This paper is a preliminary study of salafi jihadism in Cairo after the 2011 Egyptian revolution. It is qualitative and based on a year-long field research with several groups of salafi jihadi sympathisers in Cairo. Its central objective is to provide a glimpse into the world view of these young militants and to initiate new studies on their socialisation with salafi jihadi ideas. It does not intend to be exhaustive but rather endeavours to explore causal mechanisms and processes explaining the adoption of these ideas by initially unsympathetic youths. Accordingly, it gives a primordial place to their testimonies and attempts to identify common patterns in their personal histories. It also strives to contextualise their experiences in the Egyptian context to reinforce the potential theoretical underpinnings of this study.
This study reveals that these youths were mostly raised in a very religious environment and identified as salafis unsympathetic to jihadi positions before accepting them. Associated with the previous point, this paper suggests that a central problématique should therefore be the study of the progressive acceptance of jihadi positions in the population that identifies with salafism.
Third, this case-study attempts to investigate a specific causal mechanism of socialisation to salafi jihadi ideas, the internet. It demonstrates that, in the absence of Egyptian militant groups (whose members were in prison or in exile), most salaji jihadi sympathisers familiarised themselves with this trend's tenets through the internet. It also asserts that this process was facilitated by two additional factors, the shared religious creed between salafism and salafi jihadism and the easy access to the internet. It finally concludes with an indirect consequence of online socialisation, namely a textual relation to this literature that emphasise the importance of the Islamic proofs rather than the credibility of the writers.
