Al-Qa‘ida's Editor: Abu Jandal al-Azdi's Online Jihadi Activism
This article deals with the online activism of Abu Jandal al-Azdi, one of the main ideologues of the now-defunct Saudi version of Al-Qa‘ida on the Arabian Peninsula (QAP), whose writings have been all but neglected in publications on this organisation. While rightly seen as only a mediocre religious...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2011
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| In: |
Politics, religion & ideology
Year: 2011, Volume: 12, Issue: 4, Pages: 355-369 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article deals with the online activism of Abu Jandal al-Azdi, one of the main ideologues of the now-defunct Saudi version of Al-Qa‘ida on the Arabian Peninsula (QAP), whose writings have been all but neglected in publications on this organisation. While rightly seen as only a mediocre religious scholar, I contend that al-Azdi is nevertheless an important ideologue for two reasons: firstly, his religious university education combined with his internet skills propelled him to a position that can perhaps best be described as ‘al-Qa‘ida's editor’: he presented very few (if any) new ideas of his own but collected, selected, and presented others' general and more difficult writings into readily-applicable and easily-digestible chunks of information - now forever present in cyberspace - that was aimed carefully and specifically at his target audience of radical Saudi Islamists; secondly, through the case-study of al-Azdi, I show that anti-Saudi ideas in QAP's discourse - as opposed to pan-Islamism - were more prominent, more openly available and expressed at an earlier time than has hitherto been suggested, and that al-Azdi has been one of the most important ideologues promoting this. |
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| ISSN: | 2156-7697 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Politics, religion & ideology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/21567689.2011.624400 |