The rapid evolution and diffusion of the Internet led to diversification in production and consumption of media content. On the one hand, this phenomenon affected what is known as traditional or legacy media, which have been forced to adapt to the demands of a new audience; on the other, it provided a new outlet for alternative forms of content production, which proved particularly fruitful, especially for groups promoting political mobilization. In 2010, the Malahem Media Foundation, a media outlet affiliated with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), initiated the publication of Inspire, a periodical magazine published digitally and circulated across the internet in PDF format. The magazine presents itself as published by the Muslim community for the Muslim community, and its declared purpose is to promote the global fight against the (perceived) enemies of Islam framing it as jihad in defense of the umma. Until recently, academic research on Inspire has had a narrow scope of inquiry focused on the jihadi component of the magazine, while overlooking other components that constitute the worldview endorsed by the magazine. This paper explores the ways in which the authors of Inspire construct and present their worldview to their readers using the umma as the analytical paradigm. Through merging Benedict Anderson’s theoretical framework of imagined communities (1991) with Susan Opotow’s theoretical framework of moral exclusion (1990), this paper analyses how Inspire discursively constructs the boundaries of the Muslim community, thus creating what I call an ‘imagined moral umma (community)’. I define the Imagined Moral Umma as an imagined community whose boundaries are determined by the moral standards of its members, thus making religious affiliation (i.e. being Muslim) a necessary but not sufficient condition to be part of this umma. By engaging in qualitative discourse analysis of selected articles in Inspire magazine, this paper shows that 1) the boundaries of Inspire’s umma are flexible, for inclusion and exclusion from the Imagined Moral Umma are dependent upon historical contingencies; 2) moral exclusion becomes the paradigm for justifying violence against Muslims, thus allowing the authors of the magazine to deflect the accusation of being a “takfiri group” (a group that utilizes the accusation of apostasy against its enemies). As such, the flexibility of the Imagined Moral Umma allows the authors of Inspire to articulate an ideological shift from a chiefly anti-Western propaganda to an anti-imperialist rhetoric, which directly affects the way in which jihad is promoted.

This paper focuses on this pattern in the self-styled Islamic State’s (IS) campaign against the Yazidis, a religious community with historical roots in the Sinjar area of northern Iraq in the summer of 2014. Thousands of Yazidis were summarily executed; large numbers of women and children were taken hostages and subsequently sold as slaves. What explains the IS’s extraordinary violence against the Yazidis? What were the motives of individuals who took part in the atrocities? This paper argues that one needs to look beyond Islamic state’s ideology and opportunistic motives to deep-rooted stigmatization of the Yazidis to explain the patterns of complicity and participation by the local population in the violence. Preexisting religious tensions and prejudices at the local level have played a strong role in shaping local population’s participation in the genocidal campaign. This explanation emphasizes the importance of the historical substance of ethnic identity (defined through religious beliefs and markers in this case) in shaping inter-communal relations. It also shows that alternative theoretical frameworks based on the notions of security dilemma, resentment, and greed do not provide satisfactory explanations of this pattern. The paper combines several different qualitative methods and is based on several original empirical sources. First, the authors have been conducting dozens of face-to-face in-depth interviews with Yazidi leaders including Baba Sheik, the top-religious authority of the community, and survivors including women who were taken captive by IS for extended periods of time in Iraqi Kurdistan (two different visits in September 2017 and May 2018) and Germany (June 2017). The authors use these interviews to obtain information about (a) the nature of inter-communal relations at the local level before the attacks, (b) the behavior of non-Yazidi neighbors during and in the aftermath of the attacks, and (c) the Yazidi perceptions of the causes of the attacks. These interviews develop a comprehensive view of the Yazidi population with regards to social caste, economic class, gender, age, and geographical location. The authors supplement these interviews with recorded testimonies of survivors conducted by local researchers and field reports by international associations and local organizations. Additionally, the authors have been conducting in-depth interviews with activists, professionals, and local authorities involved in the Yazidi affairs. Finally, the authors compile a rich set of historical and contemporary documents in primary languages (i.e., Kurmanjî and Sorani dialects of Kurdish, Arabic, and Turkish) about the perception of Yazidis by non-Yazidi communities and ruling authorities.

“I felt empty from inside…. I prayed to Allah to guide me.… then I found out about the respected leader of Tehrik-e Taliban [of] Pakistan….I met Mullah Fazlullah Khurasani…and gave him pledge of allegiance….Allah saved me.” This excerpt from a lengthy and detailed account of how a female fighter joined Tehrik-e Taliban of Pakistan (TTP) featured in Sunat-e Khola is rather a common theme among various jihadi groups (e.g. Afghan Taliban, TTP, ISIS, and Al Qaeda). While much is written about different terrorist groups, there is a paucity of systematic comparative analyses of the role personal stories/testimonies play in propaganda and recruitment strategies. Personal stories of average jihadists can be an effective way of garnering recruits. By focusing on personal stories featured in jihadi magazines, this research brings into light (1) differences in propaganda strategies of various groups and (2) what these stories tell us about the targeted audience of each group. The research employs the Information, Motivation, and Behaviour (IMB) model of behavior change to conduct qualitative analysis of Al Sommod, Azan, Dabiq, Inspire, Rumiyah, Ihyaye Khilafat, and Sunate Khola magazines. Our research demonstrates that there is a significant difference between the groups’ focus on “psychological and motivational appeals” as recruitment strategies.

This paper explores Islamic State’s use of fire in its own words and images. After conducting a systematic analysis of Islamic State’s official videos, books, and publications, particularly Dabiq, Rumiyah, and An-Naba’, I concluded that fire is the single most prevalent trope in the profusion of IS imagery and literature. This paper grapples with this central question: Why is fire central to IS vision of itself? Fire is a ubiquitous motif in IS speeches, chants, sermons, videos and publications. My analysis focuses on four video and three textual sources. Video sources include the 55-minute foundational “documentary,” Flames of War (September 2014), the 7-minute“What Are You Waiting For?,” the infamous Healing the Chests of the Believers (February 2015), showing the immolation of a Jordanian air force pilot, and Flames of War II (November 2017). Textual sources are the inaugural issue of Dabiq, which adopts al-Zarqawi’s words, “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify-by Allah’s permission-until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq,” as motto; an article, in the 7th issue of Dabiq (February 12, 2015), titled “The Burning of the Murtadd Pilot,” about the immolation of Kasasbeh, and a 3-page article in the 5th issue of Rumiyyah (January 6, 2017), Dabiq’s successor, titled “The Flames of Justice,” which discusses the merits of using fire to punish unbelievers. Fire figures prominently in the Quran, the hadiths, and Islamic eschatological literature. Fire, as hell, and the Garden, as paradise, are central to how groups like IS define themselves and their enemies. But fire is also one of the great engines of civilization: “the great transmuter,” the historian Stephen Pyne called it, of wood, metal and sociality. A stimulus for the imagination, the flame is “one of the greater operators of images,” wrote the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. Critics likened the magic of cinema to fire’s capacity to beguile, and equated the rise of the internet to the rediscovery of fire. Fire, then, is prevalent in Islamic State’s literature and imagery because it fuses life and death, faith and media, belief with battlefield, primal stirrings and advanced gadgetry. Fire helps Islamic State forge a dualistic identity: a celebrated self, occupying a hearth that must be defended, pitted against a reviled other that must be incinerated by the torch (this includes anyone, Muslim or not, who does not declare fealty to the Caliph).

This paper explores how the group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS) positions itself on the questions of nationalism and ethnicity by offering analysis of two Kurdish-language propaganda videos released by the group in 2015 and 2016. Released in the middle of IS’s battles with Kurdish nationalist movements in Iraq and Syria, the two videos attack Kurdish nationalist groups and ideology, seeking to discredit them in the eyes of average Muslim Kurds in the four Middle Eastern countries where the Kurds are divided: Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. Interestingly, the videos also offer an interesting window into IS’s general position on nationalism and ethnic culture and its desired form of polity: ummah. The study argues that as a Salafi Jihadi organization fighting to establish an Islamic caliphate that would ideally span the Muslim world and beyond, IS categorically rejects nationalist ideology as it stands in stark contrast to its ideal, universal notion of pan-Muslim ummah. IS conceives nationalism, with its roots in modern Europe, as a form of jahiliyya or ignorance, thus in opposition to hakimiyyah or God’s rule that is manifested in the form of pan-Muslim ummah or caliphate. Based on this ideological attitude, IS strongly rejects Kurdish nationalism and nationalist groups, viewing the ideology as an attempt to split the Muslim ummah. However, the group signals a tolerant position toward ethnic culture and identity. This tolerance is projected through appreciation for Kurds’ contribution to the Islamic civilization, and the fact that the videos are in Kurdish language and some of the militants wear Kurdish costumes. This positioning is a calculated strategy with an eye to recruitment as IS seeks to distinguish itself positively from the dominant state nationalisms that have oppressed Kurds over the course of a century. This study seeks to go beyond the current scope of the bulk of the research on IS that tends to largely focus on the group from a counter-terrorism perspective and attempts to shed light on key tenets of the group’s ideology particularly insofar as it relates to nationalism and treatment of ethnic diversity of the Muslim populations.