Creating the Ideology of Al Qaeda: From Hypocrites to Salafi-Jihadists

This article investigates the rationales of different explanatory models that have been utilized to explain the ideology of Al Qaeda. From perceptions of madmen and religious hypocrites to Wahhabis of the twenty-first century and Salafi-Jihadists, what these approaches have in common is an “outside-in” perspective that assumes a concept of the underlying logic of Al Qaeda without sufficient reference to primary sources. It is argued that particularly those explanations that seem to have become the official wisdom regarding the fundamental logic of Al Qaeda, Wahhabism and the Salafi-Jihadist discourse, are concepts that are poorly understood and subject to much controversy. In the anxious quest to explain Al Qaeda, the terrorism studies community seems to have deviated from the guidelines of academic conduct and restricted itself to re-assuming for its own use oversimplifications of the complexity of Islamic thought, thereby granting those oversimplifications a new lease on life. The risk of such conduct is that one ends up with a misrepresentation of the very issue he or she seeks to comprehend.