Jihad in Saudi Arabia

For decades Saudi citizens have long made up a large number, if not the majority of, Muslim “foreign fighters” who have traveled abroad to participate in armed conflicts in locations as diverse as Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Roughly half of the suicide bombers in Iraq whose identities are known have been alleged to be Saudis. The rise of militant Muslim political (“Islamist”) groups in the kingdom has been the focus of numerous studies and polemical pieces, many of them shallowly researched and based more on stereotypes and conjecture than careful analysis of evidence. Differences between different types of Saudi foreign fighters (“jihadis”) have also largely been ignored.

Thomas Hegghammer’s Jihad in Saudi Arabia fills a gap in the existing literature on violent Islamism and specifically the history of Muslim activism inside the kingdom. Hegghammer, a researcher at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, is a former post-doctoral fellow at Princeton and Harvard Universities and is currently a non-resident fellow at New York University’s Center on Law and Security.