Jihad and Révolution Jusqu’à La Victoire: Political Theologies, Secular Jihads, and Trans-religious Exchanges in the Global Palestinian Guerrilla Movement

In contemporary historiography of the 20^th Century Middle East, the global ascension of political Islam and jihadist movements in the 1980s is seen as a novel historical phase, a distinct movement to be contrasted with the “secular leftist” or “Arab socialist” protest culture of the 1960s and 1970s. While broadly accepted, this periodization is highly problematic, as it reduces the complex ideologies, discourses, and practices of both periods, and obscures the origins of global Islamic activist networks. In an effort to complicate dualistic schemata that distinguish between “secular vs. Islamist” protest, this study explores the fusion of Christian, Muslim, and Marxist iconography and theology in the Palestinian guerrilla movement of the 1960s and 1970s. How were concepts like jihad, martyrdom, and the mujahid understood in the “secular leftist” revolutionary canon of the 1960s and 1970s? What role did inherited beliefs about universal justice, redemptive violence, and self-effacement play in the revolutionary imagination? How did trans-religious exchanges and ties to transnational protest networks influence the construction of Palestinian moral imaginaries, particularly as related to notions of jihad and revolutionary struggle? By comparing Christian and secular Marxist concepts of liberation and violence with Islamic concepts of jihad, the study seeks to contextualize and demystify the question of jihad, by examining its modern function as a form of social protest. In addition, by looking at the role of jihad and other theologies in transnational protest cultures, the study contributes to a broader debate on the intersection of the moral imaginary and global imaginary in modern social movements.