Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi

Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, whose real name is Assem ibn Muhammad ibn Tahir al-Barqawi, is a Palestinian writer and Salafi Islamist scholar. Al-Maqdisi is known for popularizing several significant themes within radical Islam, including the theological concept of Al-Wala' wal-Bara'. He is regarded as one of the earliest public Islamists to openly denounce the Saudi royal family as apostates from Islam. Al-Maqdisi posits that democracy functions as a religion in its own right and has accused Muslim advocates of democracy of apostasy. Additionally, he is recognized as the mentor of Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who served as the initial leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. In 2004, a significant ideological and methodological divide emerged between al-Maqdisi and al-Zarqawi due to the latter's declaration of takfir against all Iraqi Shīʿites. Al-Maqdisi advocated for targeted killings of Shīʿites instead, to prevent al-Zarqawi's approach from becoming counterproductive.

As of 2012, al-Maqdisi's writings maintained a wide following. A study by the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy (USMA) concluded that al-Maqdisi "is the most influential living jihadi theorist" and that "by all measures, Maqdisi is the key contemporary ideologue in the jihadi intellectual universe." The jihadist website Tawhed, which al-Maqdisi owned at the time, remained operational as, according to the USMA report, "al-Qa`ida [sic]'s main online library".