"MY BROTHER IS MY KING": EVALUATING THE MORAL DUTY OF GLOBAL JIHAD

This paper considers the problem of defining and describing terrorism associated with contemporary "political" or "radical" Islam and the statements of Osama bin Laden that ostensibly justify global jihad. The author's moral assessment considers the task of comparative jurisprudence that includes reasoning in Islamic jurisprudence. Given bin Laden's appeal to Islamic sources, attention needs to be paid to the authority of the Hanbali school of law and the jurist Ibn Taymiyya as these relate to the justification of global jihad. The article concludes that these sources provide political Islamists "just cause" to wage a defensive global jihad on behalf of global Islamic solidarity of the ummah, defensive insofar as these actions are taken against Western "imperialism" and American hegemony. This points to the need for American politicians to rethink the policy of waging what is called the global war on terrorism.