What ISIS Really Wants
The Islamic State is no mere collection of
psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs,
among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what
that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.
What is the Islamic State?
Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity
of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to
know the answers. In December, The New York Times published
confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special
Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting
that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We
have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the
idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic
State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,”
statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have
contributed to significant strategic errors.
The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area
larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader
since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance
on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp
Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he
stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to
deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading
his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from
hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists
that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and
volume, and is continuing.
Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It
is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has
spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s
countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the
caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project
knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of
principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make
it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that
change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a
harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.
The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS),
follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to
the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know
its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the
triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the
Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a
dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived
to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8
million.
We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two
ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the
logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it.
The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden
as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since
al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain
the group’s priorities and current leadership.
Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did
not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible,
operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The
Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and
a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil
and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)
We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest
campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter
Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled
his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as
a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror
and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such
as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers
navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohammad Atta’s last full day
of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.
Nearly all the Islamic State’s decisions adhere
to what it calls, on its billboards, license plates, and coins, “the
Prophetic methodology.”
There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are
modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval
religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of
what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere,
carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a
seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the
apocalypse.
The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic
State’s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to
“moderns.” In conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver
from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet
Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and
allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to
specific traditions and texts of early Islam.
To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the
Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries
such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a
rock,” poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To
Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop
destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to
vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery
alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an
“uncircumcised geezer.”)
But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with
theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops
directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops
alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which
case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very
Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn
largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe.
But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from
coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic
State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on
its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic
methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of
Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State;
nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious,
millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be
combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and
back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with
the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way
that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its
own excessive zeal.
I. Devotion
In November, the Islamic State released an infomercial-like video
tracing its origins to bin Laden. It acknowledged Abu Musa’b al Zarqawi,
the brutal head of al‑Qaeda in Iraq from roughly 2003 until his killing
in 2006, as a more immediate progenitor, followed sequentially by two
other guerrilla leaders before Baghdadi, the caliph. Notably
unmentioned: bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, the owlish
Egyptian eye surgeon who currently heads al‑Qaeda. Zawahiri has not
pledged allegiance to Baghdadi, and he is increasingly hated by his
fellow jihadists. His isolation is not helped by his lack of charisma;
in videos he comes across as squinty and annoyed. But the split between
al-Qaeda and the Islamic State has been long in the making, and begins
to explain, at least in part, the outsize bloodlust of the latter.
Zawahiri’s companion in isolation is a Jordanian cleric named Abu
Muhammad al Maqdisi, 55, who has a fair claim to being al-Qaeda’s
intellectual architect and the most important jihadist unknown to the
average American newspaper reader. On most matters of doctrine, Maqdisi
and the Islamic State agree. Both are closely identified with the
jihadist wing of a branch of Sunnism called Salafism, after the Arabic al salaf al salih,
the “pious forefathers.” These forefathers are the Prophet himself and
his earliest adherents, whom Salafis honor and emulate as the models for
all behavior, including warfare, couture, family life, even dentistry.
The Islamic State awaits the army of “Rome,” whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.
Maqdisi taught Zarqawi, who went to war in Iraq with the older man’s
advice in mind. In time, though, Zarqawi surpassed his mentor in
fanaticism, and eventually earned his rebuke. At issue was Zarqawi’s
penchant for bloody spectacle—and, as a matter of doctrine, his hatred
of other Muslims, to the point of excommunicating and killing them. In
Islam, the practice of takfir, or excommunication, is
theologically perilous. “If a man says to his brother, ‘You are an
infidel,’ ” the Prophet said, “then one of them is right.” If the
accuser is wrong, he himself has committed apostasy by making a false
accusation. The punishment for apostasy is death. And yet Zarqawi
heedlessly expanded the range of behavior that could make Muslims
infidels.
Maqdisi wrote to his former pupil that he needed to exercise caution and “not issue sweeping proclamations of takfir”
or “proclaim people to be apostates because of their sins.” The
distinction between apostate and sinner may appear subtle, but it is a
key point of contention between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is
straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the
position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These
include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western
clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim
candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates. Being a
Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well, because the
Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the
Koran is to deny its initial perfection. (The Islamic State claims that
common Shiite practices, such as worship at the graves of imams and
public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in the example
of the Prophet.) That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked for
death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have
elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing
laws not made by God.
Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to
purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of
objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the
slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest
that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass
executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common
victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians
who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live,
as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.
Centuries have passed since
the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in
large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps,
the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of
the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe
that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking
or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.
Their skepticism is comprehensible. In the past, Westerners who
accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved
grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that
calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate
them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which
these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores,
the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil.
Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise
of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the
exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if
religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely
it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked
executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.
Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic.
It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims
have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions
as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State
un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the
leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and
politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion”
that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally
required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he
said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”
Every academic I asked about the Islamic State’s ideology sent me to
Haykel. Of partial Lebanese descent, Haykel grew up in Lebanon and the
United States, and when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee,
there is a hint of an unplaceable foreign accent.
According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply
infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even
the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug
for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion,
and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the
Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous,
sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve
Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if
there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they
interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not
just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as
anyone else.”
All Muslims acknowledge that Muhammad’s earliest conquests were not
tidy affairs, and that the laws of war passed down in the Koran and in
the narrations of the Prophet’s rule were calibrated to fit a turbulent
and violent time. In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic
State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully
reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of
practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as
integral to their sacred texts. “Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings
are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the
medieval tradition,” Haykel said. Islamic State fighters “are smack in
the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into
the present day.”
The
Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted
for enemies of Islam. The tax on Christians finds clear endorsement in
the Surah Al-Tawba, the Koran’s ninth chapter, which instructs Muslims
to fight Christians and Jews “until they pay the jizya with
willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” The Prophet, whom all
Muslims consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves.
Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as
strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for
hundreds of years. “What’s striking about them is not just the
literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,”
Haykel said. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims
don’t normally have.”
Before the rise of the Islamic State, no group in the past few
centuries had attempted more-radical fidelity to the Prophetic model
than the Wahhabis of 18th‑century Arabia. They conquered most of what is
now Saudi Arabia, and their strict practices survive in a diluted
version of Sharia there. Haykel sees an important distinction between
the groups, though: “The Wahhabis were not wanton in their violence.”
They were surrounded by Muslims, and they conquered lands that were
already Islamic; this stayed their hand. “ISIS,
by contrast, is really reliving the early period.” Early Muslims were
surrounded by non-Muslims, and the Islamic State, because of its takfiri tendencies, considers itself to be in the same situation.
If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would
it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with
public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving
people, even some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, the caliphate
has continued to embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. “We
will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,”
Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the
West. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and
grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at
the slave market.”
In October, Dabiq, the magazine of the Islamic State,
published “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” an article that took
up the question of whether Yazidis (the members of an ancient Kurdish
sect that borrows elements of Islam, and had come under attack from
Islamic State forces in northern Iraq) are lapsed Muslims, and therefore
marked for death, or merely pagans and therefore fair game for
enslavement. A study group of Islamic State scholars had convened, on
government orders, to resolve this issue. If they are pagans, the
article’s anonymous author wrote,
Yazidi women and children [are to be] divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations [in northern Iraq] … Enslaving the families of the kuffar [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Koran and the narrations of the Prophet … and thereby apostatizing from Islam.
II. Territory
Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are thought to have immigrated
to the Islamic State. Recruits hail from France, the United Kingdom,
Belgium, Germany, Holland, Australia, Indonesia, the United States, and
many other places. Many have come to fight, and many intend to die.
Peter R. Neumann, a professor at King’s College London, told me that
online voices have been essential to spreading propaganda and ensuring
that newcomers know what to believe. Online recruitment has also widened
the demographics of the jihadist community, by allowing conservative
Muslim women—physically isolated in their homes—to reach out to
recruiters, radicalize, and arrange passage to Syria. Through its
appeals to both genders, the Islamic State hopes to build a complete
society.
In November, I traveled to Australia to meet Musa Cerantonio, a
30-year-old man whom Neumann and other researchers had identified as one
of the two most important “new spiritual authorities” guiding
foreigners to join the Islamic State. For three years he was a
televangelist on Iqraa TV in Cairo, but he left after the station
objected to his frequent calls to establish a caliphate. Now he preaches
on Facebook and Twitter.
Cerantonio—a big, friendly man with a bookish demeanor—told me he
blanches at beheading videos. He hates seeing the violence, even though
supporters of the Islamic State are required to endorse it. (He speaks
out, controversially among jihadists, against suicide bombing, on the
grounds that God forbids suicide; he differs from the Islamic State on a
few other points as well.) He has the kind of unkempt facial hair one
sees on certain overgrown fans of The Lord of the Rings, and his
obsession with Islamic apocalypticism felt familiar. He seemed to be
living out a drama that looks, from an outsider’s perspective, like a
medieval fantasy novel, only with real blood.
Last June, Cerantonio and his wife tried to emigrate—he wouldn’t say
to where (“It’s illegal to go to Syria,” he said cagily)—but they were
caught en route, in the Philippines, and he was deported back to
Australia for overstaying his visa. Australia has criminalized attempts
to join or travel to the Islamic State, and has confiscated Cerantonio’s
passport. He is stuck in Melbourne, where he is well known to the local
constabulary. If Cerantonio were caught facilitating the movement of
individuals to the Islamic State, he would be imprisoned. So far,
though, he is free—a technically unaffiliated ideologue who nonetheless
speaks with what other jihadists have taken to be a reliable voice on
matters of the Islamic State’s doctrine.
We met for lunch in Footscray, a dense, multicultural Melbourne
suburb that’s home to Lonely Planet, the travel-guide publisher.
Cerantonio grew up there in a half-Irish, half-Calabrian family. On a
typical street one can find African restaurants, Vietnamese shops, and
young Arabs walking around in the Salafi uniform of scraggly beard, long
shirt, and trousers ending halfway down the calves.
Cerantonio explained the joy he felt when Baghdadi was declared the
caliph on June 29—and the sudden, magnetic attraction that Mesopotamia
began to exert on him and his friends. “I was in a hotel [in the
Philippines], and I saw the declaration on television,” he told me. “And
I was just amazed, and I’m like, Why am I stuck here in this bloody room?”
The last caliphate was the Ottoman empire, which reached its peak in
the 16th century and then experienced a long decline, until the founder
of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, euthanized it in 1924.
But Cerantonio, like many supporters of the Islamic State, doesn’t
acknowledge that caliphate as legitimate, because it didn’t fully
enforce Islamic law, which requires stonings and slavery and
amputations, and because its caliphs were not descended from the tribe
of the Prophet, the Quraysh.
Baghdadi spoke at length of the importance of the caliphate in his
Mosul sermon. He said that to revive the institution of the
caliphate—which had not functioned except in name for about 1,000
years—was a communal obligation. He and his loyalists had “hastened to
declare the caliphate and place an imam” at its head, he said. “This is a
duty upon the Muslims—a duty that has been lost for centuries … The
Muslims sin by losing it, and they must always seek to establish it.”
Like bin Laden before him, Baghdadi spoke floridly, with frequent
scriptural allusion and command of classical rhetoric. Unlike bin Laden,
and unlike those false caliphs of the Ottoman empire, he is Qurayshi.
The caliphate, Cerantonio told me, is not just a political entity but
also a vehicle for salvation. Islamic State propaganda regularly
reports the pledges of baya’a (allegiance) rolling in from
jihadist groups across the Muslim world. Cerantonio quoted a Prophetic
saying, that to die without pledging allegiance is to die jahil (ignorant)
and therefore die a “death of disbelief.” Consider how Muslims (or, for
that matter, Christians) imagine God deals with the souls of people who
die without learning about the one true religion. They are neither
obviously saved nor definitively condemned. Similarly, Cerantonio said,
the Muslim who acknowledges one omnipotent god and prays, but who dies
without pledging himself to a valid caliph and incurring the obligations
of that oath, has failed to live a fully Islamic life. I pointed out
that this means the vast majority of Muslims in history, and all who
passed away between 1924 and 2014, died a death of disbelief. Cerantonio
nodded gravely. “I would go so far as to say that Islam has been
reestablished” by the caliphate.
I asked him about his own baya’a, and he quickly corrected me: “I didn’t say that I’d pledged allegiance.” Under Australian law, he reminded me, giving baya’a
to the Islamic State was illegal. “But I agree that [Baghdadi] fulfills
the requirements,” he continued. “I’m just going to wink at you, and
you take that to mean whatever you want.”
To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni
law—being a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral
probity and physical and mental integrity; and having ’amr, or
authority. This last criterion, Cerantonio said, is the hardest to
fulfill, and requires that the caliph have territory in which he can
enforce Islamic law. Baghdadi’s Islamic State achieved that long before
June 29, Cerantonio said, and as soon as it did, a Western convert
within the group’s ranks—Cerantonio described him as “something of a
leader”—began murmuring about the religious obligation to declare a
caliphate. He and others spoke quietly to those in power and told them
that further delay would be sinful.
Cerantonio
said a faction arose that was prepared to make war on Baghdadi’s group
if it delayed any further. They prepared a letter to various powerful
members of ISIS, airing their displeasure
at the failure to appoint a caliph, but were pacified by Adnani, the
spokesman, who let them in on a secret—that a caliphate had already been
declared, long before the public announcement. They had their
legitimate caliph, and at that point there was only one option. “If he’s
legitimate,” Cerantonio said, “you must give him the baya’a.”
After Baghdadi’s July sermon, a stream of jihadists began flowing
daily into Syria with renewed motivation. Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German
author and former politician who visited the Islamic State in December,
reported the arrival of 100 fighters at one Turkish-border recruitment
station in just two days. His report, among others, suggests a
still-steady inflow of foreigners, ready to give up everything at home
for a shot at paradise in the worst place on Earth.
In London, a week
before my meal with Cerantonio, I met with three ex-members of a banned
Islamist group called Al Muhajiroun (The Emigrants): Anjem Choudary,
Abu Baraa, and Abdul Muhid. They all expressed desire to emigrate to the
Islamic State, as many of their colleagues already had, but the
authorities had confiscated their passports. Like Cerantonio, they
regarded the caliphate as the only righteous government on Earth, though
none would confess having pledged allegiance. Their principal goal in
meeting me was to explain what the Islamic State stands for, and how its
policies reflect God’s law.
Choudary, 48, is the group’s former leader. He frequently appears on
cable news, as one of the few people producers can book who will defend
the Islamic State vociferously, until his mike is cut. He has a
reputation in the United Kingdom as a loathsome blowhard, but he and his
disciples sincerely believe in the Islamic State and, on matters of
doctrine, speak in its voice. Choudary and the others feature
prominently in the Twitter feeds of Islamic State residents, and Abu
Baraa maintains a YouTube channel to answer questions about Sharia.
Since September, authorities have been investigating the three men on
suspicion of supporting terrorism. Because of this investigation, they
had to meet me separately: communication among them would have violated
the terms of their bail. But speaking with them felt like speaking with
the same person wearing different masks. Choudary met me in a candy shop
in the East London suburb of Ilford. He was dressed smartly, in a crisp
blue tunic reaching nearly to his ankles, and sipped a Red Bull while
we talked.
Before the caliphate, “maybe 85
percent of the Sharia was absent from our lives,” Choudary told me.
“These laws are in abeyance until we have khilafa”—a
caliphate—“and now we have one.” Without a caliphate, for example,
individual vigilantes are not obliged to amputate the hands of thieves
they catch in the act. But create a caliphate, and this law, along with a
huge body of other jurisprudence, suddenly awakens. In theory, all
Muslims are obliged to immigrate to the territory where the caliph is
applying these laws. One of Choudary’s prize students, a convert from
Hinduism named Abu Rumaysah, evaded police to bring his family of five
from London to Syria in November. On the day I met Choudary, Abu
Rumaysah tweeted out a picture of himself with a Kalashnikov in one arm
and his newborn son in the other. Hashtag: #GenerationKhilafah.
The caliph is required to implement
Sharia. Any deviation will compel those who have pledged allegiance to
inform the caliph in private of his error and, in extreme cases, to
excommunicate and replace him if he persists. (“I have been plagued with
this great matter, plagued with this responsibility, and it is a heavy
responsibility,” Baghdadi said in his sermon.) In return, the caliph
commands obedience—and those who persist in supporting non-Muslim
governments, after being duly warned and educated about their sin, are
considered apostates.
Choudary said Sharia has been misunderstood because of its incomplete
application by regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which does behead
murderers and cut off thieves’ hands. “The problem,” he explained, “is
that when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and
don’t provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia—the whole
package—they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia.” That whole
package, he said, would include free housing, food, and clothing for
all, though of course anyone who wished to enrich himself with work
could do so.
Abdul Muhid, 32, continued along these lines. He was dressed in
mujahideen chic when I met him at a local restaurant: scruffy beard,
Afghan cap, and a wallet outside of his clothes, attached with what
looked like a shoulder holster. When we sat down, he was eager to
discuss welfare. The Islamic State may have medieval-style punishments
for moral crimes (lashes for boozing or fornication, stoning for
adultery), but its social-welfare program is, at least in some aspects,
progressive to a degree that would please an MSNBC pundit. Health care,
he said, is free. (“Isn’t it free in Britain, too?,” I asked. “Not
really,” he said. “Some procedures aren’t covered, such as vision.”)
This provision of social welfare was not, he said, a policy choice of
the Islamic State, but a policy obligation inherent in God’s law.
III. The Apocalypse
All Muslims acknowledge that God is the only one who knows the
future. But they also agree that he has offered us a peek at it, in the
Koran and in narrations of the Prophet. The Islamic State differs from
nearly every other current jihadist movement in believing that it is
written into God’s script as a central character. It is in this casting
that the Islamic State is most boldly distinctive from its predecessors,
and clearest in the religious nature of its mission.
In broad strokes, al-Qaeda acts like an underground political
movement, with worldly goals in sight at all times—the expulsion of
non-Muslims from the Arabian peninsula, the abolishment of the state of
Israel, the end of support for dictatorships in Muslim lands. The
Islamic State has its share of worldly concerns (including, in the
places it controls, collecting garbage and keeping the water running),
but the End of Days is a leitmotif of its propaganda. Bin Laden rarely
mentioned the apocalypse, and when he did, he seemed to presume that he
would be long dead when the glorious moment of divine comeuppance
finally arrived. “Bin Laden and Zawahiri are from elite Sunni families
who look down on this kind of speculation and think it’s something the
masses engage in,” says Will McCants of the Brookings Institution, who
is writing a book about the Islamic State’s apocalyptic thought.
During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic
State’s immediate founding fathers, by contrast, saw signs of the end
times everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival of
the Mahdi—a messianic figure destined to lead the Muslims to victory
before the end of the world. McCants says a prominent Islamist in Iraq
approached bin Laden in 2008 to warn him that the group was being led by
millenarians who were “talking all the time about the Mahdi and making
strategic decisions” based on when they thought the Mahdi was going to
arrive. “Al-Qaeda had to write to [these leaders] to say ‘Cut it out.’ ”
For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic
good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a
deep psychological need. Of the Islamic State supporters I met, Musa
Cerantonio, the Australian, expressed the deepest interest in the
apocalypse and how the remaining days of the Islamic State—and the
world—might look. Parts of that prediction are original to him, and do
not yet have the status of doctrine. But other parts are based on
mainstream Sunni sources and appear all over the Islamic State’s
propaganda. These include the belief that there will be only 12
legitimate caliphs, and Baghdadi is the eighth; that the armies of Rome
will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that
Islam’s final showdown with an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem
after a period of renewed Islamic conquest.
The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of
Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town,
and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s
strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly
said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of
Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.
“Dabiq is basically all farmland,” one Islamic State supporter
recently tweeted. “You could imagine large battles taking place there.”
The Islamic State’s propagandists drool with anticipation of this event,
and constantly imply that it will come soon. The state’s magazine
quotes Zarqawi as saying, “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its
heat will continue to intensify … until it burns the crusader armies in
Dabiq.” A recent propaganda video shows clips from Hollywood war movies
set in medieval times—perhaps because many of the prophecies specify
that the armies will be on horseback or carrying ancient weapons.
Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of
an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the
apocalypse. Western media frequently miss references to Dabiq in the
Islamic State’s videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of beheading.
“Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly
waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive,” said a masked
executioner in a November video, showing the severed head of Peter
(Abdul Rahman) Kassig, the aid worker who’d been held captive for more
than a year. During fighting in Iraq in December, after mujahideen
(perhaps inaccurately) reported having seen American soldiers in battle,
Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like
overenthusiastic hosts or hostesses upon the arrival of the first guests
at a party.
The Prophetic narration that foretells the Dabiq battle refers to the
enemy as Rome. Who “Rome” is, now that the pope has no army, remains a
matter of debate. But Cerantonio makes a case that Rome meant the
Eastern Roman empire, which had its capital in what is now Istanbul. We
should think of Rome as the Republic of Turkey—the same republic that
ended the last self-identified caliphate, 90 years ago. Other Islamic
State sources suggest that Rome might mean any infidel army, and the
Americans will do nicely.
After its
battle in Dabiq, Cerantonio said, the caliphate will expand and sack
Istanbul. Some believe it will then cover the entire Earth, but
Cerantonio suggested its tide may never reach beyond the Bosporus. An
anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will
come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of
the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in
Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the
second-most-revered prophet in Islam—will return to Earth, spear Dajjal,
and lead the Muslims to victory.
“Only God knows” whether the Islamic State’s armies are the ones
foretold, Cerantonio said. But he is hopeful. “The Prophet said that one
sign of the imminent arrival of the End of Days is that people will for
a long while stop talking about the End of Days,” he said. “If you go
to the mosques now, you’ll find the preachers are silent about this
subject.” On this theory, even setbacks dealt to the Islamic State mean
nothing, since God has preordained the near-destruction of his people
anyway. The Islamic State has its best and worst days ahead of it.
IV. The Fight
The ideological purity of the Islamic State has one compensating
virtue: it allows us to predict some of the group’s actions. Osama bin
Laden was seldom predictable. He ended his first television interview
cryptically. CNN’s Peter Arnett asked him, “What are your future plans?”
Bin Laden replied, “You’ll see them and hear about them in the media,
God willing.” By contrast, the Islamic State boasts openly about its
plans—not all of them, but enough so that by listening carefully, we can
deduce how it intends to govern and expand.
In London, Choudary and his students provided detailed descriptions
of how the Islamic State must conduct its foreign policy, now that it is
a caliphate. It has already taken up what Islamic law refers to as
“offensive jihad,” the forcible expansion into countries that are ruled
by non-Muslims. “Hitherto, we were just defending ourselves,” Choudary
said; without a caliphate, offensive jihad is an inapplicable concept.
But the waging of war to expand the caliphate is an essential duty of
the caliph.
Choudary took pains to present the laws of war under which the
Islamic State operates as policies of mercy rather than of brutality. He
told me the state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies—a holy
order to scare the shit out of them with beheadings and crucifixions and
enslavement of women and children, because doing so hastens victory and
avoids prolonged conflict.
Choudary’s colleague Abu Baraa explained that Islamic law permits
only temporary peace treaties, lasting no longer than a decade.
Similarly, accepting any border is anathema, as stated by the Prophet
and echoed in the Islamic State’s propaganda videos. If the caliph
consents to a longer-term peace or permanent border, he will be in
error. Temporary peace treaties are renewable, but may not be applied to
all enemies at once: the caliph must wage jihad at least once a year.
He may not rest, or he will fall into a state of sin.
One comparison to the Islamic State is the Khmer Rouge, which killed
about a third of the population of Cambodia. But the Khmer Rouge
occupied Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations. “This is not permitted,”
Abu Baraa said. “To send an ambassador to the UN is to recognize an
authority other than God’s.” This form of diplomacy is shirk, or
polytheism, he argued, and would be immediate cause to hereticize and
replace Baghdadi. Even to hasten the arrival of a caliphate by
democratic means—for example by voting for political candidates who
favor a caliphate—is shirk.
It’s hard to overstate how hamstrung the Islamic State will be by its
radicalism. The modern international system, born of the 1648 Peace of
Westphalia, relies on each state’s willingness to recognize borders,
however grudgingly. For the Islamic State, that recognition is
ideological suicide. Other Islamist groups, such as the Muslim
Brotherhood and Hamas, have succumbed to the blandishments of democracy
and the potential for an invitation to the community of nations,
complete with a UN seat. Negotiation and accommodation have worked, at
times, for the Taliban as well. (Under Taliban rule, Afghanistan
exchanged ambassadors with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab
Emirates, an act that invalidated the Taliban’s authority in the Islamic
State’s eyes.) To the Islamic State these are not options, but acts of
apostasy.
The United States and
its allies have reacted to the Islamic State belatedly and in an
apparent daze. The group’s ambitions and rough strategic blueprints were
evident in its pronouncements and in social-media chatter as far back
as 2011, when it was just one of many terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq
and hadn’t yet committed mass atrocities. Adnani, the spokesman, told
followers then that the group’s ambition was to “restore the Islamic
caliphate,” and he evoked the apocalypse, saying, “There are but a few
days left.” Baghdadi had already styled himself “commander of the
faithful,” a title ordinarily reserved for caliphs, in 2011. In April
2013, Adnani declared the movement “ready to redraw the world upon the
Prophetic methodology of the caliphate.” In August 2013, he said, “Our
goal is to establish an Islamic state that doesn’t recognize borders, on
the Prophetic methodology.” By then, the group had taken Raqqa, a
Syrian provincial capital of perhaps 500,000 people, and was drawing in
substantial numbers of foreign fighters who’d heard its message.
If we had identified the Islamic State’s intentions early, and
realized that the vacuum in Syria and Iraq would give it ample space to
carry them out, we might, at a minimum, have pushed Iraq to harden its
border with Syria and preemptively make deals with its Sunnis. That
would at least have avoided the electrifying propaganda effect created
by the declaration of a caliphate just after the conquest of Iraq’s
third-largest city. Yet, just over a year ago, Obama told The New Yorker that he considered ISIS
to be al-Qaeda’s weaker partner. “If a jayvee team puts on Lakers
uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” the president said.
Our failure to appreciate the split between the Islamic State and
al-Qaeda, and the essential differences between the two, has led to
dangerous decisions. Last fall, to take one example, the U.S. government
consented to a desperate plan to save Peter Kassig’s life. The plan
facilitated—indeed, required—the interaction of some of the founding
figures of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and could hardly have looked
more hastily improvised.
It
entailed the enlistment of Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, the Zarqawi mentor
and al-Qaeda grandee, to approach Turki al-Binali, the Islamic State’s
chief ideologue and a former student of Maqdisi’s, even though the two
men had fallen out due to Maqdisi’s criticism of the Islamic State.
Maqdisi had already called for the state to extend mercy to Alan
Henning, the British cabbie who had entered Syria to deliver aid to
children. In December, The Guardian reported that the U.S.
government, through an intermediary, had asked Maqdisi to intercede with
the Islamic State on Kassig’s behalf.
Maqdisi was living freely in Jordan, but had been banned from
communicating with terrorists abroad, and was being monitored closely.
After Jordan granted the United States permission to reintroduce Maqdisi
to Binali, Maqdisi bought a phone with American money and was allowed
to correspond merrily with his former student for a few days, before the
Jordanian government stopped the chats and used them as a pretext to
jail Maqdisi. Kassig’s severed head appeared in the Dabiq video a few
days later.
Maqdisi gets mocked roundly on Twitter by the Islamic State’s fans,
and al‑Qaeda is held in great contempt for refusing to acknowledge the
caliphate. Cole Bunzel, a scholar who studies Islamic State ideology,
read Maqdisi’s opinion on Henning’s status and thought it would hasten
his and other captives’ death. “If I were held captive by the Islamic
State and Maqdisi said I shouldn’t be killed,” he told me, “I’d kiss my
ass goodbye.”
Kassig’s death was a tragedy, but the plan’s success would have been a
bigger one. A reconciliation between Maqdisi and Binali would have
begun to heal the main rift between the world’s two largest jihadist
organizations. It’s possible that the government wanted only to draw out
Binali for intelligence purposes or assassination. (Multiple attempts
to elicit comment from the FBI were unsuccessful.) Regardless, the
decision to play matchmaker for America’s two main terrorist antagonists
reveals astonishingly poor judgment.
Chastened by our earlier indifference,
we are now meeting the Islamic State via Kurdish and Iraqi proxy on the
battlefield, and with regular air assaults. Those strategies haven’t
dislodged the Islamic State from any of its major territorial
possessions, although they’ve kept it from directly assaulting Baghdad
and Erbil and slaughtering Shia and Kurds there.
Some observers have called for escalation, including several
predictable voices from the interventionist right (Max Boot, Frederick
Kagan), who have urged the deployment of tens of thousands of American
soldiers. These calls should not be dismissed too quickly: an avowedly
genocidal organization is on its potential victims’ front lawn, and it
is committing daily atrocities in the territory it already controls.
One way to un-cast the Islamic State’s spell over its adherents would
be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq
now under caliphate rule. Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can
survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State cannot.
If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it will cease
to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground movements,
because territorial authority is a requirement: take away its command of
territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no longer binding.
Former pledges could of course continue to attack the West and behead
their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda value of the caliphate
would disappear, and with it the supposed religious duty to immigrate
and serve it. If the United States were to invade, the Islamic State’s
obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests that it might send vast
resources there, as if in a conventional battle. If the state musters at
Dabiq in full force, only to be routed, it might never recover.
And
yet the risks of escalation are enormous. The biggest proponent of an
American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos,
in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name,
are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a
huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide: irrespective of whether
they have given baya’a to the caliph, they all believe that the
United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims.
Yet another invasion and occupation would confirm that suspicion, and
bolster recruitment. Add the incompetence of our previous efforts as
occupiers, and we have reason for reluctance. The rise of ISIS,
after all, happened only because our previous occupation created space
for Zarqawi and his followers. Who knows the consequences of another
botched job?
Given everything we know about the
Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it, through air strikes and
proxy warfare, appears the best of bad military options. Neither the
Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue and control the whole Sunni
heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated there, and have no appetite
for such an adventure anyway. But they can keep the Islamic State from
fulfilling its duty to expand. And with every month that it fails to
expand, it resembles less the conquering state of the Prophet Muhammad
than yet another Middle Eastern government failing to bring prosperity
to its people.
The humanitarian cost of the Islamic State’s existence is high. But
its threat to the United States is smaller than its all too frequent
conflation with al-Qaeda would suggest. Al-Qaeda’s core is rare among
jihadist groups for its focus on the “far enemy” (the West); most
jihadist groups’ main concerns lie closer to home. That’s especially
true of the Islamic State, precisely because of its ideology. It sees
enemies everywhere around it, and while its leadership wishes ill on the
United States, the application of Sharia in the caliphate and the
expansion to contiguous lands are paramount. Baghdadi has said as much
directly: in November he told his Saudi agents to “deal with the rafida [Shia] first … then al-Sulul [Sunni supporters of the Saudi monarchy] … before the crusaders and their bases.”
The foreign fighters (and their wives and
children) have been traveling to the caliphate on one-way tickets: they
want to live under true Sharia, and many want martyrdom. Doctrine,
recall, requires believers to reside in the caliphate if it is at all
possible for them to do so. One of the Islamic State’s less bloody
videos shows a group of jihadists burning their French, British, and
Australian passports. This would be an eccentric act for someone
intending to return to blow himself up in line at the Louvre or to hold
another chocolate shop hostage in Sydney.
A few “lone wolf” supporters of the Islamic State have attacked
Western targets, and more attacks will come. But most of the attackers
have been frustrated amateurs, unable to immigrate to the caliphate
because of confiscated passports or other problems. Even if the Islamic
State cheers these attacks—and it does in its propaganda—it hasn’t yet
planned and financed one. (The Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in
January was principally an al‑Qaeda operation.) During his visit to
Mosul in December, Jürgen Todenhöfer interviewed a portly German
jihadist and asked whether any of his comrades had returned to Europe to
carry out attacks. The jihadist seemed to regard returnees not as
soldiers but as dropouts. “The fact is that the returnees from the
Islamic State should repent from their return,” he said. “I hope they
review their religion.”
Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own
undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will
remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly
uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that
it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken,
and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it
leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like.
Even so, the death of the Islamic State is unlikely to be quick, and
things could still go badly wrong: if the Islamic State obtained the
allegiance of al‑Qaeda—increasing, in one swoop, the unity of its
base—it could wax into a worse foe than we’ve yet seen. The rift between
the Islamic State and al-Qaeda has, if anything, grown in the past few
months; the December issue of Dabiq featured a long account of an
al‑Qaeda defector who described his old group as corrupt and
ineffectual, and Zawahiri as a distant and unfit leader. But we should
watch carefully for a rapprochement.
Without a catastrophe such as this, however, or perhaps the threat of
the Islamic State’s storming Erbil, a vast ground invasion would
certainly make the situation worse.
V. Dissuasion
It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the
Islamic State “a problem with Islam.” The religion allows many
interpretations, and Islamic State supporters are morally on the hook
for the one they choose. And yet simply denouncing the Islamic State as
un-Islamic can be counterproductive, especially if those who hear the
message have read the holy texts and seen the endorsement of many of the
caliphate’s practices written plainly within them.
Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture.
Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion
outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the
Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents
could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings
of Islam are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really would be
an act of apostasy.
The Islamic State’s ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain
subset of the population. Life’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies vanish
in its face. Musa Cerantonio and the Salafis I met in London are
unstumpable: no question I posed left them stuttering. They lectured me
garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call
them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that
they would win. If they had been froth-spewing maniacs, I might be able
to predict that their movement would burn out as the psychopaths
detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But these men
spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate
seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as
anything else.
Non-muslims cannot tell Muslims
how to practice their religion properly. But Muslims have long since
begun this debate within their own ranks. “You have to have standards,”
Anjem Choudary told me. “Somebody could claim to be a Muslim, but if he
believes in homosexuality or drinking alcohol, then he is not a Muslim.
There is no such thing as a nonpracticing vegetarian.”
There is, however, another strand of Islam that offers a hard-line
alternative to the Islamic State—just as uncompromising, but with
opposite conclusions. This strand has proved appealing to many Muslims
cursed or blessed with a psychological longing to see every jot and
tittle of the holy texts implemented as they were in the earliest days
of Islam. Islamic State supporters know how to react to Muslims who
ignore parts of the Koran: with takfir and ridicule. But they
also know that some other Muslims read the Koran as assiduously as they
do, and pose a real ideological threat.
Baghdadi is Salafi. The term Salafi has been villainized, in
part because authentic villains have ridden into battle waving the
Salafi banner. But most Salafis are not jihadists, and most adhere to
sects that reject the Islamic State. They are, as Haykel notes,
committed to expanding Dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, even,
perhaps, with the implementation of monstrous practices such as slavery
and amputation—but at some future point. Their first priority is
personal purification and religious observance, and they believe
anything that thwarts those goals—such as causing war or unrest that
would disrupt lives and prayer and scholarship—is forbidden.
They live among us. Last fall, I visited the Philadelphia mosque of
Breton Pocius, 28, a Salafi imam who goes by the name Abdullah. His
mosque is on the border between the crime-ridden Northern Liberties
neighborhood and a gentrifying area that one might call Dar al-Hipster;
his beard allows him to pass in the latter zone almost unnoticed.
Pocius
converted 15 years ago after a Polish Catholic upbringing in Chicago.
Like Cerantonio, he talks like an old soul, exhibiting deep familiarity
with ancient texts, and a commitment to them motivated by curiosity and
scholarship, and by a conviction that they are the only way to escape
hellfire. When I met him at a local coffee shop, he carried a work of
Koranic scholarship in Arabic and a book for teaching himself Japanese.
He was preparing a sermon on the obligations of fatherhood for the 150
or so worshipers in his Friday congregation.
Pocius said his main goal is to encourage a halal life for worshipers
in his mosque. But the rise of the Islamic State has forced him to
consider political questions that are usually very far from the minds of
Salafis. “Most of what they’ll say about how to pray and how to dress
is exactly what I’ll say in my masjid [mosque]. But when they get to questions about social upheaval, they sound like Che Guevara.”
When Baghdadi showed up, Pocius adopted the slogan “Not my khalifa.”
“The times of the Prophet were a time of great bloodshed,” he told me,
“and he knew that the worst possible condition for all people was chaos,
especially within the umma [Muslim community].” Accordingly,
Pocius said, the correct attitude for Salafis is not to sow discord by
factionalizing and declaring fellow Muslims apostates.
Instead, Pocius—like a majority of Salafis—believes that Muslims
should remove themselves from politics. These quietist Salafis, as they
are known, agree with the Islamic State that God’s law is the only law,
and they eschew practices like voting and the creation of political
parties. But they interpret the Koran’s hatred of discord and chaos as
requiring them to fall into line with just about any leader, including
some manifestly sinful ones. “The Prophet said: as long as the ruler
does not enter into clear kufr [disbelief], give him general
obedience,” Pocius told me, and the classic “books of creed” all warn
against causing social upheaval. Quietist Salafis are strictly forbidden
from dividing Muslims from one another—for example, by mass
excommunication. Living without baya’a, Pocius said, does indeed make one ignorant, or benighted. But baya’a
need not mean direct allegiance to a caliph, and certainly not to Abu
Bakr al‑Baghdadi. It can mean, more broadly, allegiance to a religious
social contract and commitment to a society of Muslims, whether ruled by
a caliph or not.
Quietist Salafis believe that Muslims should direct their energies
toward perfecting their personal life, including prayer, ritual, and
hygiene. Much in the same way ultra-Orthodox Jews debate whether it’s
kosher to tear off squares of toilet paper on the Sabbath (does that
count as “rending cloth”?), they spend an inordinate amount of time
ensuring that their trousers are not too long, that their beards are
trimmed in some areas and shaggy in others. Through this fastidious
observance, they believe, God will favor them with strength and numbers,
and perhaps a caliphate will arise. At that moment, Muslims will take
vengeance and, yes, achieve glorious victory at Dabiq. But Pocius cites a
slew of modern Salafi theologians who argue that a caliphate cannot
come into being in a righteous way except through the unmistakable will
of God.
The Islamic State, of course, would agree, and say that God has
anointed Baghdadi. Pocius’s retort amounts to a call to humility. He
cites Abdullah Ibn Abbas, one of the Prophet’s companions, who sat down
with dissenters and asked them how they had the gall, as a minority, to
tell the majority that it was wrong. Dissent itself, to the point of
bloodshed or splitting the umma, was forbidden. Even the manner of the establishment of Baghdadi’s caliphate runs contrary to expectation, he said. “The khilafa
is something that Allah is going to establish,” he told me, “and it
will involve a consensus of scholars from Mecca and Medina. That is not
what happened. ISIS came out of nowhere.”
The Islamic State loathes this talk, and its fanboys tweet derisively
about quietist Salafis. They mock them as “Salafis of menstruation,”
for their obscure judgments about when women are and aren’t clean, and
other low-priority aspects of life. “What we need now is fatwa about how
it’s haram [forbidden] to ride a bike on Jupiter,” one tweeted drily.
“That’s what scholars should focus on. More pressing than state of
Ummah.” Anjem Choudary, for his part, says that no sin merits more
vigorous opposition than the usurpation of God’s law, and that extremism
in defense of monotheism is no vice.
Pocius doesn’t court any kind of
official support from the United States, as a counterweight to jihadism.
Indeed, official support would tend to discredit him, and in any case
he is bitter toward America for treating him, in his words, as “less
than a citizen.” (He alleges that the government paid spies to
infiltrate his mosque and harassed his mother at work with questions
about his being a potential terrorist.)
Still, his quietist Salafism offers an Islamic antidote to
Baghdadi-style jihadism. The people who arrive at the faith spoiling for
a fight cannot all be stopped from jihadism, but those whose main
motivation is to find an ultraconservative, uncompromising version of
Islam have an alternative here. It is not moderate Islam; most Muslims
would consider it extreme. It is, however, a form of Islam that the
literal-minded would not instantly find hypocritical, or blasphemously
purged of its inconveniences. Hypocrisy is not a sin that ideologically
minded young men tolerate well.
Western officials would probably do best to refrain from weighing in
on matters of Islamic theological debate altogether. Barack Obama
himself drifted into takfiri waters when he claimed that the
Islamic State was “not Islamic”—the irony being that he, as the
non-Muslim son of a Muslim, may himself be classified as an apostate,
and yet is now practicing takfir against Muslims. Non-Muslims’ practicing takfir elicits chuckles from jihadists (“Like a pig covered in feces giving hygiene advice to others,” one tweeted).
I suspect that most Muslims appreciated Obama’s sentiment: the
president was standing with them against both Baghdadi and non-Muslim
chauvinists trying to implicate them in crimes. But most Muslims aren’t
susceptible to joining jihad. The ones who are susceptible will only
have had their suspicions confirmed: the United States lies about
religion to serve its purposes.
Within the narrow bounds
of its theology, the Islamic State hums with energy, even creativity.
Outside those bounds, it could hardly be more arid and silent: a vision
of life as obedience, order, and destiny. Musa Cerantonio and Anjem
Choudary could mentally shift from contemplating mass death and eternal
torture to discussing the virtues of Vietnamese coffee or treacly
pastry, with apparent delight in each, yet to me it seemed that to
embrace their views would be to see all the flavors of this world grow
insipid compared with the vivid grotesqueries of the hereafter.
I could enjoy their company, as a guilty intellectual exercise, up to a point. In reviewing Mein Kampf
in March 1940, George Orwell confessed that he had “never been able to
dislike Hitler”; something about the man projected an underdog quality,
even when his goals were cowardly or loathsome. “If he were killing a
mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.” The Islamic
State’s partisans have much the same allure. They believe that they are
personally involved in struggles beyond their own lives, and that merely
to be swept up in the drama, on the side of righteousness, is a
privilege and a pleasure—especially when it is also a burden.
Fascism, Orwell continued, is
psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.
Nor, in the case of the Islamic State, its religious or intellectual
appeal. That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfillment of
prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our
opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain
confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succor if
it stays true to the Prophetic model. Ideological tools may convince
some potential converts that the group’s message is false, and military
tools can limit its horrors. But for an organization as impervious to
persuasion as the Islamic State, few measures short of these will
matter, and the war may be a long one, even if it doesn’t last until the
end of time.
Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. His personal site is gcaw.net.
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