The extremist doctrine of jihad articulated by Bin Laden and others was a warped but recognizable descendant of the militant revivalism that burgeoned in the Wahhabi and Sokoto movements. They too had justified their expansionist jihads (mostly against Muslims they declared apostates) not by artful interpretation of scripture but by imagining themselves in the original contexts of that scripture itself, the pioneering monotheists purifying a heartland for Islam.
