One of today's most prominent Islamic organizations is al-Qaida, whose origins are linked to the international opposition against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Palestinian Abdallah Azzam (d. 1989) maintained a "AfghanServices Bureau" (maktab al-khidamat) in the West Pakistani State of Peshawar, which served as a contact point for volunteer fighters (Mujahideen), who were mostly from Arabic countries. From this point on, Osama bin Laden (b. 1957), who had to leave his homeland of Saudi Arabia due to his radical position against the political and religious establishments there, logistically and financially coordinated aid. In the early 1990s, he built a database with which he primarily collected information about Arab volunteers in order to form a militant Islamic network that could fight simultaneously in many places against what were, according to them, un-Islamic regimes in their homelands. This database most likely gave the organization al-Qaida ("The Base") its name.

The majority of war veterans, among them bin Laden, returned to their homelands after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and began founding national opposition cells, mostly in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, and Algeria.

When the Egyptian doctor Aiman az-Zawahiri (b. 1951), some members of his Jihad group and of Jamaa islamiyya joined al-Qaida, the organization took up a new ideological direction and has since committed itself to the struggle against "the West". At the beginning of 1998, the "World Islamic Front for the Jihad against Jews and Crusaders" (al-dschabha al-islamiyya al-alamiyya li-dschihad al-yahud wa-s-salibiyin) was established in order to agitate the USA into withdrawal from the Islamic world and in August 1998 this resulted in the attacks on the American Embassies in Daressalam (Tanzania) and Nairobi (Kenya) and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on September 11, 2001.

As a result of the invasion of Afghanistan by international troops during the course of the American declared "War on Terror", al-Qaida lost their base there during the winter of 2001/02 and due to decentralization was not able to engage globally. The attacks after this in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Turkey (all in 2003), as well as those that have been planned or carried out in Europe since 2003, though quite welcome, were no longer directly planned by bin Laden and his direct followers. On the contrary, numerous competing groups evolved that only leaned on the ideology and structure of al-Qaida. One of these groups, "Monotheism and Jihad" (Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad), was headed by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (d. 2006) and drew attention for its organized suicide attacks in Iraq as well as for declaring war on the Jordanian royal family, Israel and Jews in general.