Today’s ‘Jihads’ are in fact all  located on the peripheries of the Muslim world (umma ), operating  in places like Chechnva, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, as well as in Thai­land and the Philippines. Like its predecessors, the jihad in our times is also peripheral as a set of practices, being charismatic, heretical and even mystical. And like these holy wars of the past, the jihad, too, attempts to move such populist and non-juridical elements to the centre of the Islamic world as part of its struggle. This description runs counter to most academic and journalistic accounts, which derive the jihad from an urban, legalistic and orthodox Muslim tradition originating in the central lands and among the central authorities of Islam and exported to its social and geographical margins by way, of preaching and funding. In short, the jihad's specifically Islamic content draws upon the flotsam and jetsam of received ideas and remembered histories spanning the Muslim tradition that is often received by way of European sources.

This mode of appropriating the past differs from earlier efforts in that it denies the existence of distinct orders or genealogies of Islamic authority. In the past, for example, Sufi ideas and practices were absorbed into the juridical culture of Islam by strengthening and expanding the latter's distinctive order. But with the jihad all such orders and genealogies appear to have broken down, so that its task of synthesis is neither about claiming something from a rival order, nor about setting up or expanding a genealogy of one's own.

Everything we know about Al-Qaeda as a religious movement compares favorably with Sufi or mystical brotherhoods, even if these happen to be disapproved of by members of the movement itself. There is, for instance the very emphasis on jihad, which has historically been a characteristic of Sufi groups. Then there is the cult of martyrs, to whom are attributed supernatural powers including the ability to intercede with God for the salvation of their families, something generally frowned upon by anti-Sufi groups, but advocated by Osama bin Laden himself.' Along with these are the jihad's definition as an individual ethical obligation supposedly divorced from the political requirements of a state, as well as a rich and occult world of prophetic and other dreams, which are con­stantly spoken about within Al-Qaeda. Olivier Roy argues that the individualization of the jihad means that the concern of its advocates with personal faith, repentance and salvation transform their religious practices into those of mysticism.

Among the files found on a computer used by Al-Qaeda mem­bers in Kabul, for example, are references to Aristotle, Jesus and Menachem Begin's 1951 book, The Revolt, about his days as a ter­rorist fighting the British in Palestine-this being quoted approv­ingly and at great length. There are also documents in Arabic, Persian, Malay, French and English. (Alan Cullison, "Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive," The Atlantic Monthly,September 2004, p. 61.)

Even the videotapes of hosta­ges held in Iraq are multilingual, their Arabic signs and statements being juxtaposed with the hostages' own pleas and entreaties in various languages. This immediately pluralizes the audiences of these tapes and in fact presupposes their translation, thus undermining the idea of an original language for the Jihad. There is a sense in which the jihad's globalization is facilitated by the English language, with Arabic continuing to play its usual role over most of the Muslim world, as a minor language made for rituals rather than ideas.

Bin-Laden’s jihad abandons the authorities and heartlands of Islam by- taking to the peripheries, assuming there a charismatic, mystical and even heretical countenance that dismembers the old social and religious distinctions of Islam. But the jihad also infil­trates these central lands and authorities from the peripheries, thereby disaggregating their very centrality to democratize Islam and disperse it globally. The fate of the Middle East as a site that is supposedly central to Islam illustrates well how this process occurs.

Here al-Zawahiri second in command, is exemplary  not only because he aban­doned the struggle in Egypt for that in Afghanistan, but also because he deliberately renounced regional struggles altogether for the global jihad. Zawahiri's reasoning for this dual abandonment was a very simple one: the failure of jihad as a regional enterprise, espe­cially in the Middle East. This is how, for instance, he describes its particularly Egyptian failure in Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet: The problem of finding a secure base for jihad activity in Egypt used to occupy me a lot, in view of the pursuits to which sve were subjected by the security forces and because of Egypt's flat terrain which made government control easy, for the River Nile runs in its narrow valley between two deserts that have no vegetation or water. Such a terrain made guerrilla warfare in Egypt impossible.

Despite the importance he attaches to the jihad in the central lands of the Middle East, it is in fact on the Central and South Asian periphery that holy war achieves its purest Islamic form. Traditional notions of centres and peripheries in the Muslim world, whether of geography or autho­rity, have broken down in the jihad to the extent of becoming quite nonsensical.

Zawahiri's refrains about the importance of Egypt to the jihad, then, are curious neither because of their nationalist sentiment, nor because they overestimate the significance of the Arab world for global Islam. The Middle East is undeniably significant to the Muslim world as a whole, though perhaps more for geo-political than strictly religious reasons. What is puzzling about Zawahiri's remarks are his attempts to constitute the Arab world anew within a landscape where Islamic authority as well as geography have been completely- dispersed. And it is to this dispersal and reconstitution that I now turn. The Humpty-Dumpty of the Middle East is put back together in the jihad not as a site of historical or contemporary religious authority, let alone of Islamic political power, but instead as the symbolic battlefield of the three monotheisms, something which in any case it had already become in the world of Euro­American journalism and popular culture. The Middle East enjoys this specifically metaphysical status in the jihad.

Like Rome and Jerusalem, the holy cities of the Muslim Middle East have achieved the kind of religious universality that makes it difficult for them to be circumscribed within entirely regional, not to mention national, geographies. We know, for instance, that despite all its attempts to do so, the House of Saud has never managed to claim Mecca and Medina as its own patrimony.  In fact oncep­tually it subordinates his country and its sovereignty to an Islamic universality over which he has very little if any control. From Iranian demonstrations and Wahhabi gun-battles in the area around the great mosque of Mecca, to more recent demands by Al-Qaeda that the two sacred cities be freed from the Saudi monarchy, the very universality of these holy places pushes them beyond any lin­guistic or geographical particularity.

Even without these sacred sites, the Arab world, and the Middle East with which it is often conflated, come across as fairly ram­shackle entities. After all there exist areas like Spain which were once part of the Arab world but are no longer, people like the Berbers in Algeria, the Circassians in Jordan or the Kurds in Iraq who belong in the Arab world and even speak Arabic but who are not accounted Arabs, African groups in countries like Mauritania who speak Arabic but do not belong in the Arab world, and religious groups like Christians in Lebanon who speak Arabic and are con­sidered Arabs but happen not to be Muslims. In other words the cat­egories Arab or Middle Eastern have little if any consistency. Being made up of an arbitrary and vacillating congeries of language, re­ligion and race, such categories have only temporary meaning, and this, too, only in terms of a global politics that is frequently determ­ined outside the region's linguistic as well as geographical borders.

Another suggestion I would like to make is that among others, Al-Qaeda is propagandized by its negative portrayal in the Western media, but also that this portrayal ends up retaliating against the West in the form of terror.

The latter  is because Osama bin Laden recognizes Al-Qaeda's inability to practice a politics of control in its relations with the West, that he is able to separate the jihad's local causes from its global effects. The spectacular actions of a network like Al-Qaeda, while they are indeed meant to achieve certain goals, have departed the realm of intentionality by relinquishing control over their consequences. They have become, in other words, symbolic acts, as Jean Baudrillard would have it.

Plus Al-Qaeda  is in some respects also like its allies, the Sipah-e Sahaba or Jaish-e Muhammad, both groups that have little if any concern with states and territories frequently betraying Pakistan's own national security for the cause of global Sunnism.  Olivier Roy, for example, argues convincingly that the kinds of individuals, practices and religio­sitv common to Al-Qaeda do not differ significantly either from quietist forms of Islam, or indeed from globalized religions more generally. For him such forms of Islam are both the agents and victims of globalization.

The Media and Martyrdom

Whether or not the jihad's acts are influenced by pre-existing media stereotypes, they invariably occur in the form of events already packaged, as it were, for media distribution. Media packa­ging is also common among those who might not support the jihad but have been affected by it. For example in photographs released by Reuters of women in the Pakistani city of Multan protesting the beheading of their countrymen by the Islamic Army in Iraq in July 2004. The pictures show demonstrators carrying English-language placards blaming the Pakistani government for the deaths, each of which bears the name of a Pakistani music company printed decora­tively at the top. No doubt anticipating the massive exposure these signs would receive in the media, an enterprising Pakistani firm seems to have sponsored them.' The global exposure of these English language signs could do very little for sales of such CDs abroad, but they might well reach an English-speaking Pakistani audience in a much more effective way by taking this international route. Al-Qaeda and its imitators are not slow to reciprocate such media-savvy moves. An Iraqi tribal leader, negotiating on behalf of the Islamic Secret Army for the release of three Indian citizens taken hostage in July 2004, advised that appeals made to the abductors by Indian film stars were more likely to succeed than direct communi­cations from the government in New Delhi. What kind of holy warriors are these who blend so effortlessly with Hindi film fans?

From spectacular attacks to sundry communiques and behead­ings, the jihad's world of reference is far more connected to the dreams and nightmares of the media than it is to any traditional school of Islamic jurisprudence or political thought. Indeed the novel practice of beheading hostages, especially on film, has spread rather like a fashion promoted in the media. Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Pakistanis domiciled in Kuwait who were respectively involved in the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, seem to have modelled their behaviour on that of James Bond. This is how they passed the time in between carrying out a series of strikes in South-East Asia during 1994:

The conspirators were very cool. As they planned their attacks in Manila, they took plenty of time out to enjoy themselves. After bombing the PAL (Philippines Airlines) airliner they went to Puerto Galera, a beach resort south of Manila, to take a week-long scuba-diving course. One of Khalid's girlfriends later told police that he had portrayed himself as a rich Qatari businessman. One of their meetings took place in a five-star hotel in Makati, Manila's financial district. The two men also frequented night­ clubs and hotel bars. On one occasion Khalid set out to impress a lady dentist by hiring a helicopter and flying it over her clinic while talking to her on the telephone. (Yosri Fouda and  Nick Fielding, Masterminds of Terror: The Truth Behind the Most Devastating Terrorist Attack the World Has Ever Seen, 2003, p. 98.)

Such "Westernized" behaviour did not in the least interfere either with the religious belief of these  men, or with their fervent practice of it at other times. Nor does it indicate an exceptionally schizo­phrenic attitude, since similar swings in behaviour, terrorist outrages apart, are common enough among Muslims, as they are no doubt among others as well. Indeed such behaviour is, if anything, yet another sign of the disintegration of old-fashioned distinctions, whether religious or political, in a universe of global effects that is best represented by the mass media.

With satellite TV all over the Muslim world, Sarajevo, Groznv, Kabul, Baghdad, Srinagar and even New York, like the sacred sites of old, also call forth practices of pil­grimage, donation, tourism and death, but unlike these are marked neither by tradition nor commemoration. While each of these global sites calls to and even emulates the others by making possible the movement of men, money and munitions between them, none make for old-fashioned practices of visiting and recalling, perhaps because they are by nature un-historical. Their importance lying in the sheer currency or immediacy of suffering, these sites are quickly forgotten once they become safe for visiting, or rather they survive only as names in the randomly constructed genealogy of some other, more current theatre of war and martyrdom. As sites of a global Islam, in other words, former sites of the jihad like Sarajevo are separated from their own local and regional histories to become part of the history of jihad elsewhere, in places such as Kabul, Baghdad , Manhattan, London, or Paris.

It is no exaggeration to say that only in this globally mediated landscape does Islam become universal, uniting Muslims and non­Muslims alike in a common visual practice, even in a fundamental agreement over the Islamic nature of the spectacle that brings together people of every religious and political opinion in a strange unity. Might we say that a religious universality expressed in the vision of converting the world has been displaced here by the con­version of vision itself, to make of Islam a global spectacle built out of the convergence and complicity of innumerable lines of sight? It is as the object of this seeing that Islam becomes universal, if only in the particularity of the caves, ruins and battlefields of its own martyrdom.

The jihad's battlefields become sites of a global Islam only when they are in the news, which is why combatants, funds, and supplies, not to mention the world's attention, move from one battlefield to another, because the content of the jihad is the news itself as something new. It is when they are reduced to caves and ruins that the towns and villages occupied by the jihad lose their own histories and become nothing but news, to enjoy their being in a state of immediacy. And once their particularity is destroyed, their very roots eradicated, these blasted habitations and their former occupants are transformed into universal figures. They become Muslims as such, people whose particular histories have suddenly disap­peared to become part of the universal history of Islam.

Islam comes to exist universally in the places where its particu­larity is destroyed, the presence of its ruins on television screens bearing witness to the Muslim's universality as martyr and militant. What makes Islam universal, then, is the forging of a generic Muslim, one who loses all cultural and historical particularity by his or her destruction in an act of martyrdom.

Unlike Christian martyrdom, which also invokes the idea of witnessing, Muslim  shahadat involves not only the person whose life is volun tarily sacrificed for the cause of God, but everyone annihilated in this cause whether willingly or not. Not only people, but animals, buildings and other inanimate objects as well may participate in the rites of martyrdom, including even those who witness the mar­tsrdom of others without themselves being killed. After all shahadat is a fundamentally social and therefore inclusive act, the pity and compassion it excites among witnesses forming part of its classical as much as contemporary definition. Because martyrdom in Islam is thus connected to seeing in a much more general as well as much more specific sense than in Christianity, it is capable of cohabiting in productive ways with the global practices of news reportage. Martyrdom also includes within its ambit any number of subjects: perpetrators, victims, bystanders, other animate and inanimate witnesses, near or far, all of whom constitute by their very seeing the landscape of the jihad as a site of sociability. Roxanne Euben, in a essay on martyrdom in the jihad, argues that it may help to anchor a new political project by lending it a kind of existential weight. While I do not explore this line of thought here, the sociability of martyrdom that I am describing might reinforce her argument. See Roxanne Euben, "Killing (For) Politics: Jihad, Martyrdom, and Political Action", Political Theory, vol. 30, no. 1, Feb. 2002, pp. 4-35.

Only in mass media does the collective witnessing that defines martyrdom achieve its full effect, as the various attempts by would­be martyrs to film their deaths or at least to leave behind videotaped testaments, illustrates so clearly. A videotape obtained by Time magazine in which martyrs are shown reading their last testaments, saying goodbye to their families and blowing themselves up at various places in Iraq is the closest the jihad has vet come to creating its own form of a reality television show.

God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the sit­uation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon,

I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the US sixth fleet.

In those difficult moments many emotions came over me which are hard to describe, but which produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.

As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way (and) to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women. 3 3

Noteworthy is that the witnessing of which Bin Laden speaks so personally, and which affected him so deeply, was in fact a collective witnessing by way of mass media, since he never participated in the Lebanese war. It was perhaps the abstracted nature of this viewing that resulted in Bin Laden's determination to reject injustice and punish the unjust in an equally abstract manner, as a universal and so properly ethical imperative rather than a specifically political one, since what had become "unbearable" for him as a television viewer was a morally unjust situation. Yet the profound emotions that he claims were inspired by this witnessing bear little if any relation to the reality of the scene he describes. In other words while he may have reacted to images from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in this fashion, Bin Laden's attempt to claim the destruction of tower blocks in Beirut as a precedent for those of Manhattan ignores more recent precedents, such as the attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Moreover the proposal to fly planes into the twin towers was suggested to him by an outsider, Khalid Sheikh Moham­med. So the mediated witnessing of terror in Beirut, which Bin Laden tells us set a precedent for his equally mediated witnessing of Roxanne Euben, in a fine essay on martyrdom in the jihad, argues that it may help to anchor a new political project by lending it a kind of existential weight. While I do not explore this line of thought here, the sociability of martyrdom that I am describing might reinforce her argument. See Roxanne Euben, "Killing (For) Politics: Jihad, Martyrdom, and Political Action", Political Theory, vol. 30, no. 1, Feb. 2002, pp. 4-35.

In Bin-Laden’s last  videotape broadcast by Al-Jazeera on October 29 2004, during the closing phase of a  contested presidential election in the United States, Osama bin Laden repeated this justification for the attacks of 9/11, tying it even more strongly to the viewing practices of mass media:

God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the sit­uation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the US sixth fleet. In those difficult moments many emotions came over me which are hard to describe, but which produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.

As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way (and) to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women. ("God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers", The Guard­ian, Oct. 30, 2004. (http://s;-NN%%.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/ 0,13918,1339845,00.html), pp. 1-2.)

Noteworthy is that the witnessing of which Bin Laden speaks so personally, and which affected him so deeply, was in fact a collective witnessing by way of mass media, since he never participated in the Lebanese war. It was perhaps the abstracted nature of this viewing that resulted in Bin Laden's determination to reject injustice and punish the unjust in an equally abstract manner, as a universal and so properly ethical imperative rather than a specifically political one, since what had become "unbearable" for him as a television viewer was a morally unjust situation. Yet the profound emotions that he claims were inspired by this witnessing bear little if any relation to the reality of the scene he describes. In other words while he may have reacted to images from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in this fashion, Bin Laden's attempt to claim the destruction of tower blocks in Beirut as a precedent for those of Manhattan ignores more recent precedents, such as the attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993.

Moreover the proposal to fly planes into the twin towers was suggested to him by an outsider, Khalid Sheikh Moham­med. So the mediated witnessing of terror in Beirut, which Bin Laden tells us set a precedent for his equally mediated witnessing of terror in New York, together make up a media narrative in which one scene is exchanged for another, creating a community of exchanges between the jihad and its enemies.

Or take for example the following  statement  by a Hezbollah fighter in Lebanon:

The Americans pretend not to understand the suicide bombers and consider them evil. But I am sure they do. As usual, they are hypocrites. What is so strange about saying: "I am not going to let you rob me of all my humanity and my will?" What is so strange about saying: "I'd rather kill you on my own terms and kill myself with you rather than be led to my death like a sheep on your terms?" I know that the Americans fully understand this because this is exactly what they were celebrating about the guy who downed the Philadelphia flight on September 11, the one where the hijackers failed to hit their target. Isn't that exactly what he must have said when he decided to kill himself and everyone else by bringing the plane down? Didn't he say to those hijacking him: "I'd rather kill you on my own terms and kill myself with you rather than be led to my death like a sheep on your terms?" They made a hero out of him. The only hero of September

11. They are hypocrites, the Americans. They know as much as we do that as a human being we all have the capacity to rush enthusiastically to our death if it means dying as a dignified being." (Quoted in Ghassan Hage, "`Comes a Time we are All Enthusiasm': Under­standing Palestinian Suicide Bombers in Times of Exighophobia", Public Culture, 15 (1), 2003, pp. 84-5.)

The sociable nature of the jihad is evident in this passage, with mar­tyrdom making a community possible by the collective witnessing of mass media. For it is this bearing of witness that allows Amer­icans and the world at large to know that the martyrs of 9/ 11 and their victims were interchangeable and equal in death-a death that was important because it offered them both the possibility of becoming human.

Thus martyrdom creates a global community because it is collectively witnessed in mass media. These witnesses are therefore part of the jihad's struggle either as friends or enemies.

However while linking the jihad's role as a media spectacle to Muslim notions of martyrdom, I do not wish to suggest that this role somehow derives from such notions. The community of witnesses created by the media spectacle, and its ethical responsibility for the holy war, makes sense even without the etymology of the word shahadat. The jihad posits the existence of a global com­munity, one that is formed by martyrdom as a bearing of witness through mass media in order to hold people, and even the whole world, responsible in some way for its struggle. Such responsi­bility, therefore, depends upon the unproblematic availability of the jihad's truth in martyrdom, beyond any theory of ignorance or deception. After all truth here has become an ethical rather than epistemological fact. This does not mean that there are no attempts at media deception, only that the spectacle of martyrdom makes ignorance inexcusable, as if by the sheer excess of its violence. So apart from acknowledging the responsibility assigned them by the jihad, it is hypocrisy and not delusion that is the only other attitude expected of people. Hypocrisy, an accusation levelled in the Quran against those who claimed to be Muslim out of convenience, has become the jihad's most damning charge, referring now to the self­interested lies not only of Muslims but of all those concerned with its struggle.

Ultimately the spectacle of martyrdom is its own proof, a sacri­fice whose selflessness transforms the jihad into a practice of ethics. Indeed as an ethical performance the act of martyrdom is a perfectly circular one, since it proves itself by itself without the help of any outside truth. And this is how it is invariably described in the jihad, as a leap of faith that affirms itself by itself.

In Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet Ayman al-Zawahiri next, also places the American-led war against Afghanistan in a geopolitical context that both predates Al-Qaeda and exists much beyond its control:

If the Chechens and other Caucasus mujahidin reach the shores of the oil­rich Caspian Sea, the only thing that will separate them from Afghanistan will be the neutral state of Turkmenistan. This will form a mujahid Islamic belt to the south of Russia that will be connected in the east to Pakistan, which is brimming with mujahidin movements in Kashmir. The belt will be linked to the south with Iran and Turkey that are sympathetic to the Muslims of Central Asia. This will break the cordon that is struck around the Muslim Caucasus and allow it to communicate with the Islamic world in general, but particularly with the mujahidin movement. Furthermore the liberation of the Muslim Caucasus will lead to the fragmentation of the Russian Federation and will help escalate the jihad movements that already exist in the republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, whose governments get Russian backing against those jihad movements. The fragmentation of the Russian Federation on the rock of the funda­mentalist movement and at the hands of the Muslims of the Caucasus and Central Asia will topple a basic ally of the United States in its battle against the Islamic jihadist reawakening. For this reason the United States chose to begin by crushing the Chechens by providing Western financing for the Russian Army so that when this brutal campaign against the Chechen mujahidin is completed, the campaign can move southwards to Afghanistan either by the action of former Soviet republics that are US agents or with the participation of US troops under the guise of combating terrorism, drug trafficking, and the claims about liberating that region's women. ("Transcript of Usama Bin Ladin Video Tape", trans. George Michael and Kassem M. Wahha, Dec. 13, 2001, (http://wwss-.defcnselink.mil/news/ Dec2001 /d2001 l213ubl.pdf, p. 6.)

This longterm analysis, as it is of any self-respecting conspiracy theory, again illustrates the jihad's adoption of a global history by way of the Cold War, its location outside the bounds of the Middle East, its subordination of local struggles to the larger conflict of monotheism, and so forth.

The strictly political concerns of Zawahiri's analysis have to do with the alleged American desire and strategy to control the oil and natural gas of the Caucasus and Central Asia, which makes Muslims, and especially the supporters of holy war, into inveterate enemies of the United States. Given this explanation, Ayman al-Zawahiri could dispense with the language of Islam and even of jihad in order to gain allies among non-Muslims and wage a purely political war. The fact that he does not has little to do with his desire to play upon religious emotions or anything of the sort. It does however have a lot to do with the ethical nature of global movements like the jihad, which have been unable to prevail politically.

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