We associate “crusaders” with the medieval world and those who took part in military campaigns during the period 1095–1291, the “golden age of crusading.” This chapter examines why groups of men and women throughout history have been described as “crusaders.” For many historians, “crusaders” are not just those who fought against Muslims, but those who took part in papally inspired campaigns in various theatres-of-war against diverse enemies, for which they took vows and enjoyed special privileges. We further use the word “crusader” to describe those whom popes encouraged to take part in military ventures, for example against the Ottomans, over a much wider chronological period – from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In modern times, crusade rhetoric has also been a key feature of both Western and Eastern religious and political discourse. Hence the chapter explores how our idea of “crusaders” has developed since the original use of the word.

This chapter explores the medical systems developed in precolonial and colonial Nigeria, the social, economic, and political processes which impacted the development of said medical institutions/practices, and how these systems, in turn, impacted the social, economic, and political landscape of colonial Nigeria. This chapter will use several significant pandemics, such as the 1918 influenza pandemic, to explain how Nigeria’s medical and nonmedical systems interacted during immense medical stress. The medical practices and policies explored were highly regionalized, and each Indigenous population had its specialized form of healthcare. When Nigeria was brought under the colonial fold, certain regions received more or less assistance in developing medical facilities. These developments were primarily driven by economic interests underpinned by a racist political and social system, often leading to disastrous consequences.

This chapter explores the history of urbanization in Nigeria, focusing primarily on the colonial era and, to a lesser degree, precolonial Nigeria in areas that hosted large, Indigenous urban centers like Ibadan or Kano. This chapter will argue that the primary factor that pushed Nigeria toward urbanization was colonialism, driven primarily by economic interests. This development was informed by Nigeria’s unique geographic, social, and political conditions, the specifics of which will be showcased through the exploration of Nigeria’s most prominent cities. Finally, the chapter will detail the urban policies of colonial officials and the actual development of these cities, along with the challenges that arose from uneven, exploitative practices. These issues would mire Nigeria’s urban landscape with poor planning, crime, poverty, and numerous other challenges which continue to plague the nation today.

This chapter concerns the 1435/2014 IS booklet on slave-concubinage, al-Sabī: Aḥkām wa-Masāʾil, probably authored by the group’s jurisconsult (muftī), Turkī al-Binʿalī (d. 1438/2017). The text was widely disseminated online when first published, attracting much comment in the international press. In the section excerpted here, al-Binʿalī focuses on the permissibility of taking female pagans as slave-concubines. While premodern Sunnī jurists had typically permitted female People of the Book (i.e. Kitābiyyāt, Jews and Christians) as sexual partners for male Muslims living in the Muslim polity, whether through marriage or slave-concubinage, they were almost unanimous in prohibiting such unions with Zoroastrians and other religious groups. Based on largely historical considerations, and adducing the views of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), Ibn al-Qayyim (d. 751/1350) and al-Shawkānī (d. 1250/1834) as proof, al-Binʿalī undermines the classical Sunnī view that female pagans are unlawful as slave-concubines.

This chapter discusses the 2015 Islamic State (IS) publication Bal ʾaṭʿanā allāh idh aḥraqanāhu yā ʿabīda al-rafāhiyya (‘Nay, We Obeyed God When We Burned Him, You Slaves of the Luxurious Life’), which justifies the execution by immolation of Jordanian fighter pilot Muʿādh al-Kasāsba. The act prompted widespread criticism, sparking outrage across the Muslim world. This condemnation was even echoed within the Salafī jihādī, including the notorious Abū Muḥammad al-Maqdisī (b. 1959). The author of the piece, Shaymāʾ Haddād (b. 1992), more commonly known by her pseudonym Aḥlām al-Naṣr, exploits juristic disagreements in the medieval scholarly tradition to persuade the reader that immolation was never prohibited by the Prophet Muḥammad. Far from presenting the punishment of immolation as a timeless repetition of Prophetic custom, she claims that immolation is a necessary evil in a modern world where ‘incendiary weaponry’ (al-asliḥa fī hi ḥaraqa) - such as missiles, napalm, and cluster bombs - has become a norm in the conduct of war.

The concluding chapter argues that the consolidation of the Company state in India led to a radical reconfiguration of the politics of Muslim pilgrimage. From 1818, a “paramount” Company Raj sought to secure its newly acquired sovereign supremacy by designating as legally deviant or permissible a host of circulating figures in and around India, including hajj pilgrims. Yet, against this backdrop, the British also became increasingly anxious of the supposedly subversive forces that were being smuggled into the Indian Subcontinent from Arabia by so-called Wahhabis, a colonial byword for militant jihadis. But then, in its efforts to tackle the violent insurgencies of “Muhammadan fanatics” as a specifically political problem, and so distinct from the putatively “religious” practices of pilgrim “faqirs,” the Company state and its secular legal regimes also became entangled in administrative quandaries of their own making. The result was not only pervasive forms of colonial “Mussulmanophobia” and repeated recourses to state violence against suspected Wahhabis under the cover of states of emergency. With the bigger and bloodier crisis of 1857, it was also a set of official gestures that radically recast and reified “religion” as the natural wellspring of modern Muslim politics in South Asia.

Chapter 2 uses a colloquial expression from contemporary Mauritania – “al-ḥikma kuntiyya aw fūtiyya” – to examine Mauritanian narratives that place the consolidation and localization of the Islamic esoteric sciences in the Sahara in the eighteenth century. The expression shows how Mauritanians today associate these sciences with the powerful scholarly and commercial network of the Kunta, a confederation known for its Islamic learning, and the Fulbe torodbe scholars who established theocratic states in West Africa. Both communities continue to associate these sciences as solely embedded in networks linked genealogically to Arab identity. This colloquial expression shows how Mauritanians today conceive of this esoteric religious wisdom as deployed at the very local level, spread through two regionally important religious communities, yet simultaneously connected to the longer history of Islam in the Muslim world, and circulating at the global level of Sufi networks. By the end of the nineteenth century, differences in interpretation and practice of the Islamic esoteric sciences had amplified: questions regarding which esoteric and medical techniques were permitted within Islam and which were not were intensely debated, as scholars from the Saharan West elaborated their own intellectual positions and political objectives in the ways they classified these sciences.

Chapter 1 is dedicated to the interpretation of a recently discovered, unpublished typescript by Strauss on Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. In this transcript, available as Appendix A and composed sometime after 1956, Strauss underscores the conflict between philosophy and Islam in Averroes’s commentary on Plato’s Republic. The transcript consists only of short notes and therefore, to reveal its message, it needs to be interpreted in the context of Strauss’s other writings. Strauss’s interpretation of Averroes is based on the idea that Averroes must have been aware of the incompatibility of Islamic revelation with the best regime of Plato. Unlike other scholars, who are mainly preoccupied with Averroes’s access or lack thereof to a reliable translation of Plato’s Republic, Strauss argues that the deficiencies of Averroes’s commentary do not mean that Averroes did not have access to Plato’s Republic; he claims that such apparent deficiencies might be intentional and significant for understanding Averroes’s views.

The Sultanate was a global state that interacted with regimes in North, West and East Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia. Its ideology of diplomacy focused on maintenance of the balance of power extant during the formative stage of its founding: control over the Syrian Littoral and Red Sea nautical routes to South and East Asia. Senior officers appointed from Cairo ruled Syrian provincial capitals as viceroys, tying them directly to the imperial center. On the Red Sea coast of Arabia (Hijaz), the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca exercised local political authority, but from Baybars’ reign were compelled to comply with the Sultanate’s commercial and fiduciary policies over the spice trade. Tensions in Southeastern Asia Minor heightened when objectives of territorial stasis advocated by the Mamluks clashed with aims of territorial conquest asserted by the Ottomans. Regional principalities pursued their own goals of autonomy with varying degrees of success. The international system of commerce, centered on Venetian and Mamluk exploitation of trade routes to Asia through the Red Sea, was decisively altered by the Portuguese entry to the Indian Ocean. When the Ottomans defeated the Cairo Sultanate, its centrality in the global environment was already diminished.

At the core of the politicization of Islam is the territorialization of Islamic belonging, which during the nation-building phase has manifested itself in ways previously unknown in the former Muslim Empires. This territorialization was combined with the elimination of religious and cultural diversity, leading to a specific form of religious nationalism called hegemonic. The genealogical investigation shows the conceptual and institutional changes that constitute the bedrock of the current manifestations of Political Islam from the last phase of the Ottoman Empire to the current national situations. Areas of politicization in Syria and Turkey are presented from the inception of the nation-state to today’s civil war in Syria and the role of Turkey. These areas cover the status of sharia in state law, the boundaries of the secular space, the status of political violence, and the influence of regional and transnational political and religious actors.

This chapter looks at the thinking and practice of international relations and world order in the Islamic world. It opens by setting Islam's complex geopolitical context. In terms of thinking it covers the umma, the realms of al-Harb, al-Islam, and al-Ahd, jihad, the work of Ibn Khaldun, and Ijtihad. In terms of practice it covers the relationship between the umma and the Islamic state, the division of Islam into rival empires, and the rivalry between Sunnis and Shias within Islam. A key theme is the contradictions between thinking and practice.

Chapter 5 focuses on the elusive boundary between the lazy and the industrious in the post-1908 Young Turk era. In this tumultuous period, the Ottoman culture producers employed the concepts of work and laziness to further develop the exclusionary language characteristic of the culture of productivity against their rivals. Surveying political pamphlets, journals, memoirs, and the daily press, this chapter shows how various ideological camps entered into a cultural struggle over who should be regarded as lazy and useless based on a putative association with “super Westernization” or with “anti-progressivism.” In the relatively open political atmosphere immediately following the 1908 revolution, the polemics between various political agents, usually dubbed “Westernists” and “Islamists,” signalled a vital debate on the ideal citizen required by the nation. Their views of these issues diverged greatly, as did the question of who should be labeled lazy and unproductive. Such labels marshaled the exclusionary language that has been in development, revealing a variety of models of reform in the public sphere and how each one regarded the other as the cause of laziness.

This chapter analyses a set of keywords which were used to refer to ‘Us’, that is the author of the text and the social group that they belong to, which includes the reader as a potential member of that group. The keywords examined in this chapter are Islam, Allah, Muslim, brothers, believers, Ummah and you. The chapter introduces the reader to the main method of analysis which involves identification of representation surrounding each keyword via grammatical patterns through the corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine.

This chapter functions as a literature review, beginning with a summary of some of the terminological issues surrounding the study of terrorism. This is followed by an overview of theorisations of terrorism as communication, that is, the theory that violent acts are communicative. We then discuss not the practices and (verbal) expressions related to clandestine violence undertaken by terrorist individuals or groups. We explore some of the findings from previous research relating to the patterns in terrorists’ words and communicative strategies. We then turn to violent jihadist discourse specifically considering issues around polarised language and its relation to grievance-based discourse, the creation of shared identity, intertextual use of historical and theoretical texts and evocation of authority. We conclude by suggesting why the dearth of research on terrorist discourse poses problems for the creation of viable counter-terrorism measures.

In this chapter, the focus remains on language but moves away from representations around particular words to instead consider the ways in which specific types of language are used as persuasive devices in themselves. Here, we take another meaning of discourse, one which relates to the concept of register, text-type or genre and involves issues relating to stylistic choice. We thus explore some of the specific linguistic strategies that authors use in the data in order to highlight how these might contribute to the legitimacy or persuasiveness of the extremist discourse. We examine keywords that index formal register, as well as those connected to the concepts of truth and quotation. This is followed by a consideration of how code-switching into Arabic is employed in the texts.

This chapter examines the language around harm, focussing on keywords related to the category of violence: jihad, kill, martrydom and paradise. We identify the frequent use of a religious journey metaphor which extremist writers have taken from the Qur’an and reworked to justify killing. A key stage on this path then, is the conceptualisation of jihad as literal fighting and as obligatory, desired by Allah and in is his name. Three representations around killing help to position Muslims as victims, giving a justification for killing civilians, and helping to assuage fears around losing one’s own life as the result of engaging in violent attacks, again by invoking Allah’s authority and approval. Violence is cast as heroic martyrdom and justified as occurring within the context of a war.

This chapter gives an account of our data and method, specifically outlining how we collected and prepared the texts containing extremist language that are the subject of this book, along with the different tools and techniques that were used for analysis. The chapter then carries out preliminary analyses of the data, using Biber’s multidimensional approach before moving on to describe a methodology called Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) which involves a collection of approaches that are united by their use of software to identify linguistic patterns in large, electronically-encoded sets of data. We also describe how we obtained and classified keywords across the three sub-corpora which were used as the basis of focussing our analysis on a manageable set of lexical items.