Jihadi Culture

Abstract

“Jihadi culture” refers to the artistic products and social practices of transnational militant Islamist groups such as al‐Qaeda and Islamic State. A relatively new academic term, the concept seeks to capture the rich aesthetic‐cultural dimension of militant Islamism with its distinct poetry, music, iconography, practices, and rituals. As conceptualized by Hegghammer, jihadi culture is an umbrella term for all products and practices observed in jihadi groups that seem superfluous to the core tasks of a military organization. A group needs to propagandize, but not necessarily through poetry, and its members need clothes, but not necessarily of a particular color. This is a functionalist and materialist notion of culture close to what Leach referred to as aesthetic frills and decorations. Hegghammer also stresses the distinction between jihadi culture and jihadi doctrine – the latter connoting core theological and political tenets – and calls for the disaggregation of the term “ideology” into a doctrinal and an aesthetic dimension.