Transnational Islamic Movements

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on the network aspect of Islamic movements, i.e. what networks are, what their structure is and what some of their properties are. The discussion focuses on scale-free networks, their properties and networks value expressed in social capital and formulated in the Strength of Weak Ties theory by Granovetter. Al-Qaeda has been the most frequent reference in the research on the transnational Islamic networks, so somewhat unintentionally al-Qaeda’s example often appears in this paper as well.