The English is simple and clunky, almost to the end of being ridiculous. The pictures look like bad Photoshop jobs.

But the contents of Inspire, a magazine posture the signature of the party line arm of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, are no joke.

Headlines taunt tutorials for would-be terrorists, including commands to make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom, an article on “Mujahedeen 101” and a lesson in sending and receiving encrypted messages.

A PDF of the magazine the first known English-language publication thought to be produced by the Yemen-based terrorist group began circulating on the Internet on Wednesday. The magazine’s goal is to enlist disaffected Muslims in the United States, Canada, Britain and other English-speaking countries.

They are targeting a very small society and hoping that they will get the next Times Square bomber or the next Fort Hood slaughterer to come forward, be further radicalized and carry out an act of mass violence, said Bruce Riedel, a Brooking s Institution scholar who worked for the C.I.A. on counter terrorism efforts in the Middle East and South Asia.

The PDF broadly distributed in the past 48 hours was only three pages long a virus apparently corrupted the remaining 64 pages. Mr. Riedel said that could have been the work of hackers, possibly working for the United States government.