Devji (2017) Landscapes of the Jihad.
Citation: Devji, Faisal (2017) Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity, London: Hurst & Company.
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Devji (2017:xv): “The bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam [1998], or in New York and Washington [2001], represent the emergence of distinct cultures of terror and security in the form of global networks. Rather than seeing Tanzania, Kenya or the United Staes only as contexts for Al-Qaeda’s jihad their bombings in fact produced it as a global entity. This new world produced by the jihad as the site of its own globalization can be described as a landscape. I use the word landscape here to describe the patterns of belief and practice that are produced by the actions of Al-Qaeda, irrespective of its members’ intentions. For it is only in this way that such a network becomes global, rather than via theories or doctrines that are passed down to its members only to be realized in action.”
Devji (2017:xvi): “Studies of Al-Qaeda’s jihad tend to focus on its violence, thus bringing together the most divergent intellectual and political opinions into a single narrative seeking to explain the causes and contexts of this violence. […] Al-Qaeda’s violence, while certainly the most visible aspect of its jihad, is also linked to a whole world of beliefs and practices that remain invisible in much scholarly writing on the subject. This invisible world of ethical, sexual, aesthetic and other forms of behaviour is far more extensive than the jihadi’s realm of violence” [in terms of armed opposition, the NC insurgency has clearly lost. However, in broader terms, it has been far more succesful because it has convinced a whole new generation that violence under the banner of jihad is the only form of valid opposition to the status quo.]
Devji (2017:xvii): “By ‘landscapes of the jihad,’ then, I refer to the new patterns of belief and practice, so pregnant with future possibilities, that have emerged as the global consequences of Al-Qaeda’s actions.”
Devji (2017:xxiii): Describes terrorism studies as “another echo chamber […] which is often conceived as nothing more than an aide to policymakers, and so quite lacking in scholarly integrity in its obsession with problem solving in the present. Surely it is the difference that scholars bring to a discussion that makes a dialogue with policymakers possible as well as productive, and not some attempt to outsource state functions to the university?”
Devji (2017:3-4): Notes that the effects of jihad have far outstripped the capacity for control. “The actions of this jihad, while they are indeed meant to accomplish certain ends, have become more ethical than political in nature, since they have resigned control over their own effects, thus becoming gestures of duty or risk rather than acts of instrumentality properly speaking. This might be why a network such as Al-Qaeda, unlike terrorist or fundamentalist groups of the past, has no coherent vision or plan for the future.”
Devji (2017:20-21): Notes that, although many scholars anchor their analysis of jihad in traditions of political Islam, these geneologies — focused as they are on Sunni Islam in the Middle East — overlook that the most successful examples of political Islam (Iran, Lebanese Hizbollah) are Shia and jihad is mostly waged outside of the Middle East. “Apparently the very presence of Arab fighters or funding in such places is evidence enough that Salafi or Wahhabi Islam has been exported in sufficient measure to determine the nature of jihad there. That the reverse might be true, with Arab fighters and financiers importing the jihad from these regions to the Middle East, is not seriously considered.”
Devji (2017:22): “the presence of large non-Arab working populations in the Arabian peninsula, as well as the dominance of non-Arab Muslims in the formulation and dissemination of Islamic ideas globally, especially in languages like English, renders nonsensical any notion that the Arab Middle East is the original homeland of radical Islam.”
Devji (2017:27-28): “struggles in particular countries are important for two reasons: because, like the Taliban’s Afghanistan, they provide a base for jihad more generally, as well as for rousing Muslims internationality. In other words the particular sites of these struggles are themselves unimportant, their territories being subordinated to a larger and even metaphysical struggle for which they have become merely instrumental. Indeed, by moving between Bosnia and Afghanistan, Chechnya and Iraq, the jihad displays fundamental indifference to these terroritories rather than consolidating them into a single Muslim geography” [it seems unlikely to be widely accepted that e.g. Chechens waging jihad are indifferent to Chechnya]
Devji (2017:28): “This subordination of local to global struggle differs from the internationalism of revolutionary movements like communism both because it is based on the failure rather than success of local struggle, and because it implies the coming into being of a new global environment after the Cold War.”