In this paper, I examine the logic that radical Islamists use to promote martyrdom beyond their reference to Islamic religious tenets. I argue that death through martyrdom is presented as ‘existence’, a paradoxical claim that is based on linking certain circumstances of being to ‘not-Being’ or ‘death’. With reference to radical Islamist discourse drawn from temporally and contextually varied Islamist extremist groups and movements, I argue that radical Islamists equate passive existence to ‘not-Being’ or ‘death’ and, conversely, death through agency – martyrdom – to ‘Being’. This logic is fundamentally premised on a distinction between two modes of existence: ‘natural existence’ that is simply ‘being’ even if in servitude, and ‘existence as Being’ that is agency and autonomy and a rejection of servitude. This distinction then forms the basis of the radical Islamist deconstructive notion that ‘real’ existence can transcend being and that therefore death should be valued if it disrupts the master-slave dialectic. To this end, both existence and death have a metaphorical meaning in radical Islamist discourse, logic that makes possible two related claims: (1) existence can transcend being; (2) death is a state of being. The former claim is based on a view of the self as inseparable from the collective, the ummah, and the latter claim forms the basis of the violent rejection of oppression and servitude. The philosophical basis of the radical Islamist promotion of martyrdom, I argue, may be further understood with reference to both Tolstoy’s Master and Man and the epic of Gilgamesh. In Tolstoy’s tale, as Mohammed Bamyeh points out, death for the master was the opposite of power not life, and so the master feared death since it meant his complete negation. This fear is not unlike the fear that had obsessed Gilgamesh, the semi-god cursed with mortality. Here, the only equalizer of power differentials between Gilgamesh and his subjects was a shared mortality. Radical Islamists promote martyrdom, I argue, with logic that echoes of the Tolstoyian satire and the irony in the epic of Gilgamesh. Here, the tenuous nature of the master’s mastery is exploited through dialectical reason that challenges the servitude of the self and the master’s mastery with logic that is both central and characteristic of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic: the truth of the master is the slave. It is thus that self-destruction is promoted in radical Islamist discourse with reason that is empowering for the self, the Hegelian slave.

This paper explores the role of ideology on militant Islamist groups in Egypt. Starting from the premise that ideology should be considered both a dependent and an independent factor, this research investigates the operationalisation of the separation between ideational and material explanations in the study of the praxis of militant groups. First, it briefly reviews common studies of Islamist militancy and deplores the unproductive divide between partisans of an overstated stress on ideology, defined by a limited corpus of textual sources, and their contenders who disprove and reject ideational factors and rather favour a focus on other macro, meso or micro parameters. Thereafter, it identifies the acknowledgement of this stalemate in the literature and illustrates some attempts to bridge the gap between these studies. Then, it presents a new theoretical approach based on the use of process tracing and social movement theory. This new perspective postulates that ideology encompasses central and secondary components that co-exist in a militant group and asserts that the ideological evolution of a group has to be investigated and deciphered through the unfolding of its long terms ideological commitments. It consequently proposes that the later have to be analysed through textual analysis associated with in-depth interviews of the protagonists who wrote these key texts. These interviews are deemed crucial to uncover the formation of a textual consensus and to relate the text to broader macro and organisational factors. This approach therefore allows for a more acute understanding of circumstantial short-term ideological compromises and long term commitments. This study is applied to al-Jama'ah al-Islamiyah (the Islamic Group) and Jama'ah al-Jihad (the Jihad Group) in Egypt and is based on extensive interviews with leaders and members of both groups. It illustrates this new theoretical approach through the focus on these groups' respective position on violence and democracy from their inception to the post-2011 Egyptian uprising. This research is important to both practitioners and academics and ought to inform future policies and research. Even if the present study is centred on violent groups, the same approach can indeed potentially be applied to other non-violent Islamist movements.

While each of Jihad and political realism has received extensive treatment in the academic literature, no serious effort has been made yet to investigate the relationship between these two pivotal notions. This paper offers a fresh perspective on the discourses on jihad of two leading contemporary Islamist scholars –the Sunni Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi (b. 1926) and the Shia Sayyid Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935 - 2010) –, reading them in light of realist theory of international relations. I start by discussing Qaradawi and Fadlallah’s views on: 1) the different meanings and forms of jihad, 2) the centrality of qital (fighting) or military jihad (hereafter jihad) to the life of the Muslim community (Umma), and 3) the lawful purposes of jihad. I then highlight how realist assumptions – regarding international anarchy, human nature and the centrality of power to resolving conflicts – underpin the two scholars’ discourses on jihad. I argue that Fadlallah and Qaradawi subscribe to an instrumental view of jihad, seeing it as a means to achieve lawful ends, rather than as an end in itself. Stated otherwise, jihad’s chief purpose, for the two authors, is to ensure the survival and security of the Muslim community in an anarchical international system, where the intensions of others cannot be trusted. Jihad is thus prompted by the same forces that, according to realists, cause wars to erupt; namely the absence of international authority and the animus dominandi (craving for power) that classic realists see as central to human nature. A realist reading of the massive oeuvre on jihad by Fadlallah, Qaradawi and other Islamists serves at least three purposes. To start with, it underscores the political, rather than religious, causes of fighting. These causes tend to be the same across civilizational units, while the justifications for fighting are generally grounded in culturally-specific thought-systems whose source is often religion. Equally important, it paves the way for comparing contemporary discourses on jihad to different strands of realism, namely: classical, structural, offensive and especially Christian realism. This comparison is pivotal for mainstreaming these discourses, through demonstrating how they fit within realism which is the dominant tradition in international relations. Finally, it underscores that the concern with security – which is at the core of the realist paradigm – is universal (and not specific to Western culture); as is the tendency of serious thinkers, including Islamists, to see fighting (and preparing for fighting) as the chief means for coping with insecurity

This paper will explore how religious writers in Egypt re-configured Islamist discourse following Cairo’s cataclysmic defeat in the June War of 1967. While Israel’s military victory is usually thought to have triggered an Islamist ‘revival’ in Egypt, the dynamics informing this ‘resurgence’ in the immediate aftermath of the war have received relatively little attention within the vast literature on Islamism. A fairly prevalent explanation claims that many Egyptian Muslims ‘returned’ to their faith at a time of acute crisis because they viewed religion as a reassuring reservoir of spiritual solace and cultural authenticity. The determining cultural essentialism of such arguments, however, is deeply Orientalist. By contrast, Islamist ideologues in the period acknowledged that, despite its transcendent spiritual truth, ‘Islam’ offered no ‘ready-made solutions’ to their nation’s predicament. Thus, they were conscious of articulating novel doctrines to help Egypt overcome her defeat. This paper will trace the emergence of a body of Islamist resistance ideology through a close reading of two tracts from the period, Muhammad Jalal Kishk’s Al-Naksa wa al-Ghazw al-Fikri, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s Dars al-Nakba al-Thaniya. It will argue that interpretations of Zionist ideology proved crucial to the constitution of Islamist subjectivities in post-war Egypt. According to Islamists, the defeat revealed the extent to which secular nationalism had divided the Arab nation. By contrast, Israeli society had evinced unity of purpose and esprit de corps. Islamists argued that the Arab media’s emphasis on linguistic and socio-economic cleavages in Israeli society before the war had blinded the Egyptian public to the ways in which a shared faith actually lent the Zionist polity genuine cohesion. For Islamists, there were no common national or linguistic ties that bound a motley group of settlers from different countries to one another— apart from the Jewish faith. If Jewish settlers ‘returned’ to Palestine, this was because the land held religious significance for them. For Islamists, the execution of the Zionist project thus demonstrated that a successful ‘recovery’ of territory presupposed ‘religious’ consciousness. Therefore, they recommended ‘confessionalizing’ Arab identity by endorsing a ‘pan-Islamic’ nationalism. Aware that Zionists stressed martial aspects in the Jewish heritage, Islamists proposed emulating Zionism’s conversion of ‘the Jew’ into a ‘fighting Sabra’. Calls for jihad to liberate Palestine need to be seen in this context. The Islamists’ insistence on a ’return’ to particular Islamic tradition(s) needs to be understood, in part, as a derivative discourse and a mimetic practice.