The evolving participation of Muslim women in Palestine, Chechnya, and the global jihadi movement

Muslim women are not new participants within the nationalist, and often violent, conflicts that exist in their respective countries. They have been long-associated with secular nationalist settings in Algeria, Palestine, Turkey and Lebanon. In modern times, women’s involvement in Islamic religious violence first appeared during the Iranian Revolution. Their involvement in Islamic religious violence widened in the context of the Chechen movement and then in the Palestinian and Salafi global jihadi movement (GJM), though, by most accounts, their numbers have remained relatively small, though not insubstantial.1 The evolution of women’s political violence from secular to Islamic religious settings2 is the focus of this analysis.