• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

SAMIR KHAN

Like Zach Chesser, Samir Khan was another young American Muslim with an attitude and Internet access. Khan was born in Saudi Arabia, and his parents were moderate Muslims who moved the family to Queens when he was seven.

Khan began blogging as a teenager, shortly after attending a Muslim summer camp sponsored by a little-known fundamentalist group called the Islamic Organization of North America that was devoted to the nonviolent establishment of the Islamic way of life in America.48 Soon after, Khan discovered the Islamic Thinkers Society.

Although his early blog entries didn’t address the issue of jihad, they were unquestionably conservative. He wrote about the need to purify American society and signs of the End Days and generally presented a fairly chipper vision of a devout, intense Muslim who was not in the mainstream but perhaps not far from it either.

Humanity is in need of a Just Social Order; a way of life that protects men and women from the deceptions that this world can trap one into. In order to truly bring about this “Renaissance” within the fixed area of man’s existence [sic], we must turn to the root of the different philosophies that man offered to the world; from there do we then choose the revolution which will bring about this great change. For this reason, I am in complete agreement with the Islamic Revolution brought about by Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). With his revolution, was the human changed not only externally, but also internally; it was the absolute greatest internal revolution which led to the spreading of Islam, not by the sword, but by the hearts! Conquering a land is easy, but conquering a heart … well, you will need one heck of a philosophy!49

The warning sign, if there was one, was to be found in Khan’s username, “inshallahshaheed”—“God willing, a martyr.” With the advent and escalation of the war in Iraq, Khan became increasingly militant. He celebrated the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and dismissed their grieving families as “people of hellfire.” His blog linked to al Qaeda videos, and he justified the Islamic doctrine of takfir (which attempts to justify the killing of moderate Muslims) while celebrating the writings of Omar Abdel Rahman, Ayman Al Zawahiri, and Anwar Awlaki.50

Khan encountered challenges in keeping his blog online due to its controversial content, which violated most Internet service providers’ rules on hate speech and the incitement of violence. If one Googles “inshallahshaheed,” the result is page after page announcing that the blog has found a new server. All the links are dead.51 There were other complications as well. On at least one occasion, Khan’s parents—in whose basement he lived—cut off his Internet access.52

In 2009 Khan upped the ante, producing an online magazine in PDF format called Jihad Recollections. The magazine was overproduced—slick but too busy and at times unreadable, loosely inspired by popular American magazines. Its content consisted of a series of articles that included transcriptions of speeches and communiqués by al Qaeda leaders and original pieces by Khan and members of his social circle, such as Revolution Muslim cofounder Younus Abdullah Muhammad. The magazine was distributed through a wide variety of English-language jihadist forums and websites.

Khan published four issues of Jihad Recollections, which featured such stories as “The Men behind 9/11 and the Motives That Bound Them,” “The Emphasis for an Identity in the Storm of Kufr [apostasy]” and “The Science behind Night Vision Technology.” An article titled “Staying in Shape without Weights” was penned by a teenager from Oregon named Mohamed Mohamud, who would be arrested in 2010 for trying to bomb a family-oriented Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland. Jihad Recollections also included historical and religious pieces, such as a biography of a recently killed al Qaeda trainer and an adaptation of an Anwar Awlaki lecture on one of the