Western Jihadism: A Thirty Year History
JYTTE KLAUSEN
(OUP, 543 PP, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • tel 020 7799 4064

The graphic imagery on the jacket of Jytte Klausen’s book conjures up a firework display, until one discovers what it represents. The gleaming lines streaking across the globe chart the reach and inter-connectivity of jihadist extremism.

Professor Klausen teaches at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, and her earlier books were about Muslims in Europe, including a study of the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Since then, she and her students have spent 15 years building up a database profiling more than 6,000 Western jihadists – 5,832 men and 561 women – in an arc of countries stretching from Alaska to Australia. The resulting book is a 30-year history of al-Qaeda from the early 1990s until today, with a particular focus on the role of Western Muslims. The reason for this soon becomes apparent. For while al-Qaeda’s founding father, Osama bin Laden, relied on several crucial factors – Egyptian lieutenants, Saudi money, the new power of the internet and social media – he also needed Western recruits with clean passports who could carry the jihad well beyond the Greater Middle East to the streets of New York, London, Madrid and Paris.

At first the principal target was the American superpower, and Klausen reconstructs the various jihadist networks which spent years planning the 9/11 attacks against the Twin Towers in New York. The 19 hijackers devised ingenious means to avoid detection: they used 364 aliases during their stay in the US, travelling into and out of the country 33 times between mid-January 2000 and the attacks themselves on 11 September 2001.