Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Mad mullah or freedom fighter? What is a militant Salafist?
- 2 What is wrong with these people?
- 3 Taking us everywhere: the role of the political imaginary
- 4 (Hyper)media and the construction of the militant community
- 5 Movement: from actual to ideological
- 6 Why me? The role of broader narratives and intermediaries
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Movement: from actual to ideological
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Mad mullah or freedom fighter? What is a militant Salafist?
- 2 What is wrong with these people?
- 3 Taking us everywhere: the role of the political imaginary
- 4 (Hyper)media and the construction of the militant community
- 5 Movement: from actual to ideological
- 6 Why me? The role of broader narratives and intermediaries
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Even with the dearth of reliable information on many militants, documenting the prevalence of movement amongst them is a relatively easy task. Relocation is amongst the most common and significant characteristics they share. As Roy writes, the ‘link between territory and nationalism, and … between deterritorialisation and radical Islamisation, is quite constant’.
Actual deterritorialisation can and often does lead to ideological deterritorialisation, in turn indispensable to militant Salafism as it exists in the West. The dynamic of movement helps to undermine ‘that sense of the naturalness and givenness of territorialised “national belonging”’. For some, including militant Salafists, its place is taken with the idea of the ummah, a transnational religious identification that consciously rejects territory as a determinant of identity. They are not alone. Other deterritorialised visions are an increasingly common motivation for political action. As Tololyan notes:
the place of terrorism … is no simple geographical locale. It is not simply the ‘rabbit warrens’ that Caspar Weinberger sees in Shi'ite Beirut, or the mist-shrouded pastures of Ireland. It can be the Promised Land of Zion and of covenantal theology – the American Puritans, the South African Boers. It can be the revanchist's vision of a land that he has never seen or the aspiration of the alienated ecologist seeking a land unmarked by society. Not only the time and place that are, but absent times and places, as well as projected times and places, provide that context which is the domain in which a cultural vision can produce terrorists.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Jihad in the WestThe Rise of Militant Salafism, pp. 100 - 131Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011