Jihadism went global because of local repression. That is the bottom line of this long and complex story. The inability of Arab countries to include Islamists in national politics produced a class of activists who in the 1970s began looking to the international stage for operating space. In the 1980s some of these pan-Islamists gave the notion of Islamic solidarity a military interpretation, and started calling for Muslims to fight in each other’s wars. They were helped by a host of other factors – including oil money, technology, and geopolitics – but they would not have embarked on their mission in the first place if they had not been excluded from local politics. Thus the main roots of jihadi transnationalism lie in the domestic and regional politics of the postwar Middle East.