ABSTRACT
Non-state violence in the name of Islam dates back to the Assassins of the seventh century whose murderous campaign is now immortalized in the English language. The Assassins were Shi’a Moslems who stabbed to death prominent political and religious individuals who were felt to be resisting the advancement of their cause of the preservation of traditional Islamic values. Over a millennium later political violence in the name of Islam returned to become a major feature of international politics. The 1979 Iranian Revolution, which overthrew a western-oriented royal dynasty and put in its place a fundamentalist Shi’a regime, served as the catalyst for armed Islamist struggles, both Shi’a and Sunni (the two main sects), elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa. This modern wave of political Islam can actually be dated back as far as the 1920s and the anti-colonialist movement in Egypt, which founded the Muslim Brotherhood but was inspired and radicalized by the Iranian Revolution and the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan that occurred in the same year.
