History Through Jihadist Eyes: Interview with Abu Shu'ayb al-Masri

A considerable amount of tracking of jihadist discourse focuses on what jihadist groups and figures say about present-day and ongoing events: for example, the Russia-Ukraine war and the recent coronavirus pandemic. While understandable, this focus may lead to a neglect on how they conceive of history, both on the ‘pre-Islamic’ level (i.e. before Prophet Muhammad’s mission and the establishment of the Muslim community) and the ‘Islamic’ level (i.e. history during his lifetime and subsequent to it). Yet it is surely the understanding of history that forms a key basis of their worldview, in terms of why the Ummah (global Muslim community) is seen as facing a crisis today and the nature of the solutions to that crisis, and how looking at the past is important for extracting lessons for the present and future.

To give a sample illustration of the importance of history, I present here an interview I recently conducted on this very topic with Abu Shu‘ayb al-Masri/Talha al-Musayyar (an independent Egyptian cleric, who was previously affiliated with the insurgent group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in northwest Syria and is now a leading critic of the group for what he sees as unacceptable compromise on the jihad in Syria).

In this interview we touched on the general importance of history for the Ummah, the historical nature of the conflict between belief and disbelief, the course of Islamic history, the particular lessons of the Muslim experience in Iberia, and whether the Ummah is today facing the worst crisis in its history.

Note that any parenthetical insertions in square brackets are my own.