Islamism refers to a social, political, and religious ideology and movement that emerged in response to European colonialism and the social instability wrought by encounters with the West. Its adherents hold that Islamic principles should serve as the basis of the social, political, and legal order and guide the personal lives of individual Muslims. Often led by intellectuals rather than clergy members, Islamist movements focus on social and political change rather than on religious doctrine. Moderate Islamists work within established institutions and political processes to pursue social and political reforms that, they hope, will result in states that are premised on Islamic law and built from the bottom up. Radical Islamists strive to monopolize political power so that they can construct Islamic states from the top down. Islamists do not reject all aspects of Western culture, and they may even embrace Western education and technology as useful tools for the construction of Islamic states. Islamists, in contrast to jihadis (defined below), reject the use of violence to achieve their objectives.
Political Islam is sometimes used synonymously with Islamism, even though it constitutes only one aspect of the social, political, and religious ideology and movement. Although political Islam employs the language of religion, it represents a political rather than a religious response to Westernization. Its adherents do not reject modernity, but they repudiate a particular brand of modernity. They refute the claim that the Western definition of modernity is a universal one and embrace an Islamist variant in its place.
Jihad means effort or struggle. A person who engages in jihad is a mujahid (plural, mujahideen). Jihad has three interrelated meanings: first, the inner spiritual struggle to live righteously, as a good Muslim; second, the struggle to build and purify the Muslim community; and third, the struggle to defend the Islamic faith from outsiders, with force if necessary. The first meaning, which refers to a personal spiritual struggle, constitutes the greater jihad. The second and third meanings, which focus on the outside world, comprise the lesser jihad. Historically, jihad has been understood first and foremost as an inner struggle that begins with the self and extends outward to the broader society. Those who undertake such struggle believe that social and political reforms are best achieved through preaching, proselytizing, and mobilizing the masses to effect change from the bottom up. Engaging in the lesser jihad is held to be a collective duty of the Muslim community, as determined situationally by religious and legal authorities, rather than a permanent personal duty as determined by individuals or self-appointed preachers.
Since the onset of the war on terror, Western observers have frequently collapsed all forms of jihad into one, erroneously defined as a “holy war” against nonbelievers. The concept of holy war originated among Christians in medieval Europe to justify crusades against Muslims; it has no direct counterpart in mainstream Islamic thought. Jihad is not one of the five pillars of Islam and thus is not a practice that is essential to Muslim identity.
Jihadism refers to a minority insurgent movement that broke from Islamism and employs violence in the name of religion. Jihadism emerged in the context of severe social, political, and economic inequalities, and in many cases, political persecution. The movement has primarily attracted young men who feel alienated from mainstream society. Its adherents reject the traditional interpretation of the lesser jihad as a collective struggle of the Muslim community, determined by officially recognized religious and legal authorities, and define it instead as a personal one, to be determined by each individual as he or she sees fit or by self-described clerics. From the early 1970s until the mid-1990s, jihadis generally targeted local secular and Muslim regimes that they deemed impure (the “near enemy”), with the goal of overthrowing them and Islamizing state and society from the top down. However, from the mid-1990s, a small minority began to focus on distant impious or non-Muslim regimes (the “far enemy”), heralding the emergence of global jihad.
Western commentators often overlook these distinctions, failing to differentiate between jihadist factions and frequently merging Islamism and jihadism under the misleading rubric of “Islamic terrorism.” Some erroneously deem both movements a threat to Western societies and argue that both must be opposed in an open-ended war on terror and an effort to restructure the Muslim world. Policies based on this misunderstanding have tended to result in increased hostility and an even greater threat to the West.
A jihadi is a militant Muslim activist who opposes the secular sociopolitical order at home, and Westernization and globalization more broadly, and who engages in armed struggle to establish an Islamic state. The term is not synonymous with mujahid, which refers to a person engaged in any of the three forms of jihad. The term jihadi (jihadist, adjective) was coined in the early twenty-first century by militants who self-identified as such. Jihadis who focus on local struggles against purportedly impious Muslim or secular regimes constitute the majority of this minority faction, while those who focus on distant or non-Muslim regimes—the so-called global jihadis—are a tiny minority of the minority movement.
Islamic terrorism is a commonly used but misleading term that associates religious doctrine with terrorist activity. Islamic fundamentalism, radical Islamism, and political Islam are not equivalent to Islamic terrorism. Muslims who engage in terrorism and claim religious justification for these activities constitute a minuscule minority of Muslims worldwide, and their actions are strongly condemned by the majority. Although these violent extremists deploy the language and symbols of religion to justify their actions, their turn to terrorism was often inspired by social, political, and economic grievances rather than by religious beliefs. This study rejects the use of the term Islamic terrorism as both inaccurate and dangerous. Violence that targets civilians for political reasons is described as “violent extremism” or simply “terrorism.” In some instances, “Muslim extremist” is used to distinguish violent actors who claim to be operating on behalf of their Islamic faith from other violent actors.
Conclusion
Political, economic, and social instability in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries brought renewed attention to the African continent. Employing new justifications for their actions, foreign powers and multilateral institutions challenged the centuries-old principle of national sovereignty and claimed the right to intervene to restore stability, protect civilian lives, and combat terrorism. Although some of these interventions reestablished law and order and saved civilian lives, others left conflicts unresolved and laid the groundwork for future strife. Misinterpretations and distortions of Islam, which influenced external actions in the war on terror, often had devastating consequences for civilians. Chapter 3 introduces the major foreign actors involved in African conflicts after the Cold War, including extracontinental powers, neighboring states, multilateral state-based organizations, and nonstate actors associated with international terrorist networks.
Suggested Reading
Suggested readings relevant to specific countries follow chapters 4–11. The works listed below provide general overviews or are pertinent to multiple African countries.
African economic crises that began in the 1970s sparked many of the continent’s political crises. The following works provide contrasting views of the origins of these crises and their solutions. For an insider’s critique of the role of the IMF, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization in promoting global inequality, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). Nicolas van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), argues that the internal dynamics of neopatrimonial African states rather than external impositions were primarily responsible for the postcolonial economic crises. David Sahn and colleagues contend that