At first, Jihadism began as just another Islamist movement focused on establishing an Islamic state. As Fawaz Gerges, America’s premier scholar of Jihadism, has shown, the early Jihadists were “religious nationalists whose fundamental goal was to effect revolutionary change in their own society.” Their primary focus was on what they termed the “Near Enemy”—Arab regimes, “hypocrite” imams, apostate Muslims—as opposed to the “Far Enemy”—Israel, Europe, and the United States. “The road to Jerusalem goes through Cairo,” Ayman Zawahiri wrote in 1995, before he had joined al-Qa’ida, when he was
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