Living mostly in the diaspora and undeterred by the
threat of retaliation against original home populations, jihadis, who are fre-
quently middle-class, secularly well educated, but often “born-again” radical
Islamists, including converts from Christianity, embrace apocalyptic visions
for humanity’s violent salvation. In Muslim countries and across western
Europe, bright and idealistic Muslim youth, even more than the marginalized
and dispossessed, internalize the jihadi story, illustrated on satellite televi-
sion and the Internet with the ubiquitous images of social injustice and po-
litical repression with which much of the Muslim world’s bulging immigrant
and youth populations intimately identifies. From the suburbs of Paris to the
jungles of Indonesia, I have interviewed culturally uprooted and politically
restless youth who echo a stunningly simplified and decontextualized message
of martyrdom for the sake of global jihad as life’s noblest cause. They are in-
creasingly as willing and even eager to die as they are to kill.
