[Jihadica] New Articles on al-Maqdisi and Bin Nayif

Thomas Hegghammer's pieces are always worth reading as an antidote to the nonsense that tends to appear in most of the American media.

New Articles on al-Maqdisi and Bin Nayif

Thomas Hegghammer

September 6th, 2009 — Western Analysts

Just a quick note to say that there is a new article on the idelogy of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi in the latest issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. The author is of course Joas Wagemakers, the world’s leading Maqdisi expert and an occasional Jihadica commentator. While I am at it, I should mention that Wagemakers published two other excellent articles on related topics last year, one on al-Maqdisi’s Qur’an interpretation and another on al-wala wa’l-bara in Salafi discourse.

For more relevant academic articles, see the indispensible overview of current contents of periodicals on the Middle East by the GLORIA Center in Herzlia, Israel.

On the current affairs side of things, there are two new articles on the Bin Nayif operation. Greg Johnsen of Waq al-Waq has an excellent piece in the Nationalwhich gives you the big picture of the operation. Then there is a great analysis by Saud al-Sarhan in the Saudi newspaper al-Watan. Al-Sarhan traces in detail the long history of Saudi al-Qaida’s targeting of government figures, and argues that the main novelty in the Bin Nayif attack was the tactics. The attack does not herald a new wave of violence, he concludes (and I agree). Al-Sarhan, for those of you who don’t know him, is a Saudi intellectual and PhD candidate at Exeter University in the UK. He writes frequently in Arab media and occasionally in the Western press (see e.g. this New York Times piece).

Sphere: Related Content