I keep touting Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 as a corrective for those who claim that Al-Qaeda is motivated not by religion, but by secular issues like poverty, colonialism, and the like. Wright’s book shows clearly that the roots of Al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamic groups that practice terrorism were, in the main, motivated by Islam, its dictate to wage jihad, and its hatred of the West, whose values stood in distinction to those of Islam.
Despite, that, though, Muslim apologists like Karen Armstrong and Reza Aslan continue to insist not only are Islamic terrorist groups “not truly Islamic,” but that the message of the Qur’an is one of peace and love. That, of course, is bunk. And now that ISIS has arisen after Wright’s book, the same apologetics are being applied to it as were applied to Al-Qaeda.
The necessary corrective has just been published in The Atlantic by Graeme Wood, in a piece called “What ISIS really wants“. Wood is an editor at the magazine as well as a lecturer in political science at Yale. He lived in the Middle East for four years beginning in 2002, so he certainly has the street cred to write about ISIS. His piece is long—21 pages as I printed it out—but it’s well worth reading, especially because ISIS threatens to kindle a huge war in the Middle East.
Many readers sent me the link to the piece (thanks, all!), probably because its main message is one I make a lot: ISIS has deep roots in Islam and, in fact, is simply carrying out the medieval Muslim plan to establish a worldwide caliphate. Wood clearly describes ISIS’s bizarre theology involving the capture of Istanbul by the Caliphate, the death of nearly all its members, and then their final rescue by the Muslim prophet Jesus (yes, the Jesus) who comes back to Earth during the Apocalypse.
Wood’s article involved a lot of travel, interviewing, and scholarly work, and you really should read it (the download is free). I’ll give just a few quotes (indented) and then my own take on the piece.
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.
. . . 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.”
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.
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.. . . 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.
So in the end, knowing ISIS’s background and ideology doesn’t seem that helpful.
But Wood also has another point. Every time the President or someone else claims that ISIS isn’t really a brand of Islam, it turns those who are susceptible to jihad even more militant, for they see that the U.S. “lies about religion to serve its purposes.” Well, I don’t find that argument terribly convincing, but maybe it does have some force.
My own objection to characterizing ISIS as “not Muslim” is on grounds of truth: such statements are disingenuous and simply serve to perpetuate all religion, with the harms attendant on it, for I see even the moderate forms of faith as usually harmful. (Yes, Reza Aslan, I’m an anti-theist.) I think it’s marginally useful to know that ISIS is a religiously motivated group, for it’s best to know your enemy as fully as possible, but Wood hasn’t made the case that such knowledge will be crucial in defeating the group.
I hear the words of Chokri Belaid, the brave Tunisian lawyer, shortly before he was gunned down by Islamist fanatics on Feb. 6, 2013: “We can disagree in our diversity but within a civilian, peaceful and democratic framework. Disagree in our diversity, yes!”
To speak of a nonspecific “dark ideology,” to dismiss the reality of conflict between the West and Islam, is also to undermine the anti-Islamist struggle of brave Muslims like Belaid — and these Muslims are the only people, ultimately, who can defeat the black-flagged jihadi death merchants.
