No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.). / Written for the Dept. of Political Science. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Honors)--College of William and Mary, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-115). Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.A.)--Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, MA, 2005. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-95).

Proefschrift--Letteren--Amsterdam, 1979. / Résumé en néerlandais. Bibliogr. p. 201-225. Index.

Large scale destruction and surfeit chaos that accompany civil wars have provided a platform to several insurgencies operating in the setting to compete in a struggle for increased power and territorial occupation against their depraved regimes and each other. It is during this power struggle that several insurgencies make a jump from a purely nationalistic agenda of the civil war to a larger religious goal by complying with jihadist organisations thriving in the region. Although the topic of civil war and religious radicalisation has been on the international agenda as well as the academic community for many years now, proselytizing and hijacking of national agenda of insurgencies by religious extremists is also of growing concern. Thus, this research will seek to find if jihadisation of insurgencies is a direct consequence of civil wars by using the Afghanistan and the Syrian Civil wars as case studies. The approach adopted here is to dwell into the factors behind the adoption of jihadist ideologies by insurgencies in war zones. These factors would then be applied to both the case studies. The paper will incorporate insights from previous qualitative studies conducted on geo-referenced terror, the role of religion, and ideologies in civil wars in the aforementioned countries to arrive at the...

Religion is often invoked as a driving force behind violence, disentangled from political, social, and economic reasons. In this thesis, we will be exploring the viewpoints of three prominent religious thinkers in investigating the principal causes behind what is called religious violence. The works of Karen Armstrong, Mark Juergensmeyer, and William T. Cavanaugh are considered as theoretical frameworks for understanding violence in an Islamic context. While Armstrong argues that the root cause of violence can be traced back to economic, political, and cultural reasons, Juergensmeyer contests that religion is the most important cause underlying all violence. In their analyses, both thinkers rely heavily on a distinction between religious and secular violence. Cavanaugh, on the other hand, regards such a distinction as itself a legitimation of secular forms of violence that obscures the real causes of what we call religious violence.

No description available.

This thesis examines the impact of changing views of legitimate Islamic authority on conceptions of jihad. Spearheaded by militant Sunni movements, jihad in the modern era has taken on new purposes and practices that more closely resemble general understandings of terrorism than the regulated forms of warfare cemented during the classical period of Islam. Contrasting the historical authority of the caliph or political leader and the ulama over the concept of jihad with the modern state and ulama's lack of control over the concept offers a partial explanation of the divergence of contemporary jihad from the classical or traditional views. This thesis uses the concept of individual jihad as communicated through the jihadist magazine Inspire, to counter the dismissal of radical articulations of jihad as un-Islamic and therefore illegitimate, and to demonstrate how such forms instead reflect the opportunistic replacement of traditional political and religious authority by the jihadist as the true defender of Islam and consequently the rightful interpreter of Islamic law. / Master of Arts

This thesis discusses the revisions of the Egyptian Islamic Group and al-Jihād Organisation with a special focus on the theology and ideology of the two movements. The main question is: how could these groups revise their thought using Islamic theological arguments though their previous pro-violence thought was also based on Islamic theological arguments. Textual analysis, coupled with the relevant aspects of framing literature, is the main tool used to discuss the ideology of the two groups and answer the research questions. Yet, the thesis also provided extended literature review of the topic as well as historical sociopolitical and economic accounts of the two organisations in order situate the texts in their proper contexts and link thought to action. The thesis provides detailed description and analysis of the two groups’ ideologies and concludes that one of them has genuinely revised its thought while the other has not. After explaining how this change has happened in theological textual as well as in framing terms, the thesis provides an analysis on why one group could change while the other could not. The thesis shows the level of change in any Jihadist movement thought corresponds with the level of concepts it transfers from the static to the flexible sides of the Sharia, and that the nature and original objectives of each group at the time of its establishment play a great role in any revision process when violence proves counterproductive to the original objectives of that group. The thesis also proves that it is not just the ideas or ideological arguments that matter but also the process through which these ideas and arguments are framed. In addition, the fact that only one of the two groups has genuinely changed while both have undergone the same structural sociopolitical and economic conditions in the same country shows the failure of structural sociopolitical and economic approaches in explaining the reasons of violence and revisions of Islamist movements in causal terms, and illustrates the ability of the textual approach to reveal facts and secrets that other approaches could not.