Throughout the past two decades, various radical Islamist groups in the Middle East have sometimes used extreme forms of violence against their enemies. Like any other type of warfare, the battles waged in the name of Islam were never nonviolent.¹ In the past 20 years or so, however, several Islamist groups have shown that they were willing to go beyond fighting non-Muslim armies in a classical jihad between the abode of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the abode of war (dar al-harb) and instead use large-scale violence against civilians, often including fellow believers. Prominent examples of this trend include Algeria² and Egypt³ in the 1990s, Iraq since 2003⁴ and Jordan in 2005.⁵

Radical Islamists' widespread use of violence against civilians, particularly other Muslims, was not received uncritically by the radical scholars on whose writings the militants based their ideas. Some Islamists have been critical of the expansion of jihad to countries like the United States and openly condemned the terrorist attack of 9/11 and the strategy behind it.⁶ Others, such as the Egyptian al-Jamaa al-Islamiyya⁷ and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),⁸ have completely revised their radical ideologies. Still others seemed to take a middle way, criticizing certain jihadi⁹ militants for their (extreme) use of violence. Of the latter group, the radical Egyptian scholar Sayyid Imam (a.k.a. Dr. Fadl/Abd al-Qadir b. Abd al-Aziz) and the Jordanian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi are probably the best-known examples, although they do not have similar ideas. While various publications have dealt with the criticism expressed by these two men,¹⁰ far less attention has been paid to al-Maqdisi's efforts to expand on his criticism of certain jihadi practices, in order to purify jihad and the creed that supports it and to protect them from allegedly bad influences.

This article analyses al-Maqdisi's efforts to protect jihad by looking at his actual criticism of certain jihadi militants and, conversely, at his attempts to support and praise "good" jihadis in several countries. The article then focuses on the successful attempt by al-Maqdisi to set up a council of like-minded scholars in order to provide guidance and advice to youngsters dealing with religious questions about a host of issues, including jihad, and what advice this council has actually given. Using mostly Arabic primary sources taken from the internet,¹¹ including the collections of fatwas published by the council, this article argues that these radical scholars may well have an important impact on the future of jihad and as such are worthy of both scholars' and policy makers' attention.