GRAEME WOOD - What ISIS Really Wants (2015)
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.
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 Mohamed Atta’s last full day of life, he
shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.
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… read more:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/