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  • Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad by Aaron Y. Zelin
  • Alex Thurston (bio)
Your Sons Are at Your Service: Tunisia's Missionaries of Jihad, by Aaron Y. Zelin. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 400 pages. $120 cloth; $40 paper; $39.99 digital.

Aaron Zelin is one of the foremost analysts of jihadist movements, and his website Jihadology is the premier living archive of online jihadist propaganda. In his first book, a study of several hard-line movements in Tunisia from 2011 to 2019, Zelin demonstrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of an internet-centric approach to the study of militancy.

Your Sons Are at Your Service, based on Zelin's doctoral dissertation, is informed by research that began in 2011. The book showcases Zelin's meticulous and, at times, breathtaking cataloguing of materials relating to Ansar al-Shari'a ("supporters of Islamic law," abbreviated as AST when referring to its Tunisian branch), the Islamic State organization, al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghrib, and (the 'Uqba bin Nafi' Battalion (KUBN, from the Arabic Katibat 'Uqba bin Nafi'; named for a 7th century Muslim general who led the conquest of much of North Africa). In 11 tightly written chapters, Zelin explores the trajectories of these movements and discusses Tunisians' striking and disproportionate presence in the ranks of the Islamic State in Syria.

Chapters 1–3 detail the background to AST's emergence, including Tunisian jihadists' experiences abroad prior to the Arab Spring. Chapters 4–7 form the heart of the book. They cover AST's rise, its public activities, and what Zelin describes as its failure to adhere to its own strategy in the time leading up to the Tunisian government banning the group in 2013. Chapters 8 and 9 discuss Tunisian jihadists in Syria, especially their roles in the so-called Islamic State. Chapter 10 concentrates on jihadists' violence within Tunisia and responses by the Tunisian state and its allies. The final chapter offers a sober and balanced view of the future, including the dilemmas that Tunisian authorities will face regarding reintegration of ex-fighters. Multiple individual chapters are based on databases Zelin compiled, comprising thousands of documents and videos.

Yet Zelin's approach has limitations. First, the focus on marshaling jihadist propaganda sometimes overshadows the analysis. For example, one of the most pressing questions about Tunisian jihadism is why Tunisians went, at such a relatively high per capita rate, to Syria. Zelin devotes fewer pages to probing the causes of this phenomenon (pp. 218–20) than he does to listing the names of Tunisians who appear in Islamic State propaganda videos from Iraq and Syria (pp. 223–27). He leaves his answer, moreover, somewhat muddy.

Second, Zelin's analysis is not always convincing. Zelin's basic argument is that AST was empowered by the opening of freedoms in Tunisian society beginning in 2011 and that AST exploited that opportunity to pursue an outreach strategy based on da'wa (preaching/missionary work) as a precursor to an eventual campaign of violence (pp. 94–95). At times Zelin depicts the post-authoritarian opening itself as the independent variable, with AST's rise as the dependent variable; elsewhere Zelin suggests that it was al-Qa'ida's strategic evolution that was the independent variable, with Tunisia merely a favorable [End Page 478] testing ground. Yet Zelin also depicts AST leaders fumbling their strategy, failing to restrain hotheads, or otherwise caught up in events beyond their control. The cunning that Zelin often attributes to AST leaders and al-Qa'ida is unconvincing in light of other material Zelin presents.

A third limitation concerns terminology. An appendix defines terms such as "Islamism," "Salafism," and "jihad." Yet Zelin leaves his most fraught term—"front group"—undefined, and he uses it too broadly and too confidently. Zelin labels both AST and KUBN "front groups" for al-Qa'ida, even though the former was a mass social movement and the latter was a fighting battalion. AST appears too complex to constitute a mere "front group," while KUBN was always too overtly violent to offer any plausible deniability. Moreover, if both were "front groups" for al-Qa'ida, why...

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