ABSTRACT
Muslims in the contemporary world, and that discussions of tolerance and
moderation are all but absent from Islamic discourse. Aside from the texts
and transmissions of global jihadi revolutionaries such as Usama Bin
Laden, we are also told that each week in mosques around the worldmany of them funded by Saudi Wahhabis-fiery orators preach hatred
against non-Muslims, the United States, and the West. While phenomena of
this sort are undeniably present in the Muslim world today (and much
reported in the media), merely to point out their existence tells us very little
about their prevalence and relative influence vis-a`-vis other tendencies and
currents within the Muslim world. In Chapter 7 we discussed the target
audience of global jihadi radicals and sought to contextualize the appeal of
their discourse as part of a religio-political consciousness shaped by a particular experience of the relationship between religious identity and political
power in a variety of contexts. We emphasized that this jihadi approach has
very limited appeal among most Muslims today, but that the few who do
act on it have potential for great visibility and spectacle-witness September
11, 2001 or the July 7, 2005 attacks in London.
