Thomas Hegghammer

القافلة ؛ عبد الله عزام وصعود الجهاد العالمي

الجهاد في السعودية

Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian cleric who led the mobilization of Arab fighters to Afghanistan in the 1980s, played a crucial role in the internationalization of the jihadi movement. Killed in mysterious circumstances in 1989 in Peshawar, Pakistan, he remains one of the most influential jihadi ideologues of all time. Here, in the first in-depth biography of Azzam, Thomas Hegghammer explains how Azzam came to play this role and why jihadism went global at this particular time. It traces Azzam's extraordinary life journey from a West Bank village to the battlefields of Afghanistan, telling the story of a man who knew all the leading Islamists of his time and frequented presidents, CIA agents, and Cat Stevens the pop star. It is, however, also a story of displacement, exclusion, and repression that suggests that jihadism went global for fundamentally local reasons.

Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad

The Caravan

Stéphane Lacroix

Bernard Haykel

Making sense of Saudi Arabia is crucially important today. The kingdom's western province contains the heart of Islam, its two holiest mosques in Mecca and Medina, and it is the United States' closest Arab ally and the largest producer of oil in the world. However, the country is undergoing rapid change: its aged leadership is ceding power to a new generation, and its society, which is dominated by young people, is restive. Saudi Arabia has long remained closed to foreign scholars, with a select few academics allowed into the kingdom over the past decade. This book presents the fruits of their research as well as those of the most prominent Saudi academics in the field. The fifteen chapters in this volume focus on different sectors of Saudi society and examine how the changes of the past few decades have affected each. Many of the authors have conducted archival and fieldwork research in Saudi Arabia, benefitting from the recent opening of the country to foreign researchers. As such, the volume reflects new insights and provides the most up-to-date research on the country's social, cultural, economic and political dynamics.

Insights on Social, Political, Economic and Religious Change

Saudi Arabia in Transition

This book studies the art forms and social practices that make up much of the daily life of jihadi culture.

Jihadi Culture

"Making sense of Saudi Arabia is crucially important today. The kingdom's western province contains the heart of Islam, and it is the United States' closest Arab ally and the largest producer of oil in the world. However, the country is undergoing rapid change: its aged leadership is ceding power to a new generation, and its society, dominated by young people, is restive. Saudi Arabia has long remained closed to foreign scholars, with a select few academics allowed into the kingdom over the past decade. This book presents the fruits of their research as well as those of the most prominent Saudi academics in the field. This volume focuses on different sectors of Saudi society and examines how the changes of the past few decades have affected each. It reflects new insights and provides the most up-to-date research on the country's social, cultural, economic and political dynamics"--

Thomas Hegghammer

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