jihad
Article
jihad is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 01, 2022 and September 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “some others within the Islamic world who consider themselves to be in a state of permanent jihad against the West”; “plus a billion people would declare jihad on you”; “several of his relatives joined the jihad at various points”. It most often appears alongside Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, Britain.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: July 01, 2022
- Last seen: September 13, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Afghanistan (2 shared issues)
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- al-Qaeda (2 shared issues)
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- Britain (2 shared issues)
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- Germany (2 shared issues)
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- Iraq (2 shared issues)
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- ISIS (2 shared issues)
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- Japanese (2 shared issues)
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- Middle East (2 shared issues)
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- Nazi (2 shared issues)
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- Nobel prize (2 shared issues)
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- Osama bin Laden (2 shared issues)
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- Paris (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
This has been inherited by some others within the Islamic world who consider themselves to be in a state of permanent jihad against the West. In this way they seek to move the underlying expectations, to change the rules of the game. Instead of seeing conflicts with Islamic jihadists as equivalent to other conflicts, then, we should attempt to understand their worldview. It is its own set of rules and expectations, but likely is closer to the way pre-Enlightenment religious wars, also known as hygienic wars, worked. Here are some quotes to set the flavor of it, but none of this is essential to the rest of the book.
Adraste: You seek hard-and-fast rules, but these will always elude you. You can’t escape adding up the costs and benefits and having a specific object-level opinion. Banning Islam has few benefits and many costs. It violates religious freedom. It perpetuates racist stereotypes. You couldn’t do it if you tried, plus a billion people would declare jihad on you. And the overwhelming majority of Muslims don’t commit terrorist acts anyway. Banning eugenics is very easy. We already did it; the victory requires minimal effort to maintain. Rolling it back has many costs and few benefits. I say keep it banned.
(The jungle war in the Philippines sounded cool in the section title, but his brief stint there at 18 is actually one of the least exciting stories of his life: it was mostly a frozen conflict and the jihadists spent their time playing beach volleyball.)
One good consequence of his cover being blown is that twelve years after his retirement, he could finally tell his story, resulting in one of the most fascinating books I ever read. The stories were presented in a believable enough way, not over-exaggerating his own importance, that I developed a lot of trust in most of his claims being true. I also mostly believe his journalist coauthors that they corroborated many details of his story. This makes his testimony a very useful source on the inner workings of jihadist organizations, and the intelligence agencies trying to stop them.
The book is also a real page-turner, a spy novel in real life. I will share the most interesting things I learned from this book, but for all the adventure stories, read the original, I really enjoyed it more than most novels. Surprising announcement: jihadists actually believe in their religion I know, shocking.
Inline links: read the original