From Western symbolic dissent to the physical cancellation carried out by jihadism: a comparison of cultural languages, power strategies, and practices of identity annihilation
Abstract: The concept of cancel culture in its Western meaning, when analytically extended to the jihadist context, takes on radically different implications. In the West, cancel culture is a social and digital phenomenon operating through mechanisms of public outrage, boycotts, and reputational sanctions, remaining confined within the democratic dynamics of symbolic dissent. Applied to jihadist groups, however, “jihadist cancel culture” describes a set of coercive, violent, and systematic practices — cultural destruction, intimidation, executions, armed censorship — aimed at the physical and symbolic suppression of identities, memories, and cultural forms deemed incompatible with militant ideology.
Keywords: #CancelCulture #JihadistCancelCultur #jihad #jihadism #islamism #islam #geopolitics #power #politics #DanieleGarofalo #EthicaSocietas #EthicaSocietasReview #ScientificReview #SocialSciences #ethicasocietasupli
Daniele Garofalo, is a researcher and analyst specializing in jihadist terrorism and Islamist and jihadist insurgent groups, with expertise in monitoring jihadist and Islamist media channels, their propaganda, and military activities. As a researcher and analyst, he collaborates with numerous centers and media outlets, including the James Town Foundation, the CTC at West Point, the Soufan Center, Akhbar al-Aan Media TV, the Sawab Center, the Khorasan Diary, and Militant Wire. He also provides security consulting for British companies and private firms such as Janes Intelligence and Acumen Intelligent Consulting, and he shares many of his monitoring analyses on his personal website: https://www.danielegarofalomonitoring.com/. LinkedIn profile.
The Cancel Culture in the West
The expression “cancel culture” began to spread in the early 2010s, particularly in the United States, becoming truly popular between 2017 and 2018 with the growth of social movements amplified by social media, such as the MeToo phenomenon. In Western discourse, it refers to a set of social practices emerging mainly in digital spaces: online campaigns, collective pressure, boycotts, loss of reputation, symbolic exclusion. It is a phenomenon tied to public opinion rather than physical coercion.
In the West, “cancellation” occurs through social mechanisms: public outrage, moral sanctions, demands for accountability, and sometimes punitive excesses. However, it remains confined within the realm of dissent, reputation, and cultural dynamics typical of democratic societies, where no one risks their life over a drawing, a song, or an ill-chosen word.
Applying the Concept of Cancel Culture to the Jihadist Sphere
When this analysis applies the term to the jihadist galaxy, it does so deliberately in an analytical — almost provocative — way, because the concept assumes a completely different nature. Jihadist groups do not “cancel” through public pressure or reputational dynamics: they impose silence through physical violence, armed repression, executions, destruction of cultural heritage, and systematic intimidation. Their form of cancellation is not symbolic, but real: the cancellation of bodies, memory, symbols, and social practices. There is no possibility of public dissent, nor any cultural arena for debate; whatever is deemed deviant is eliminated, not criticized.
The choice to use the same term aims to highlight a precise point: while in the West cultural conflict unfolds on a discursive plane, in the jihadist universe it takes the form of an existential struggle against the very existence of certain identities, memories, and forms of expression. It is an intentional conceptual stretch, useful for showing how two phenomena that share a word actually exist on radically different planes: one symbolic, the other material; one negotiable, the other irreversible; one social, the other military.
Terms such as “cancel culture” are conceptually different in Western academic use and in the violent practices of jihadist groups, but within this analytical context the concept helps frame the phenomenon more clearly.
Over the past twenty-five years, jihadist activity has not been limited to physical violence and terrorist attacks, but has expanded to include cultural and social manipulation, exercised both directly in the areas where they operate and through propaganda. Among the strategies adopted by jihadist groups emerges a concept that can be defined as the “cancel culture of jihadism,” involving actions aimed at suppressing, erasing, or removing every form of cultural and historical expression they deem incompatible with their militant ideology or associated with a culture — the Western one — they portray as oppressive.
Thus, “Jihadist Cancel Culture” can be defined as a set of coordinated actions (violence, destruction, intimidation, official prohibitions, propaganda) aimed at suppressing cultural expressions, dissenting voices, and material traces of collective heritage. In the jihadist context, this phenomenon takes on a strongly repressive dimension, often linked to physical violence, systematic intimidation, and the destruction of tangible cultural heritage.
Cancel Culture as a Tool of Jihadist Political Control
Groups such as al-Qaeda (particularly JNIM and al-Shabaab), the Islamic State, the Taliban, and Boko Haram have demonstrated — and continue to demonstrate — a constant focus on controlling cultural practices through direct bans, the destruction of cultural and artistic works, executions of key figures within the social fabric, and media campaigns aimed at instilling fear. These dynamics have devastating effects on cultural transmission and historical identity.
The actions carried out by jihadist organizations include the destruction of monuments and archaeological sites, the killing of musicians, artists, and journalists, the banning of artistic and literary forms, and the dissemination of digital propaganda that normalizes censorship and violence. Palmyra, Mosul, and cities in northeastern Nigeria represent emblematic cases of this strategy. Jihadist “cancel culture” also manifests through de facto legislation, fatwas, and local regulations imposing moral and cultural norms strictly aligned with jihadist ideology. This dynamic has profound repercussions on society: widespread fear limits individual expression, pushes intellectuals and artists into exile, and undermines local social and cultural structures. The overall effect is the creation of an environment of forced homogenization in which cultural dissent becomes a concrete life-threatening risk.
This brief analysis aims to explore the operational modes, strategies, and impacts of jihadist cancel culture, examining concrete cases, mechanisms of control, and patterns of destruction. Understanding these phenomena allows for the development of analytical models for assessing cultural risk in contemporary conflict contexts where these organizations operate.
The Theological-Ideological Matrix of Jihadist Iconoclasm
The destruction of religious and cultural symbols by jihadist groups is neither an iconoclastic whim nor mere spectacle of violence. It is the product of an extreme and selective interpretation of the Qur’an and the hadith — not an orthodox reading, nor even a conservative one, but an ideological distortion disguised as religious purity.
For these groups, any material cultural form — monuments, tombs, statues, music, manuscripts — represents a theological risk. Their interpretation reduces the complexity of Islam to a puritan monolith in which anything evoking historical memory or distinct identity must be eliminated.
This rigidity serves two main purposes:
1. Legitimization:
By destroying mausoleums and banning music, jihadist groups present themselves as restorers of original purity. It matters little that Islamic scholars have refuted such interpretations for decades; in their propaganda, destroying a shrine or banning music becomes proof of doctrinal rigor.
2. Social control:
Culture creates identity, and identity creates resistance. By erasing symbols, memories, and traditions, these groups eliminate anything that could compete with their religious authority.
The result is a mutilated Islam, reduced to slogans, stripped of its traditions, its art, and its plural historical and theological richness. Rigid interpretation becomes a political weapon to erase memory, identity, and cultural plurality.
This intentional amputation allows jihadist groups to present themselves as custodians of a “total” truth against which any dissent — cultural, artistic, religious, scientific — appears as an affront to be eliminated.
Jihadist destruction does not arise from the Qur’an but from a political use of the Qur’an. It does not arise from spirituality but from the will to dominate. Rigid interpretation becomes the theological pretext that justifies a practice of power: erasing everything that keeps alive the memory, identity, and cultural plurality of the communities they seek to control.
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