That Atlantic piece by Graeme Wood about what ISIS really is – it’s worth reading.
Here’s the deal: it’s not just Islamism (which is bad enough), it’s the caliphate. That’s why it’s so attractive to so many people, and that in turn of course is why it’s so scary.
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.
We get it wrong if we think it’s just more of the same, like al-Qaeda only more so, Wood says. It’s not. It’s not modern plus jihadism.
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.
…
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.
Hmm. By its most ardent followers – but then there are the less ardent followers. You know how people are – some are ardent, and others are sort of ardent and sort of not, and maybe tomorrow they’ll decide to do something else. But then the ardents can kill millions and millions of people while they have the upper hand, so there’s that.
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.
But there is this impulse to deny it…
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.
Well yes, the shifting social mores, like women walking around in the world without a real human’s permission. I think Said was wrong about a lot of things.
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.
And besides, who says religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington? Jeez, if only it didn’t.
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.”
I recognize that 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.”
That part doesn’t surprise me, it’s what I’ve assumed all along. It’s the part about the caliphate and its “legitimacy” I didn’t know.
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.
That last sentence is…frightening. It explains a lot, and it’s frightening.
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.
The caliph has that.
It’s all pretty sickening. That’s enough of it for today.
Very interesting. So much to digest. So Islam is the religion of peace the same way Christianity is the religion of love. Ha ha ha. Very funny. Pull the other one.
Meanwhile, a Pakistani Muslim nuclear physicist, Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood, has decided that, since the Qur’an says djinni (that’s “genies” to us) exist and have a “fire energy”, that means that djinni exist and are a potential source of harvestable energy for us. He’s been working on it since at least 1980; to date, no djinn engines have been successfully tested. This is an example of “Islamic science, a weird hybrid of scientific terminology and Islamic lore.” http://fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/2001/10/102901.html
The end of the Islamic Golden Age came when caliphs decided that all fields of research and inquiry must conform to the Qur’an as the ultimate source of truth. Naturally, that marked the end of the brilliance that had been associated with Islam, and only dogmatic zealotry was possible from that point.
Can we refer to the Muslims as “pre-Enlightenment”, since they bristle at “ancient”?
Well, of course, members of ISIS are pious Muslims who are imitating Mohammed and his followers, how many times do they have to tell us before some people get the message? The difference now, is that the Western Kuffars are too well-armed to be easy victims, so ISIS usually preys on Muslims who aren’t sufficiently Islamic, or local Infidel minorities.
@RJW:
Now, now, be careuful. They’re pious Islamists. The two things are completely different and you have to be careful not to get them confused, or you risk giving the impression that you mean, y’know, Muslims.
#notallMuslims.
@3 sonofrojblake,
Well, that would never do, would it? Obviously Mohammed and his followers weren’t Muslims, they were Islamists!
[meta]
RJW and sonofrojblake, do you also conflate Dominionists with Christians?
@ 5 John Morales
Nice try, John. But it’s perfectly obvious to such observant regulars as RJW & sonofrojblake that No True Muslim would oppose Islamism.
@John Morales
You don’t?
Elementary logic, people. All Dominionists are Christian, but not all Christians are Dominionist. Ditto Islamists & Muslim.
Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is mortal. The “all” is crucial.
Religion matters in Washington, but in a very different way. In the U.S., you have to be able to present a nice facade of being a devout Christian, but actual true believers in DC seem to be rare, in part because it’s difficult to hold to full-bore Biblical teachings and govern effectively, at least in a democratic republic. Preachers and true believers deliver votes, but it’s the lip-service providing flim-flam men who actually get elected. These folks could never withstand a close scrutiny of how they conduct their affairs.
Wood is suggesting that the distinction comes in here. The new Caliph is an actual True Believer. Look at his life, then look at the Koran, and you won’t find the same sort of hypocrisy you do in a Huckabee or a Romney. And this means that dealing with him, and the Islamic State, is going to require a completely different approach.
For a mild rebuttal, here’s Murtaza Hussain at the Intercept https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/20/atlantic-defines-real-islam-says-isis/
The Graeme Wood article was very interesting. I’m another one who had no idea about the significance of establishing a caliphate.
There’s since been Wood’s response to the responses published. The interesting thing is that the *ISIS* commenters seemed to feel he’d understood. And they even make the point that it’s not a problem because their enemies will refuse to understand their religious motivations and continue to fight the last battle, i.e. moderns against moderns-in-robes-aka-Al-Qaeda.
I have a horrible feeling they’re right.
I’ve seen a number of articles critical of Graeme Woods’ writeup; here’s one from Balloon Juice, with a link to a much harsher critique by the director of CAIR (who would be expected to take umbrage at any suggestion that ISIS represents Islam, so color me unsurprised that he does). Juan Cole has comments here.
@5 John Morales,
“RJW and sonofrojblake, do you also conflate Dominionists with Christians?”
No, but that’s irrelevant to the point I was making, straw argument.
Mohammed and his followers were bandits who enslaved the women and children of rival tribes, massacred all the adult males, were virulent anti-Semites, they also were pedophiles by any modern definition. This was of course the way of life for desert nomads. Islam was used by Mohammed’s followers as a vehicle for a millennium of Arab and Islamic imperialism and slaughter. That is the example set by Mohammed for Muslims to follow, until all humanity is part of the Ummah, Islam is not ‘the religion of peace’. So are the members of ISIS pious Muslims? BTW, the Muslim conquers of Aleaxandria in the 7th century are one of the ‘usual suspects’ for the destruction of the Library.
@10
Murtaza Hussain has a valid point, but I think misses the point of Wood’s article. (Looks in crystal ball)
I think he was trying to accomplish two things:
1. To, as it were, get inside ISIS’ head – thus interviewing supporters or sympathizers.
2. To refute the “nothing to do with Islam” blather emanating from the likes of Reza and Obama.
Its great that there are Muslim intellectuals that oppose ISIS ideologically, but when has any sect listened to any other?
RJW @13:
Really? I quote you @4: “Obviously Mohammed and his followers weren’t Muslims, they were Islamists!”; if you were being sarcastic, then you clearly think the labels are equivalent; if not, then you think they’re exclusive.
In either case, I refer you to Ophelia @8.
Ostensibly, yes.
Note that Islam is not monolithic any more than is Christianity.
@15 John Morales,
You’ve missed the point, completely, or you’re dissembling. Ophelia’s comment @8 is not relevant to my argument, which is on the nature of Islam itself, i.e. who are in fact, true Muslims, jihadists or ‘cultural’ Muslims? I presume from your comments that you have little or no knowledge of the ideology’s origins and history. Read my comments re Islam @ 13.
“Note that Islam is not monolithic any more than is Christianity.” So what, also irrelevant.
The assumption is that Islam is similar to Christianity, a peaceful religion that has been hijacked, it’s not, it’s inherently violent and was propagated by the sword from its invention in the 7th century. As to the nature of Islamic culture itself, nominate one majority-Muslim liberal democratic state.
“if you were being sarcastic, then you clearly think the labels are equivalent;”
Nonsense, it should be obvious that if ISIS are Islamists, then the bandit and murderer, Mohammed and his followers who are ISIS’s exemplars, must also be “Islamists” by the usual definition.
Refer to-
(1) “A Critical Examination of the Qur’an” by Edmund Standing.
(2) ” The Third Choice” by Mark Durie.
RJW @16:
Again: they’re all true Muslims, in whatever way.
(I haven’t missed that you imagine that there is only one “true and genuine” Islam, and that Islamists exemplify it; I’m noting that facile conceit is not congruent with reality)
What, Paul of Tarsus? The Holy Roman Empire? The Wars of Religion? Ireland in the ’70s?
(The etymological fallacy doesn’t just apply to words)
Not only did I read that, I quoted from it!
(How did you miss that?)
Yes, I know you imagine you know the one and only true Islam, and non-Islamist Muslims ain’t part of that in your estimation.
(FWTW)
A peaceful religion?
The history of Christendom is there for anyone to see.
(“Peaceful” ain’t the adjective it merits)
This is a strawman; that there exist majority-Muslim states that aren’t what you consider properly Islamist (Jihad!) suffices to show that there is no one monolithic Islam, and that not all Islamic states are Islamist states.
(Speaking of relative peacefulness, do you recall the recent Yugoslav Wars? Peaceful Christians vs Vicious Muslim, as in days of yore, right? Vlad the Impaler would have been proud of the Christians there!)
Nonsense? Fair enough.
Presumably, you can then confirm that you acknowledge that not all Muslims are Islamists, but that all Islamists are Muslims.
(BTW, when you write “Mohammed and his followers”, you mean “Mohammed and his contemporaneous followers”, right? After all, all Muslims (even non-Islamists) are followers of Mohammed (PBUH))
John Morales,
Wasn’t Yugoslavia peaceful Orthodox Christian Serbians killing and being killed by peaceful Catholic Croatians?
[OT]
robertbaden, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosniaks#Bosnian_War
@17 John Morales,
“you can then confirm that you acknowledge that not all Muslims are Islamists, but that all Islamists are Muslims.” Yes, seems plausible.
None of the examples you have provided are relevant, “Christians” don’t practise Christianity (and “Buddhists” don’t practise Buddhism, as recent events in Myanmar have demonstrated) so what, the topic is the practice and nature of Islam at its origin and whether “Islamists” are faithful followers of the faith. Here’s a thought experiment for you–
Suppose you decided to imitate the life of Buddha, Jesus or follow the path of the Jains how would you behave towards your fellow humans? If you imitated Mohammed how would you behave? NB Whether or not the Buddha, Mohammed or Jesus actually ever existed is not relevant.
Some online references are useful, however books are usually far superior, so do some research and we could discuss the subject at some time in the future.
Islam is a demonstrably dangerous ideology and it’s inimical to liberal democracy.
RJW, if by “Islam is a demonstrably dangerous ideology and it’s inimical to liberal democracy.” you mean that some current (and contingent) instantiations of Islam are demonstrably dangerous and ideologcal and inimical to liberal democracy, then I shan’t dispute you.
(But then, neither is it disputable that others aren’t)
What’s disputable is that Islam is qualitatively worse than any other Abrahamic religion.
And yet again, in slightly different words: that all Crusaders were Christians doesn’t mean all Christians were Crusaders, as per Ophelia @8.
FWIW: history of religions (crude).
—
You can’t grok that there is more than one way to be a Christian, Buddhist or whatever, do ya?
(What did you imagine I meant by non-monolithic?)
June 3, 2015 issue of “Princeton Alumni Weekly” ISIS: A Primer. An article by Dr. Bernard Haykel.
The internecine Islamic split dates from 632, the year of Muhammad’s death. It arose as a quarrel as to whom would be the successor to the caliphate. The first centuries of Islamic history do not reflect: “the virtuous past“ … “a period of righteousness, heroism, and justice”. The Battle of Siffin (657) and the Battle of Karbala (680) are noteworthy manifestations of the schism which has continued to this day. The venues and actualizations have changed; the underlying religious animus has not.
Professor Haykel writes: “the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not agree with the Islamic State’s ideology…” The data appear to indicate otherwise. (See http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/opinion-polls.htm).
Polls by Pew Research ( and many other organizations ) show substantial Muslim support for terrorist activity. The degree of support for ( or acquiescence toward ) terrorism varies by venue. The available literature is extensive.
For example, in Western nations:
26% of younger Muslims in America believe suicide bombings are justified.
35% of young Muslims in Britain believe suicide bombings are justified.
42% of young Muslims in France believe suicide bombings are justified.
22% of young Muslims in Germany believe suicide bombings are justified.
29% of young Muslims in Spain believe suicide bombings are justified.
http://pewresearch.org/files/old-assets/pdf/muslim-americans.pdf#page=60
In Islamic countries:
74% of Palestinians support terror attacks.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/193395
Pew Research (2014): 47% of Bangladeshi Muslims says suicide bombings and violence are justified to “defend Islam”. 25% believed the same in Tanzania and Egypt. 20% of Muslims in the moderate countries of Turkey and Malaysia concur.
http://www.pewglobal.org/2014/07/01/concerns-about-islamic-extremism-on-the-rise-in-middle-east/
Pew Global: 68% of Palestinian Muslims say suicide attacks against civilians in defense of Islam are justified.
43% of Nigerian Muslims say suicide attacks against civilians in defense of Islam are justified.
38% of Lebanese Muslims say suicide attacks against civilians in defense of Islam are justified.
15% of Egyptian Muslims say suicide attacks against civilians in defense of Islam are justified.
13% of Indonesian Muslims say suicide attacks against civilians in defense of Islam are justified.
12% of Jordanian Muslims say suicide attacks against civilians in defense of Islam are justified.
7% of Muslim Israelis say suicide attacks against civilians in defense of Islam are justified.
http://cnsnews.com/node/53865 (Pew Global Attitudes Project September, 2009)
See also: http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Muslim_Statistics_(Terrorism) for further statistics on Islamic terror. The article also discusses the minimal impact of socio-economic factors vis-à-vis support for terrorism.
@22 Sandy Kramer,
“Polls by Pew Research ( and many other organizations ) show substantial Muslim support for terrorist activity.”
Of course there is, however, neither the Islamic apologists nor the ‘anti-racist’ multi-culti fantasists are going to publicly acknowledge that alarming fact. The obvious implication is that the Muslim community in the West provides an effectively inexhaustible supply of jihadis.
I usually cite the Pew surveys when someone is quoting the ‘tiny minority of extremists’ drivel, unfortunately the facts are “Islamophobic”