Temporary Scheme of Modern Jihadism

Abstract

Based on the propaganda materials of the international terrorist organization Islamic State*, the article examines the temporal scheme and the historical narrative of jihadist propaganda. Studies of the politics of memory and historical narratives of organizations of radical Islamism are practically absent due to the inaccessibility of the source base. This study is based on the official jihadist propaganda materials coming from the propaganda bodies of the Islamic State*, and on the corpus of sources of spontaneous propaganda of supporters of radical Islamism. Due to the extremely different socio-cultural basis of its supporters, jihadist propaganda is forced to operate not with an integral narrative, but rather with a set of plots, building a discrete narrative about the past. These plots correspond to the ethnic myth scheme proposed by Smith A. D. Despite the fact that modern jihadism is not an ethnic community due to the orientation towards internationalism and universalism of the dogma, the commonality of religious and, more importantly, political ideas make it possible to analyze the historical narrative of radical Islamism from the point of view of an ethnosymbolic approach. The study of representations of the past, characteristic of a modern jihadists, is carried out because of the types of cultural memory identified by Jan Assman. The study main historical points fixing the temporal scheme of the Islamic State*; and some stable ideas about the past of Islamic civilization, characteristic of jihadist propaganda. Of particular interest is the mythology of the centuries-old global conspiracy against the Muslim Ummah, which is in many ways the key concept of the jihadist narrative, as well as the eschatological representations of jihadist propaganda.

Keywords

• historical narrative
• cultural memory
• temporal scheme
• representations of the past
• national myth
• jihadism
• islamic state
• radical islamism
• caliphate