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The subject of Jihad has been a fiercly debated topic in the past few decades. Contradictory translations have been adopted by differing religious groups and political camps. In some quarters Jihad has been associated with violence and war. Other quarters perceive the Jihad to mean a striving within oneself and the struggle for self‐improvement. In this paper, the historical and contemporary perspectives of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam regarding Jihad are outlined. The evolution of the meaning of Jihad in each religion is clarified and similarities and dissimilarities among the three religions are highlighted. Various forms of Jihad are presented. The paper, however, argues that true Jihad means an active participation in social improvement and economic development. In addition, the paper provides implications of Jihad for business and organizations.

The chapter tries to highlight the critical importance of values to leadership, and argues that the research design of the ‘social scientific’ mainstream is incommensurable with the language of the scientific discipline that studies values: moral philosophy. The chapter shows that (a) through goals and actions, ethics is a central aspect of leadership and (b) that ethics cannot be reinterpreted as being ‘value-neutral’. Therefore, ‘effective’ leadership must always be connected to a specific value set. After arguing that leadership cannot be meaningfully looked at without reference to virtue ethics, two case studies are used to demonstrate the relationship between the two. By looking at two prominent terrorist leaders, the chapter shows how values are at the heart of their visions and actions. There are at least two practical implications: the study of leadership, and leadership education, must be reconnected with moral philosophy. The chapter connects three hitherto unconnected topics: leadership, (virtue) ethics and terrorism, presenting new insights into especially leadership.

Pakistan's present war against extremists has many folds and sheds. The country's initial participation in the Afghan War in 1979 later gave birth to different extremist trends in the country. State patronage of the extremist Wahabi Islamists during the Afghan jihad opened another conflict in Pakistan, and things became more complicated. The combination of external and internal factors gave birth to the worst kind of conflict, which now has not only become dangerous for the country's own existence but also a major threat for global peace. The Afghan jihad initially started as a war against Soviet occupation and later became the hub of global jihad-war against infidels.

This chapter analyzes how external factors promoted internal contradictions in Pakistan due to which the country became not only an exporter of jihadis for the world but also the worst kind of sectarian conflicts, including. Shia–Sunni, Deobandi–Wahabi clashes, entered into in the past two decades. Such a strong link exists with Pakistan's official support to global jihad. Draft sectarian groups now head to head with their opponents have killed thousands of members of rival sectors, have strong support from external sympathizers, and have spread in the country. The well planned terrorist activities of these groups reflect the fact that support to these groups in the past is now leading to a severe crisis in Pakistan. The nexuses of these indigenous extremists like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen with external terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan of Tahir Yuldasher Chechen Guerilla War has led to several bloody clashes in the country and outside.

I discuss the case of Hassan Almrei, one of the five Arab men detained as suspects who have the potential to engage in terrorism. Hassan Almrei's detention arises out of a section of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act of Canada that authorizes security certificates. A security certificate permits the detention and expulsion of non-citizens who are considered to be a threat to national security. Detainees have no opportunity to be heard before a certificate is issued and a designated judge of the Federal Court reviews most of the government's case against the detainee in a secret hearing at which neither the detainee nor his counsel is present. The detainee receives only a summary of the evidence against him. I discuss this legal situation as a state of exception that is part of a legal structure in which non-citizens have fewer rights than do citizens. Two conceptual tools shape my understanding of security certificates and their use in the “war on terror”: race thinking and the state of exception. The five detainees are more than simply victims of racial profiling. Their Arab origins, and the life history that mostly Arab Muslim men have had, operate to mark them as individuals likely to commit terrorist acts, people whose propensity for violence is indicated by their origins. When race thinking, the belief in the division of humanity into those prone to violence and those who are not according to racial descent, is accompanied by the idea that there must be two different, hierarchical legal regimes for each, and when we begin to grow accustomed to places without law and to people to whom the rule of law does not apply, we enter the terrifying world of the colonies and the concentration camp. This article examines how a space where law is suspended operates in the “war on terror” and it attends to the work that ideas about race do in the environment of the exception.

This chapter looks at a new form of a hybrid perpetrator within the field of individualized political violence. We reveal, that the new thing about (transnational) terrorism overcomes current oppositions and contradictions regarding terrorists and persons running amok, which (strategically) leads to an individualization of terrorism and thereby to a hybridization of a terroristic warfare.

By outlining organizational and structural changes in terroristic strategy within the framework of using both modern and antimodern elements, economic thinking, acting global as well as local, and by using network structures, the individualization of terror to the point of hybrid perpetrators is presented.

The new thing about (transnational) terrorism is the evolution of individualized perpetrators, radicalizing themselves without a clear connection to terroristic organizations. This leads to a hybridization of terroristic warfare, and within individualized single perpetrators it can be described as terrok. A terrorist running amok or a gunman on rampage with a radicalized mindset, equipped with his very individual ideology, who carries out his attacks logistically and operatively on his own while accepting his own death constitutes a new strategic way of irritating western society.

Currently, terrorists and persons running amok are separated into sharply distinguished categories. But regarding new tendencies in terroristic attacks committed by single perpetrators, this separation seems to be no longer able to capture the individualization of terrorism and thereby the linked hybridization of a terroristic warfare adequately. But in combining findings from both approaches, the new concept of terrok is able to do so.