The militant jihad has killed more than 140,000 civilians in the past two decades and is spreading like a wildfire, especially in Africa.

The jihadists understood early on that this war was also taking place in the media and have been preparing for it since the 1980s.

When the terrorists of the “Islamic State” posted atrocity videos online, many were amazed at their raw professionalism.

People were also amazed at the Islamists' borrowing from the Western pop culture that they actually hated.

The fact that media literacy and archaic morality can go together was known even before the Taliban's tweets.

Thomas Thiel

Editor in the features section.

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The conference “Notions of Jihad Reconsidered”, organized by the junior research group “Jihad on the Internet” at the University of Mainz, took a broad look at the phenomenon based on aesthetics. The focus was on terrorist forms of jihad. The ethnographic section refuted the long-time influential thesis of political scientist Olivier Roy that jihad was a nihilistic youth revolt without religious motivation. Among the young jihadists interviewed by Hamza Esmili and Anja Kublitz who moved to the countries of the “Arab Spring”, eschatological motives were mixed with the hope of a renaissance of the Ummah and a discomfort with consumer capitalism.

If the different religious and social motivations became clear here, then the final section promised the title-giving diversification of the term. It was to be expected that non-military aspects would also have their say there. Jihad can also mean moral or spiritual training or the attempt to establish an Islamic world order in a non-violent way. However, this chance was wasted. For the British sociologist Salman Sayyid, jihad generally stood for the ability to act suppressed by Western imperialism. From this it could be concluded that the perpetrators are not to blame for the jihadist terror, but rather a West that fundamentally attributes the worst intentions to Muslims. In view of the victim record of jihad, not only in Western countries, that was quite a trivialization,which masked the expansive character of the Islamist ideology of rule as well as the fact that, viewed globally, Islam is far less an oppressed than an oppressive religion. Sayyid was not at all interested in the distinction between legitimate criticism of religious violence and blanket suspicion of Muslims. For him, the whole of Europe was infected by the virus of Islamophobia, which is why he urgently wanted a post-western world order. He was silent on the Islamic policy of the new world power China.Sayyid was not at all interested in the distinction between legitimate criticism of religious violence and blanket suspicion of Muslims. For him, the whole of Europe was infected by the virus of Islamophobia, which is why he urgently wanted a post-western world order. He was silent on the Islamic policy of the new world power China.Sayyid was not at all interested in the distinction between legitimate criticism of religious violence and blanket suspicion of Muslims. For him, the whole of Europe was infected by the virus of Islamophobia, which is why he urgently wanted a post-western world order. He was silent on the Islamic policy of the new world power China.

Breeding ground for terror

The connecting ideology of jihad did not come into view.

Political Islam and its most powerful organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, also aim to establish divine states under Sharia law.

Because this generally non-violent Islamism in Europe hides behind a facade of human rights and anti-racism, its analysis is more difficult than that of militant jihadism.

The mutual relationship is particularly difficult to grasp.

There is demarcation and sympathy.