Representing Jihad: The Appearing and Disappearing Radical - Jacqueline O'Rourke

The jihad has been at the centre of the West’s securitization discourse for more than a decade. Theorists frequently use the jihadist as a discursive tool to further their neoliberal, military and market agendas, perpetuating massive gaps of understanding between the West, Muslims and jihadists themselves. They are helped by Muslim interlocutors, who all too often play the role of the ‘good’ Muslim explaining the motifs of the ‘bad’. Representing Jihad skilfully critiques the debate around the jihadist, arguing that Muslim theory and fiction have been commodified to cater to the needs of Western ideology. Examining the work of theorists such as Edward Said and Slavoj Žižek, novelists such as Don DeLillo and Orhan Pamuk, and jihadists such as Mohammed Siddique Khan and Osama bin Laden, O’Rourke explores some of the critical fault lines in postcolonial theory and literary analysis. Timely and comprehensive, this book argues that the temptation to appropriate the figure of the jihadist offers fertile ground for a discussion about the limits of current theory.