Nir Rosen's April 06 article in World Policy Journal is an excellent profile of some of the current and former Jordanian jihadists, including al-Maqdisi and Abu Anas al-Shami (deceased). The article also includes one of the best summaries of the contemporary Salafi movement:
Salafism found a home in Jordan beginning in the 1970s, when a Syrian cleric called Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani began teaching there at the invitation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Eventually, he settled in the city of Zarqa, north of Amman, to avoid persecution by the secular Syrian Baathists and began preaching about the need to purify Islam. Hundreds came to hear him speak, and he influenced the ranks and hierarchy of Jordan's clergy. The regime felt threatened, and he was prohibited from speaking in public.
Unable to operate openly, Salafism became an informal underground movement. The late 1970s were a crucial period, as the leftist, secular, and nationalist projects in the Arab world appeared to be failing. Saudi radicals rose up against their regime, temporarily seizing the Mosque at Mecca. In 1979, the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, and the Iranian Revolution emerged as both a model for political Islamists and a threat to Sunni regimes. In the early 1980s, Arab regimes sought to rid themselves of radicals by dispatching them to Afghanistan.
Jordan was a promising environment for political Islam. The kingdom had been ruled since the British created it in 1924 by the Hashemites, or Albu Hashem, descendants of the Prophet. In 1970, King Hussein fought an uprising of nationalist Palestinians, some of whom promulgated the slogan, "The liberation of Jerusalem begins in Amman." The Muslim Brotherhood, previously disenfranchised, supported King Hussein, and the king rewarded its following by granting them control over the Ministry of Education, allowing them to indoctrinate generations of Jordanians. Founded by the Egyptian Hassan al-Banna in 1928, the Brotherhood sought to establish a Muslim state, though not through violence.
Radical Islam had received a needed boost from the Afghan jihad that began in 1979, but it was after the first Gulf War of 1991 that jihadism became an international ideology. The Saudi government's dependence on the American infidels to protect it from Saddam Hussein, and the U.S. presence in the holiest Muslim land, coincided with the jihadhis' increasing resentment of their own governments. Arabs who had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation began returning home and sought to bring the jihad with them.
Following the Gulf War, Kuwait expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom settled in Jordan. Returning Jordanian jihadis were repelled by the condescension of wealthy Palestinians to their poor country. One such jihadi was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would later lead the Tawhid and Jihad Organization of Iraq, now known as al-Qaeda in Iraq. Other Palestinians brought with them a radical Salafist ideology.
Among them were Abu Muhammad alMaqdasi, the most important ideologue for modern jihad today and Zarqawi's former mentor, and Abu Anas al-Shami, who went on to become Zarqawi's key cleric and religious adviser in Iraq. Maqdasi's writings influenced those who carried out the 1995 bombings in Saudi Arabia that targeted Americans, as well as the September 11 attackers.
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