In a world of perfect interdisciplinary collaboration, Thomas Hegghammer’s edited collection Jihadi Culture would perhaps not be the ground-breaking work that it undoubtedly is. Largely compiled in 2014 and drawing for the most part on sources that are some years, if not decades old, there is little inherent reason why the subjects it examines should not already be the object of a lively body of scholarly inquiry. But the fact is that they are not and were not to an even greater extent when the book came out in 2017, and certainly when the project was initiated.

Given its originality, this collection makes no claim to be an encyclopedic survey or to represent the last word on the subject. As Hegghammer states in the introduction (p. 2), “Our ambition here is limited insofar as we seek only to explore a selection of genres, not to exhaust the topic.” The book aims, he immediately goes on to say, “to highlight the wealth and significance of jihadi culture and inspire others to do more research on it.” It surely succeeds in the first of these objectives and no doubt will turn out to have succeeded in the second. The complex, hybrid nature of jihadism inevitably means that studying jihadi culture entails a disciplinary juggling act that requires in more or less equal parts an understanding of classical Arabic and Islamic sources, contemporary military history, and online popular cultural production; indeed a shared feature of most of the chapters in this collection is the way they confidently and expertly weave back and forth between multiple areas without ever seeming to lose focus or become overextended.

In Cresswell and Haykel’s opening chapter on jihadi poetry, for example, the authors’ survey sweeps the reader on from the curious world of online jihadi celebrities, the poetic predilections of Osama bin Laden (who in 2010 asked a subordinate within the same few lines of a communication for recommendations regarding books on classical prosody and someone suitable to lead “a big operation inside America”), and broader Arabic pop-culture references such as Sha’ir al-Milyun— the blockbuster reality TV talent show that is essentially American Idol for classical poets. Examining the importance of anashid (Islamic hymns), Nelly Lahoud draws with seemingly equal facility on the classical Arabic literature and seized internal strategic documents. David Cook—one of the few really big-name scholars in Islamic studies who has consistently focused on cultural aspects of contemporary Islamist militancy— expertly draws out the unique features of Jihadi-Salafi martyrology by way of comparison both with ancient Islamic and Christian traditions and with the contemporary militant culture of the Shiite group Hezbollah and of comparatively secular Palestinian groups (Hamas included).

Particularly gratifying is the amount of attention given to the crucial, but often neglected, material and organizational details of jihadi cultural production and of how material is critically received by its primary audience of dedicated internet jihadis. These are by no means easy things to study. Nevertheless, the limited data that can be gleaned from online discussions and captured documents have been thoroughly harvested by the authors and used with uniformly impressive skill. Examining the visual culture of Jihadism, Afshon Ostovar, for example, considers the intriguing and almost entirely neglected case of the “art competition” once held by the Ansar al-Mujahidin forum—an occurrence that offers a tantalizing glimpse into how ordinary online jihadi supporters think about what constitutes aesthetically pleasing design. Meanwhile, ethnomusicologist Jonathan Pieslak examines the conversations of online collectors of jihadi nashids for clues as to what musical features appeal to them (thumping rhythm, it turns out, seems to be an important factor in hit making in this purely a cappella genre). Anne Stenersen, an analyst with reliably outstanding attention to detail, delves into the process behind the making of Al Qaeda’s USS Cole operation video, right down to the software packages that were available to edit it.

So what are the book’s limitations? The significant area of jihadi cultural production about which the chapters of this volume have little to say is jihadi prose literature. In his concluding chapter on jihadi “non-military practices,” Hegghammer notes the importance of storytelling as a jihadi practice; however, analysis of actual examples of storytelling lies beyond the scope of his contribution, which focuses on what jihadis do, not on what they say. David Cook does give some attention to the one relatively well-known compilation of contemporary jihadi stories, Abdullah Azzam’s Signs of the Merciful in the Afghan Jihad, but does so only from the standpoint of jihadi martyrology. Like many aspects of this profoundly proscribed movement, available data on the specific stories related and read by jihadis are not necessarily voluminous, but accessible examples do exist.

If I have one real complaint about the collection as a whole, however, it would be the apparent unwillingness of the authors—and perhaps particularly the editor—to draw what might seem to be obvious parallels between the jihadi case and parallel findings within the sociological and cultural studies literature over the past four decades. As noted, writing about jihadi culture is already a multidisciplinary undertaking, and it would seem that the individual chapters have made a point of keeping a largely empirical focus. Nevertheless, Jihadi Culture clearly aspires, taken as a whole, to offer an overarching argument as well. Indeed, as an edited collection it is impossible to pass over how remarkably disciplined the book’s overall structure is, with chapters organized into a genuinely coherent thematic progression and contributors meaningfully acknowledging and building on previous chapters as the book proceeds. Impressive as this is, however, if anything it serves to highlight the book’s arguable limitations at the conceptual level.

Hegghammer’s previous work, especially from 2013 and 2014, was notable for making skilled used of rational choice theory as a way of framing and coming up with innovative hypotheses regarding the behavior of militant Islamists. There is a lot to be said for this approach, especially given the popular tendency to present jihadists as irrational fanatics. In this volume, he seeks to interrogate jihadi culture by means of a similar approach. Of course, rational choice theorizing by its nature involves building problems out of stylized and reductive models of human life. But I am not sure the approach quite works on this occasion. For one thing, although it is true that some examples of extreme (and, theologically speaking, nonobligatory) religious practices noted by Hegghammer are so apparently counterproductive from a military perspective as to seem genuinely puzzling, the abstraction of a hypothetical rebel group with an automaton-like focus on fighting to the exclusion of everything else is a contradiction in terms. Why, absent cultural attachments, do rebels see it as in their interests to fight in the first place? For another, there is no big puzzle, surely, as to how cultural production may benefit groups.

Hegghammer himself advances two hypotheses in this regard. The first concerns the typical economistic notion of costly signaling: Hegghammer speaks of jihadi culture as perhaps functioning as a “resource for costly signs” (p. 14). And yet in the jihadi case, the data presented in this book, including in his own contribution to the volume, seem to contradict this point. Jihadi culture is a porous phenomenon that draws few sharp distinctions between jihadism as such and other forms of fundamentalist or political Islam and even, at times, entirely mainstream Islamic practices (such as istikhara, in which a believer prays for divine guidance, often believed to be sent subsequently in the form of a dream). Even “jihadi” nashids— knowledge of which Hegghammer offers as a hypothetical source of cultural capital—are mostly produced (and, in all probability, consumed) by people who are not in any thoroughgoing sense committed to Jihadi-Salafism. His second hypothesis is that jihadi cultural products are rationally worth investing in because they function as “emotional persuasion tools” (p. 16). There seems to be much more evidence for this, but it is far from clear that the microeconomic approach is a particularly helpful way to shed further light on this observation.

Hegghammer, I think, tacitly acknowledges this limitation, insofar as he also seeks to posit—somewhat independently, if not logically unrelatable to the rational choice line of inquiry—another “big idea:” namely, that “what scholars have tended to refer to as ‘ideology’ is really two different things: doctrine and aesthetics” (p. 2). This is no doubt an important corrective to the way scholars have studied jihadi groups in particular, and it is with reference to this specific field that he is immediately concerned. But the absence of any explicit acknowledgment of the extensive literature on aesthetics in relation to other totalitarian ideologies (Nazism being an obvious example) does seem to risk possible accusations of reinventing the wheel. It also seems to raise an important unasked question. Why is it that students of jihadism in particular have apparently been so slow to investigate this important subject?

Perhaps even more surprising, however, is that Hegghammer also gives very limited acknowledgment to an entire, parallel literature specifically tackling the subject of jihadi culture. Although brief mention is made in the introduction of work dealing with the subject of “pop jihad” and the relationship between jihadi radicalization and subcultures of “Muslim cool” (p. 4), there does not seem to be any serious attempt to incorporate the interests and insights of this body of work. This is perhaps not accidental. Indeed, one might argue that the approach to jihadi culture that Hegghammer’s collection serves to epitomize is in certain intriguing ways fundamentally distinct from—even opposite to—the concerns of this other body of scholarship. Illustrative, I think, is the slight bemusement with which Hegghammer seems to regard my own book Jihadi Culture on the World Wide Web (Ramsay 2013), which, he notes “appears to understand culture in a broader sense of ‘the entirety of jihadi activity’” (p. 4). Hegghammer might well think this, because the central aim of this book is indeed to analyze online jihadi activity from the theoretical standpoint of participatory culture. For Hegghammer “culture” is a distinct feature of jihadi activity, an elusive third category distinct from military utility and prescribed doctrine. For others, however, culture—or more usually subculture—describes less an object of inquiry than a theoretical approach. The typical concerns of Hegghammer and his coauthors (as presented in this book, not necessarily in their broader outputs) differ from subcultural theorists of jihadism in other ways as well.

Whether a deliberate choice or an oversight, however, my overall feeling is that Jihadi Culture is ultimately strengthened, not weakened, as a collection by the fact that it does not, by and large, engage with this ostensibly similar but ultimately very different literature. It is precisely because it so clearly exemplifies the particular approach to jihadi culture that the book is such a useful resource. Indeed, for researchers more inclined toward the paradigm I have just tried to describe, the book lays down, I think, an important challenge by way of raising an interesting paradox.

A good number of the scholars in this collection might be described as associated with the “hard” end of terrorism and political violence research. Hegghammer and Stenersen are both associated with the Norwegian defense establishment. Afshon Ostavar is a professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School. Nelly Lahoud has previously taught at West Point. They are researchers professionally charged not just with understanding jihadists but also advising national militaries on how best to defeat them. And yet, as I just pointed out, it is often precisely these sorts of researchers who end up becoming most interested in learning to see the world “through the enemy’s eyes.”

The awkward contradiction for jihadis is that allowing themselves purely aesthetic enjoyment in any human creation is a challenge to precisely the claims to authenticity they depend on: indeed it is potentially tantamount to the ultimate sin of shirk, worshiping something other than Allah. Yet, jihadis are well aware of the practical necessity of publicizing themselves and creating emotional engagement not just with Islam in general but also with their own particular movement. In addition, they are trying to faithfully reenact— to create “performances of authenticity” as Cresswell and Haykel put it (p. 28)— a complex historically existing Islamic culture that did not itself conform to puritanical standards of internal consistency. This is in turn a subdivision of a larger struggle common to Islamic and other fundamentalists who must simultaneously struggle against the profane world of globalized, late-capitalist media consumption, seeking sources of transcendence that cannot be reduced or marketized while at the same time operating according to the fundamental logic of the “language of new media.” The tensions and ambiguities that Hegghammer observes—between strategic necessity and religious observance, between doctrine and aesthetics, between what is distinctively “jihadi” and what is “mainstream” Islamic practice— are, in reality, theoretical tensions within jihadism itself.

And this is where the paradox lies. Subcultural theory is traditionally premised, at least in principle, on treating neglected and despised forms of cultural consumption and production with deep seriousness and respect—with striving to understand what members of these cultures themselves see as valuable and beautiful. And yet, however objectively apt or theoretically useful it may be to see jihadis as analogous to skinheads or hardcore punks (or, say, Saudi drifters or Egyptian mahragan artists), it is a point of view that will always be an alien and belittling imposition on the jihadi self-account. As the American fighter Omar Hammami asks (in a passage Hegghammer quotes on p. 20), “Who throws away their entire life for counter-culture?” And yet, if we do not accept at face value jihadis’ own claims to authenticity, we presumably must accept that this is, in fact, what they are doing. And it is in precisely this paradoxical space that “jihadi culture” therefore necessarily exists.