Samenvatting

The extent to which religious ideology appeals to potential radicals and the role it plays in their actual radicalization depends on a number of factors, such as the centrality of the religious ideology’s message in the lives of the target group, its breadth, the credibility of both the message and the messenger expressing the religious ideology, as well as its experiential commensurability in the lives of the targeted audience. Variations in each of these factors help explain why religious ideology plays an important role in the radicalization of some Muslims, but less so in that of others, and why the same religious ideology can be influential in some contexts while having little impact elsewhere. This article uses the examples of the Jordanian Salafi scholars Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Muhammad Ibrahim Shaqra to illustrate this and shows that religious ideology should be taken seriously as a factor in radicalization, but should also be contextualized to understand its full impact.