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the world is a far more radicalized place now than it was prior to 11 September. Helped by a powerful surge of anti-Americanism, Washington’s incredible failure to stem the haemorrhaging of support and sympathy, and by modern communications, the language of bin Laden and his concept of the cosmic struggle has now spread among tens of millions of people, particularly the young and angry, around the world. It informs their views and, increasingly, their actions. In Indonesia in November 2002, days after the Bali bombing, I saw young Islamic activists wearing bin Laden T-shirts. There were pro-Palestinian slogans on many walls in Jakarta. Hundreds of thousands of young men log onto to jihadi websites across the world each day. Once the anger and resentment of young men and women throughout the Islamic world was voiced in the language of relatively moderate political Islamists. Now the slogans are very often those of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, al-Zarqawi and the other public ideologues of the most radical extreme of modern militancy. On a visit to Kashmir in November 2003 I was surprised and concerned to hear a Muslim doctor in a town in one of the most violent areas talking about the Crusader–Zionist–Hindu alliance. This particular local bastardization of the standard jihadi worldview, predicated on a Western/Christian/Jewish conspiracy to dominate Islam, struck me as a particularly tragic example of how the radicals’ debased discourse is now so prevalent. For centuries Kashmir was known for its tolerant, pluralist, moderate, mystic and syncretic form of Islamic observance. In these harsh times, it seems, ‘soft’ Islam is easily pushed aside by newer, ‘harder’ strands. The brand of activism, articulated in Islamic terms and justified by reference to the Islamic tradition, that is personified by bin Laden, is fast becoming a global discourse of dissent. Al-Makki, with his talk ofal-Qaeda-style radicalism as the ‘common currency’ of the Islamic world, was barely exaggerating.
    This has two consequences. The first is an ideological convergence among militants. This can be detected everywhere. Organizations (and individuals) with no previous interest in ‘global jihad’ now have vastly broadened perspectives and can find new common ground. Where once groups focused on local concerns, now they look on all that is kufr as their target. In Pakistan, the mixed composition of the group who kidnapped and killed the American journalist Daniel Pearl, of the Wall Street Journal , and brutally murdered him in January 2002, was just the first of many examples of increasing co-operation between previously discrete groups, few of which had previously shown much interest in international jihad. 6 Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaeda logistics chief, was captured at a safe house belonging to the Sipa e Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), a group previously interested only in a local sectarian agenda. It is likely that the intermediaries who acted as conduits for the London bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan to the men in the mountains of Waziristan and Paktia also came from similar groups previously focused merely on Pakistan or Kashmir. A similar convergence is detectable among militants from or in the Maghreb. Algerian groups now proudly flaunt their internationalist credentials in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, issuing a series of threats in the autumn of 2006 against France, the US and even the UK. More recently, the GSPC in Algeria has made efforts to unify all the disparate militant movements in the Maghreb into a new extremist coalition. 7 In Afghanistan, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, once the archetypal educated radical political Islamist and the determined rival of both the Taliban and the Arab-dominated al-Qaeda, is now an (albeit reluctant) collaborator with men like Mullah Omar, a cleric, and Jalaluddin Haqqani, the tribal chief who is now one of the Taliban’s most powerful commanders. 8 Palestinian groups too are completing their