A Terrorist Organization that Never Was: The Jordanian “Bay‘at al-Imam” Group

This article deals with a radical Jordanian Islamist group wrongly called “Bay‘at al-Imam,” which existed from 1992–99 and included later al-Qa‘ida fighter Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi. It attempts to shed light on this group, which has received little Western scholarly or media attention, by correcting earlier notions about its supposedly terrorist character and goals. Moreover, this article seeks to increase our understanding of ongoing debates between Jordanian radicals by focusing on their origins in this period in the 1990s.