Western commentators tend to think of Islamic jihadists as enemies of our civilization. But what animates the cause of Radical Islamists are ideas borrowed from Marxist and post-colonial Western thought. Jaan Islam argues that until we recognise the familiarity of the jihadist worldview, we will fail to reach our political aims, including peace. 

When people talk about ‘jihadis’ or Muslims more generally, the desire to classify people as ‘the other’ makes us frame them in neatly-packaged stereotypes that tell us more about the observer than the subject of observation. The ‘jihadi’ in the mind of the western observer is ruthless, barbaric and lives on the fringes of civilization. Such categorizations make it very difficult to understand how they actually understand the world, and more importantly, how they understand their goals in relation to the rest of us.

To begin to understand the jihadis’ world view we need to trace how the Mujahideen intelligentsia forged, sometimes surprising, ideological connections with western political theory. The vast literature these scholars draw upon include Neo-Marxism and postcolonialism. Scholars who serve as front-line clerics for Islamic struggles today not only read figures like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edward Said and Wael Hallaq, but incorporate these ideas into a global solution to the world’s problems. These include wealth inequality, neocolonial exploitation, and authoritarianism in former colonial states. While the academy likes to study stereotypical jihadists by presupposing their ideological separation from the so-called “West”, these intellectual connections with Western intellectuals force political theorists to rethink “the other” as closer to them.