How Islamist is the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG)? An ideological assessment

ABSTRACT This article demonstrates that militant groups who base their actions on Islam do so for two reasons: Either they do in fact pursue Islamist objectives, or the groups use what appears to be an Islamist narrative in order to pursue goals which actually have no religious basis. In the first part, conceptual issues are discussed to differentiate these motivations and examining how they are implemented beyond rhetoric. In the second part, the conceptual findings are applied to the Philippine Abu Sayyaf (ASG), since there is no agreement in academic debate on the group’s classification. It is demonstrated that the ASG had intrinsically Islamist features that continuously changed into a more instrumentalizing Islamist behavior. Despite the high fragmentation of the group today, it is argued that the ASG is a largely non-Islamist group which knows how to use an Islamist narrative to portray itself in ways that give it an advantage.