also often used in relation to Islamic terrorism as a globalist ideology, and more broadly to the War on Terror. The Austrian-American academic Manfred B. Steger, Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, proposed an extension of the term "jihadist globalism" to apply to all extremely violent strains of religiously influenced ideologies that articulate the global imaginary into concrete political agendas and terrorist strategies; these include al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah, Hamas, and Hezbollah, which he finds "today's most spectacular manifestation of religious globalism".