Al-Qaeda is a pan-Islamist militant organization led by Sunni Jihadists who self-identify as a vanguard spearheading a global Islamist revolution to unite the Muslim world under a supra-national Islamic state known as the Caliphate. Its members are mostly composed of Arabs, but also include people from other ethnic groups. Al-Qaeda has mounted attacks on civilian, economic and military targets of America and its allies; such as the 1998 US embassy bombings, the USS Cole bombing and the September 11 attacks. The organization is designated as a terrorist group by NATO, UN Security Council, the European Union, and various countries around the world.
Islamic fundamentalism has been defined as a revivalist and reform movement of Muslims who aim to return to the founding scriptures of Islam. The term has been used interchangeably with similar terms such as Islamism, Islamic revivalism, Qutbism, Islamic extremism, Islamic activism, but also criticized as pejorative, a term used by outsiders who instead ought to be using more positive terms such as Islamic activism or Islamic revivalism.
Daniel Pipes is an American commentator on foreign policy and the Middle East. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East as well as criticism of Islam.
Ayman Muhammad Rabi az-Zawahiri, also known as Ayman al-Zawahiri, was an Egyptian-born militant and physician who served as the second general emir of al-Qaeda from June 2011 until his death in July 2022.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), officially the Middle East Media and Research Institute, is a Washington-based non-profit press monitoring and analysis organization that was co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1997. It publishes and distributes free copies of media reports that have been translated into English—primarily from Arabic and Persian, but also from Urdu, Turkish, Pashto, and Russian.
Islamic terrorism refers to terrorist acts with religious motivations carried out by fundamentalist militant Islamists and Islamic extremists.
Steven Emerson is an American investigative journalist, author, and pundit on national security, terrorism, and Islamic extremism. He is the founder and director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism, and received a George Polk Award for the 1994 documentary Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America.
Muhammad Hisham Kabbani is a Lebanese-American Sunni Sufi Muslim scholar belonging to the Naqsbandi Sufi Order. Kabbani has counseled and advised Muslim leaders to build community resilience against violent extremism. In 2012, the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre named him on The 500 Most Influential Muslims. His notable students include the world-famous boxer Muhammad Ali and former Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West, published in October 2003, is a nonfiction book by Robert Spencer. Spencer described the book as an "in-depth study of the doctrine of jihad and how it is exploited today by terrorists to justify what they’re doing and to recruit and motivate new terrorists".
Islamic military jurisprudence refers to what has been accepted in Sharia and Fiqh by Ulama as the correct Islamic manner, expected to be obeyed by Muslims, in times of war. Some scholars and Muslim religious figures describe armed struggle based on Islamic principles as the Lesser jihad.
Hezbollah Al-Hejaz, or Hizbollah in the Hijaz, is a militant Shia organization operating in Saudi Arabia. It was founded in May 1987 in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province. In the years 1987–89 the party launched attacks against official Saudi targets inside and outside Saudi Arabia. After being implicated in the Khobar Towers Bombing in 1996, the party was outlawed in Saudi Arabia. The party was part of the Iranian government's "exporting the Islamic revolution" policy. Most of its members were arrested and the party practically ceased to exist. In 2014 it was designated a terrorist organization by the kingdom's government.
Louay M. Safi is a Syrian-American, a scholar of Islam and the Middle East, and an advocate of Arab and Muslim American rights. He published on such issues as social and political development, modernization, democracy, human rights, and Islam and Modernity. He is the author of 11 books and numerous papers, and speaker on questions of leadership, democracy, Islam, and the Middle East. He is also a spokesperson for the Syrian National Coalition, a league of Syrian opposition groups fighting Syrian President Assad, which was formed in November 2012 in Doha, Qatar.
Rita Katz is a terrorism analyst and the co-founder of the Search International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Intelligence Group, a private intelligence firm based in Washington, D.C.
Ahmed Yousef was a senior adviser to Gaza's Prime Minister Ismail Haniya and remains close to current Hamas leadership. Beginning in 1968, Ahmed Yousef was the pupil of the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Yousef previously served as the Executive Director of the United Association for Studies and Research, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that has been called a front operation for Hamas. He also served as editor of UASR’s quarterly journal The Middle East Affairs Journal. Yousef returned to Gaza in 2005 following the withdrawal of the Israeli army and the victory of Hamas in the legislative elections. In 2006 he was appointed as the political advisor to then-Prime Minister Ismail Haniya. He is now the head of the House of Wisdom Institution for Conflict Resolution and Governance in Gaza.
Sherifa D. Zuhur is an academic and national security scholar of the Middle East and Islamic world. She was most recently a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies, University of California, Berkeley and is the director of the Institute of Middle Eastern, Islamic and Strategic Studies.
The use of politically and religiously-motivated violence dates back to the early history of Islam, its origins are found in the behavior, sayings, and rulings of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, his companions, and the first caliphs in the 7th, 8th, and 9th centuries CE. Mainstream Islamic law stipulates detailed regulations for the use of violence, including corporal and capital punishment, as well as regulations on how, when, and whom to wage war against.
Jihadi tourism, also referred to as jihad tourism or jihadist tourism, is a term sometimes used to describe travel to foreign destinations with the object of scouting for terrorist training. US diplomatic cables leaked in 2010 have raised concerns about this form of travel. Within intelligence circles, the term is also sometimes applied dismissively to travellers who are assumed to be seeking contact with extremist groups mainly out of curiosity.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) is a non-profit research group founded by Steven Emerson in 1995. IPT has been called a prominent part of the "Islamophobia network" within the United States and a "leading source of anti-Muslim racism" and noted for its record of selective reporting and poor scholarship.
The United Association for Studies and Research (UASR) was founded in 1989 in Chicago. The group states that it has a commitment to “the study of ongoing issues in the Middle East, such as the Arab–Israeli conflict”. The group has been described as a front operation for Hamas. UASR was founded by Mousa Abu Marzook who was a known Hamas operative.
United States of Jihad is a 2016 book by Peter Bergen. It chronicles various case studies of jihadist terrorism within the United States. The book served as the basis for a 2016 HBO documentary, Homegrown: The Counter-Terror Dilemma.
