Incitement
Anwar al-Awlaki’s Western Jihad
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- $35.99
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- $35.99
Publisher Description
The definitive account of the career and legacy of the most influential Western exponent of violent jihad.
Anwar al-Awlaki was, according to one of his followers, “the main man who translated jihad into English.” By the time he was killed by an American drone strike in 2011, he had become a spiritual leader for thousands of extremists, especially in the United States and Britain, where he aimed to make violent Islamism “as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea.” Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens draws on extensive research among al-Awlaki’s former colleagues, friends, and followers, including interviews with convicted terrorists, to explain how he established his network and why his message resonated with disaffected Muslims in the West.
A native of New Mexico, al-Awlaki rose to prominence in 2001 as the imam of a Virginia mosque attended by three of the 9/11 hijackers. After leaving for Britain in 2002, he began delivering popular lectures and sermons that were increasingly radical and anti-Western. In 2004 he moved to Yemen, where he eventually joined al-Qaeda and oversaw numerous major international terrorist plots. Through live video broadcasts to Western mosques and universities, YouTube, magazines, and other media, he soon became the world’s foremost English-speaking recruiter for violent Islamism. One measure of his success is that he has been linked to about a quarter of Islamists convicted of terrorism-related offenses in the United States since 2007.
Despite the extreme nature of these activities, Meleagrou-Hitchens argues that al-Awlaki’s strategy and tactics are best understood through traditional social-movement theory. With clarity and verve, he shows how violent fundamentalists are born.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Terrorism scholar Meleagrou-Hitchens debuts with a rigorous analysis of American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki's influence on the global jihadist movement. Documenting the links between al-Awlaki and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's failed 2009 attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight and Zachary Chesser's 2010 call for the murders of South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, among numerous other "jihadist-related offenses," Meleagrou-Hitchens draws on social movement theory to explain how the Yemeni-American cleric's online writings and personal interactions helped shift the focus of jihad from Muslim-majority countries to Europe and the U.S., and from top-down planning by groups like al-Qaeda to isolated individuals acting alone. By uniting "developments as disparate as the War on Terror, the Muhammad cartoon controversy in Europe, and attempts by Western think tanks to define a moderate Islam," al-Awlaki crafted a unified narrative of an anti-Muslim conspiracy that continues to radicalize people long after his 2011 assassination in a drone strike. Many followers of al-Awlaki, Meleagrou-Hitchens writes, "are not simply mindless, bloodthirsty killers" but sincere believers "who see the jihad project as one aimed at improving humanity." His lucid and deeply informed presentation reveals just how difficult it is to stamp out extremist ideologies once they've taken root. This sobering account makes a meaningful contribution to the study of terrorism.