Adam Hoffman

Islamic revivalist movements share the same basic goal of implementing God’s rule on earth, yet they diverge on the question of the best methods for achieving this objective and on how to promote an Islamic society or even an Islamic state. In modern times, the strategy of daʿwa has usually been associated with “mainstream” Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, while more radical movements have rejected it in favor of more immediate action: violent combat (jihad) or leaving mainstream Muslim society (hijra).1 Such has been particularly the case with the violent Salafi-Jihadi trend, which advocates fighting “infidels” and “apostates” as the only answer to the dire predicament of contem- porary Islam. Still, the new opportunities that arose during the dramatic events of the Arab uprisings prompted some of its leading organizations and ideologues to reconsider nonviolent preaching and proselytizing, or daʿwa. This chapter dwells on the civic aspects of the Salafi-Jihadi trend by examining the recent change in the importance of daʿwa in the dis- course and practice of Salafi-Jihadist organizations.

As the coronavirus spread across the Middle East, many states and non-state actors securitised the corona crisis: that is, used warlike rhetoric to frame the pandemic as a national security issue or mobilised the state’s military and security services in the country’s fight against COVID-19.
This article examines the government’s responses to the coronavirus in Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, as well as the securitised responses to the pandemic by lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The Islamic State has survived despite the massive international and regional effort to defeat it. Even in its present form, it is still active as a guerrilla movement in Iraq and continues to fight in its remaining territories in Syria, particularly in the Deir al-Zour region. This evolution from a proto-state to a guerrilla organization is largely a return to the group’s earlier incarnation in Iraq, prior to the 2014 declaration of the caliphate. The coming years will determine whether it can survive as an insurgency, and perhaps even replicate its past successes, or whether it will cease to be a relevant organization in the landscape of global jihad.

How did the Arab Spring impact the political behavior of violent non-state actors? The events of the Arab Spring which swept the Middle East in 2011 shook many long-held assumptions in the study of international politics regarding the region, such as the myth of authoritarian stability and the impossibility of bottom-up political change. However, in addition to these state-centric changes, events since the Arab Spring also challenged existing explanations regarding the political behavior of violent non-state actors. Since 2011, violent non-state actors in the region expanded their territorial control and challenged state authority, but also engaged in non-violent activities such as preaching and religious outreach (da'wa) events. Using Islamic State (ISIS) and Jabhat al-Nusra as case studies, this paper examines this shifting political behavior of violent non-state actors in the Middle East since the Arab Spring. The increasing use of such strategies forces scholars in international security studies to also examine the non-violent aspects of violent non-state actors in order to fully explain the political behavior of such actors.

Since the regional rise of ISIS in the summer of 2014, much of the debate in the West and the Middle East had focused on the organization's relation to Islam. This article argues that while it is impossible to assert what is 'Islamic', due to the decentralized nature of Islam and the fragmentation of religious authority in contemporary Islamic discourse, a better way of answering this question would be to examine how ISIS establishes its religious authority. As part of this analysis, the article examines the various aspects of ISIS' claim to exclusive religious authority: its declaration of a Caliphate, its appointment of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the Caliph of all Muslims and its assertion of Islam in the public sphere through an institutionalized activity of da'wah and hisbah. The article argues that ISIS' claim to exclusive religious authority marks an evolution and radicalization of the salafi-jihadi discourse during the last two decades.

In parallel to the military fight against ISIS – led by the Global Coalition, with the participation of local forces in Iraq and in additional parts of the Middle East – recent months have also seen an online campaign that seeks to debunk the organization’s narrative. The main innovation of the current struggle, which is managed by governments and civil society organizations, is the effort to discredit the messages distributed by the organization on SNS, and to refute the religious and political credibility of its messages, in order to de-legitimatize the organization's narrative.