Qisas: The Incremental Formation of Jihad amidst the Islamic Mujahideen across the Middle and Near East

Authors

Jenny N. Liang, University of Northwestern - St. PaulFollow

Abstract

Since its inception in seventh-century Arabia, Islamic thought and the concept of jihad have been present among Islamic scholars. Nevertheless, despite a history of conflict with Western nations through religious wars in the Near and Middle East, the rapid transformation of Islamic extremism by means of global terrorism in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first century ultimately traces to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the rise of the Mujahideen. Islamic yearning for retribution through strategic retaliation began after December 1979, when Soviet Red Army troops invaded Afghanistan. Following the resolution of World War II and the emergence of a Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, Eastern European nations behind the Iron Curtain soon became satellite states under Soviet intervention. Even the United Nations was largely inutile, as the two vying powers were members of the Security Council, terminating any policies that censured them. Both superpowers attempted to influence developing nations through a global race implementing either democratic or communist political structures, which inevitably reached the steppes of rugged Afghanistan. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan transpired from December 1979 to February 1989 during the late twentieth-century Cold War, where political tensions and bloody interactions between Soviet aggressions and Western provisions formed and refined the fundamentalist Mujahideen. Internal resentment and dissent culminated in a holy war against non-Islamic outsiders, the development of a unique modern approach to jihad, the formation of distinct twenty-first century terrorist groups, the cultivation of societies culturally centered around sharia doctrine, as well as a growing desire for vengeance through qisas, justice through retaliation.

First Page

38

Last Page

78

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Liang, Jenny N. (2025) "Qisas: The Incremental Formation of Jihad amidst the Islamic Mujahideen across the Middle and Near East," Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History: Vol. 15: Iss. 2, Article 2.
DOI: 10.20429/aujh.2025.150202
Available at: https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/aujh/vol15/iss2/2