El círculo de la Yihad global

Since the second half of the 20th century, and especially since we entered the current century, attacks have been taking place and increasing, the source of which is Islamic jihadism. Countries of the five continents and their main cities have suffered bloody terrorist attacks for which most of the population does not understand the reason for them. This rising wave of terror culminated in the establishment of the Islamic State, between Iraq and Syria, until its military defeat in March 2019. In "The Circle of Global Jihad", Antonio Elorza tries to explain this phenomenon from its roots, analyzing the successive ones phases of the Islamic jihadist tradition through its most representative texts. From its origins, starting with the Koran and the sentences of the Prophet of Allah, following the orthodox pattern that the Damascene theologian Ibn Taymiyya codifies around 1300, until reaching the 20th century, through the Muslim Brothers, from Hasan al Bannâ to the capital figure of Sayyid Qutb. Jihadism then becomes the north of the Islamist militancy, being reinforced by the return of Wahhabi orthodoxy in Saudi Arabia. It is what Osama bin Laden personifies. From there emerges the new trajectory that leads from al-Qaeda to the full return to origins test, represented by the Islamic State. A fundamental and illuminating book to understand the gestation of a wave of violence that traces its foundations to the Middle Ages, when Ibn Taymiyya, among others, marked the demand and the forms of predominance of the "umma", or community of believers, ruled by "sharia" or Koranic law, on any other human group, with the use of jihad as a means to make it happen.