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This book presents a rare glimpse into the rhetorical machinations of one of the world's most brutal terrorist groups. For scholars of terrorist literature, there is no comparable product on this group or other groups in South Asia.
List of contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Transliteration and Translation
- Foreword by Hussain Haqqani
- 1: Introduction to this Volume
- 2: What is the 'Lashkar-e-Tayyaba'?
- 3: Islamic Sources Used in this Volume
- 4: 'Why Are We Waging Jihad?' With a Foreword by Abdus Salam bin Muhammad
- 5: 'In Defense of Jihad' by Ubaidurrahman Muhammadi
- 6: 'The Mujahid's Call' by Naveed Qamar
- 7: 'We the Mothers of the Lashkar'
- 8: Fighter Biographies
- 9: 'Highway to Heaven' by Amir Hamza
- 10: 'The Problem with Takfir'
- 11: 'Destination Kashmir is Nigh' by Ali Imran Shaheen
- 12: 'Noble Warriors and Battlefronts' by Muhammad Tahir Naqqash
- References
- Index
About the author
C. Christine Fair is Professor, Security Studies Program, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, USA. She previously served as a senior political scientist with the RAND Corporation, a political officer with the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan in Kabul, and a senior research associate at the United States Institute of Peace. Her most recent book is In Their Own Words: Understanding Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (Hurst/OUP, 2018/2019). She has authored, co-authored, and co-edited several books, including Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army's Way of War (OUP, 2014), Pakistan's Enduring Challenges (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Policing Insurgencies: Cops as Counterinsurgents (OUP, 2014), Political Islam and Governance in Bangladesh (Routledge, 2010), and Treading on Hallowed Ground: Counterinsurgency Operations in Sacred Spaces (OUP, 2008), among others.
Safina Ustaad is a freelance translator, poet, and conceptual artist based in Providence, Rhode Island, with a Master's in Theater Studies from Brown University. Ustaad has translated for various academics and journalists researching militancy and political violence in Pakistan.
Summary
Since its inception in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT), also known as the Jamaat-ul-Dawa (JuD), has arguably been the most threatening and disruptive terrorist organization in South Asia and beyond. While there is considerable scholarship on its history and operations, few scholars have exploited the organization's vast publications. This volume is the first scholarly effort to curate a sample of LeT's Urdu-language publications and then translate them into English for the scholarly community studying this group and related organizations. While the original texts were written and published by Dar al Andalus, which exclusively publishes LeT's books, pamphlets, posters, speeches, and other materials with the explicit intention of diffusing the group's ideology, raising funds, and cultivating volunteers for the organization, the authors hope that by rendering the group's materials more accessible, this book can contribute to the myriad efforts to combat such groups and the violence they perpetrate.
Additional text
Few scholars have done as much as C. Christine Fair to educate the academic and policy communities worldwide about how Pakistan has tragically undermined its own national security since its independence. The Literature of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba vivifies one of the most dangerous terrorist groups employed by Pakistan. Through carefully translated texts that let its protagonists speak for themselves, Christine Fair and Safina Ustaad have illumined the cancer afflicting Pakistan while leaving the non-Urdu speaking scholarly community in their debt.
