How Islamic is the
Islamic State, not at all, Mehdi Hasan
It is difficult to forget the names, or the images, of James
Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning and Peter Kassig. The
barbaric beheadings between August and November 2014, in cold blood and on
camera, of these five jumpsuit-clad western hostages by the self-styled Islamic
State, or ISIS, provoked widespread outrage and condemnation.
However, we should also
remember the name of Didier François, a French journalist who was held by ISIS
in Syria for ten months before being released in April 2014. François has since
given us a rare insight into life inside what the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood, in a recent report for the magazine, has called
the “hermit kingdom” of ISIS, where “few have gone . . . and returned.” And it
is an insight that threatens to turn the conventional wisdom about the world’s
most fearsome terrorist organisation on its head.
“There was never really
discussion about texts,” the French journalist told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour
last month, referring to his captors. “It was not a religious discussion. It
was a political discussion.”
According to François, “It
was more hammering what they were believing than teaching us about the Quran.
Because it has nothing to do with the Quran.” And the former hostage revealed
to a startled Amanpour: “We didn’t even have the Quran. They didn’t want even
to give us a Quran.”
The rise of ISIS in Iraq
and Syria has been a disaster for the public image of Islam—and a boon for the
Islamophobia industry. Here, after all, is a group that calls itself Islamic
State; that claims the support of Islamic texts to justify its medieval punishments,
from the stoning of adulterers to the amputation of the hands of thieves; and
that has a leader with a PhD in Islamic studies who declares himself to be a
“caliph,” or ruler over all Muslims, and has even renamed himself in honour of
the first Muslim caliph, Abu Bakr.
The consequences are,
perhaps, as expected. In September 2014, a Zogby poll found that only 27
percent of Americans had a favourable view of Islam—down from 35 per cent in
2010. By February 2015, more than a quarter of Americans (27 per cent) were
telling the pollsters LifeWay Research that they believed that life under ISIS
rule “gives a true indication of what an Islamic society looks like.”
Yet what is much more
worrying is that it isn’t just ill-informed, ignorant or bigoted members of the
public who take such a view. “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,”
wrote Wood in his widely read 10,000-word cover report (“What ISIS really
wants”) in the March issue of Atlantic, in which he
argued, “The religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from
coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”
Bernard Haykel of
Princeton University, the only scholar of Islam whom Wood bothered to
interview, described Muslims who considered ISIS to be un-Islamic, or
anti-Islamic, as “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view
of their own religion,” and declared that the hand-choppers and throat-slitters
of ISIS “have just as much legitimacy” as any other Muslims, because Islam is
“what Muslims do and how they interpret their texts.”
Many other analysts across
the political spectrum agree and have denounced the Obama administration for
refusing, in the words of the journalist-turned-terrorism-expert Peter Bergen,
to make “the connection between Islamist terrorism and ultra-fundamentalist
forms of Islam.” Writing on the CNN website in February, Bergen declared, “ISIS
may be a perversion of Islam, but Islamic it is.”
“Will it take the end of
the world for Obama to recognize ISIS as ‘Islamic’?” screamed a headline on the
Daily Beast website in the same month. “Which will come first, flying cars and
vacations to Mars, or a simple acknowledgment that beliefs guide behaviour and
that certain religious ideas—jihad, martyrdom, blasphemy, apostasy—reliably lead
to oppression and murder?” asked Sam Harris, the neuroscientist and high priest
of the “New Atheism” movement.
So, is ISIS a recognisably
“Islamic” movement? Are ISIS recruits motivated by religious fervour and faith?
The Analyst
“Our exploration of the
intuitive psychologist’s shortcomings must start with his general tendency to
overestimate the importance of personal or dispositional factors relative to
environmental influences,” wrote the American social anthropologist Lee Ross in
1977.
It was Ross who coined the
phrase “fundamental attribution error”, which refers to the phenomenon in which
we place excessive emphasis on internal motivations to explain the behaviour of
others, in any given situation, rather than considering the relevant external factors.
Nowhere is the fundamental
attribution error more prevalent, suggests the forensic psychiatrist Marc
Sageman, than in our navel-gazing analysis of wannabe terrorists and what does
or doesn’t motivate them. “You attribute other people’s behaviour to internal
motivations but your own to circumstances. ‘They’re attacking us and therefore
we have to attack them.’” Yet, he tells me, we rarely do the reverse.
Few experts have done more
to try to understand the mindset of the young men and women who aspire to join
the blood-drenched ranks of groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda than Sageman.
And few can match his qualifications, credentials or background. The
61-year-old, Polish-born psychiatrist and academic is a former CIA operations
officer who was based in Pakistan in the late 1980s. There he worked closely
with the Afghan mujahedin. He has since advised the New York City Police
Department on counterterrorism issues, testified in front of the 9/11
Commission in Washington, D.C., and, in his acclaimed works Understanding
Terror Networks and Leaderless Jihad, closely
analysed the biographies of several hundred terrorists.
Does he see religion as a
useful analytical prism through which to view the rise of ISIS and the process
by which thousands of young people arrive in Syria and Iraq, ready to fight and
die for the group?
“Religion has a role but
it is a role of justification,” he tells me. “It’s not why they do this [or]
why young people go there.”
ISIS members, he says, are
using religion to advance a political vision, rather than using politics to
advance a religious vision. “To give themselves a bit more legitimacy, they use
Islam as their justification. It’s not about religion, it’s about identity . .
. You identify with the victims, [with] the guys being killed by your enemies.”
For converts to Islam in
particular, he adds, “Identity is important to them. They have . . . invested a
lot of their own efforts and identity to become this ‘Muslim’ and, because of
this, identity is so important to them. They see other Muslims being
slaughtered [and say], ‘I need to protect my community.’” (A recent study found
that converts to Islam were involved in 31 per cent of Muslim terrorism
convictions in the UK between 2001 and 2010.)
Sageman believes that it
isn’t religious faith but, rather, a “sense of emotional and moral outrage” at
what they see on their television screens or on YouTube that propels
people from Portsmouth to Peshawar, from Berlin to Beirut, to head for war
zones and to sign up for the so-called jihad. Today, he notes archly,
“Orwell would be [considered as foreign fighter like] a jihadi,” referring to
the writer’s involvement in the anti-fascist campaign during the Spanish civil
war.
Religion, according to
this view, plays a role not as a driver of behaviour but as a vehicle for
outrage and, crucially, a marker of identity. Religion is important in the
sense that it happens to “define your identity”, Sageman says, and not because
you are “more pious than anybody else.” He invokes the political scientist Benedict
Anderson’s conception of a nation state as an “imagined political community”,
arguing that the “imagined community of Muslims” is what drives the terrorists,
the allure of being members of—and defenders of—the ultimate “in-group.”
“You don’t have the most
religious folks going there,” he points out. ISIS fighters from the west, in
particular, “tend to have rediscovered Islam as teenagers, or as converts”;
they are angry, or even bored, young men in search of a call to arms and a
thrilling cause. The ISIS executioner Mohammed Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi
John”—who was raised and educated in the UK—was described, for instance, by two
British medics who met him at a Syrian hospital as “quiet but a bit of an
adrenalin junkie”.
Sageman’s viewpoint should
not really surprise us. Writing in his 2011 book The Black Banners: the Inside Story of
9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, the Lebanese-American former FBI
agent Ali H Soufan, who led the bureau’s pre-9/11 investigation into Al Qaeda,
observed: “When I first began interrogating AL Qaeda members, I found that
while they could quote Bin Laden’s sayings by heart, I knew far more of the
Quran than they did—and in fact some barely knew classical Arabic, the language
of both the hadithand the Quran. An understanding of
their thought process and the limits of their knowledge enabled me and my
colleagues to use their claimed piousness against them.”
Three years earlier, in
2008, a classified briefing note on radicalisation, prepared by MI5’s
behavioural science unit, was obtained by the Guardian. It revealed:
“Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in
terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy
and could . . . be regarded as religious novices.” The MI5 analysts noted the
disproportionate number of converts and the high propensity for “drug-taking,
drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes”. The newspaper claimed they
concluded, “A well-established religious identity actually protects against
violent radicalisation.”
As I have pointed out on
these pages before, Mohammed Ahmed and Yusuf Sarwar, the two young British
Muslim men from Birmingham who were convicted on terrorism charges in 2014
after travelling to fight in Syria, bought copies of Islam for Dummies and The
Koran for Dummies from Amazon prior to their departure.
Religious novices, indeed.
Sageman, the former CIA
officer, says we have to locate terrorism and extremism in local conflicts
rather than in grand or sweeping ideological narratives – the grievances and
the anger come first, he argues, followed by the convenient and self-serving
ideological justifications. For example, he says, the origins of ISIS as a
terror group lie not in this or that Islamic book or school of thought, but in
the “slaughter of Sunnis in Iraq.” He reminds me how, in April 2013, when there
was a peaceful Sunni demonstration asking the Shia-led Maliki government in
Baghdad to reapportion to the various provinces what the government was getting
in oil revenues, Iraqi security forces shot into the crowds. “That was the
start of this [current] insurrection.”
Before that, it was the
brutal, US-led occupation, under which Iraq became ground zero for suicide
bombers from across the region and spurred the creation of new terrorist
organisations, such as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
ISIS is the “remnant” of
AQI, Sageman adds. He believes that any analysis of the group and of the
ongoing violence and chaos in Iraq that doesn’t take into account the long
period of war, torture, occupation and sectarian cleansing is inadequate—and a
convenient way of exonerating the west
of any responsibility. “Without the invasion of Iraq, [ISIS] would not exist. We created it by our presence there.”
of any responsibility. “Without the invasion of Iraq, [ISIS] would not exist. We created it by our presence there.”
The Spy
Like Marc Sageman, Richard
Barrett has devoted his professional life to understanding terrorism,
extremism and radicalization. The silver-haired 65-year-old was the director of
global counterterrorism operations for MI6, both before and after the 11 September
2001 attacks, and he subsequently led the Al Qaeda and Taliban monitoring team
at the United Nations between 2004 and 2013.
Unlike Sageman, however,
Barrett partly sympathises with Graeme Wood’s and Bernard Haykel’s thesis that
“the Islamic State is Islamic”. He tells me that some ISIS followers “are
clearly convinced they are following Allah’s will” and he insists: “We should
not underestimate the extent of their belief.” However, Barrett concedes that
such beliefs and views “will not be the only thing that drew them to the
Islamic State”.
The former MI6 officer,
who recently published a report on foreign fighters in Syria, agrees with the
ex-CIA man on the key issue of what motivates young men to join—and fight
for—groups such as ISIS in the first place. Rather than religious faith, it has
“mostly to do with the search for identity . . . coupled with a search for
belonging and purpose. The Islamic State offers all that and empowers the
individual within a collective. It does not judge and accepts all with no
concern about their past. This can be very appealing for people who think that
they washed up on the wrong shore.”
Whether they are
unemployed losers or well-educated professionals, joining ISIS offers new
recruits the chance to “believe that they are special . . . that they are part
of something that is new, secret and powerful.”
While Barrett doesn’t
dismiss the theological angle in the way that Sageman does, he nevertheless
acknowledges, “Acting in the name of Islam means that, for the ignorant at
least, the groups have some legitimacy for their actions . . . They can pretend
it is not just about power and money.”
This irreligious lust for
power and money is a significant and often overlooked part of the ISIS
equation. The group—often described as messianic and uncompromising—had no
qualms about demanding a $200m ransom for the lives of two Japanese hostages in
January; nor has it desisted from smuggling pornography into and out of Iraq,
according to Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and
Corruption Centre at George Mason University in Virginia. (Shelley has referred
to Isis as a “diversified criminal operation”.)
Then there is the
often-ignored alliance at the heart of ISIS between the so-called violent
Islamists, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s
secular Ba’athist regime—an alliance that Barrett has referred to as a
“marriage of convenience.” If ISIS is the apocalyptic religious cult that Wood
and others believe it is, why was Baghdadi’s deputy in Iraq Abu Muslim al-Afari
al-Turkmani, a former senior special forces officer in Hussein’s army? Why is
Baghdadi’s number two in Syria Abu Ali al-Anbari, a former major general under
Hussein?
“The Ba’athist element was
certainly very important . . . as it gave the Islamic State military and
administrative capability,” Barrett says. “It also made it possible [for ISIS
to] take Mosul so quickly and cause defections and surrenders from the Iraqi
army. There was and continues to be a coincidence of interest between
Islamic State and other anti-government Sunni groups.”
Here again, it seems, is
the fundamental attribution error in play. We neglect to focus on the
“interests” of groups such as ISIS and obsess over their supposedly messianic
and apocalyptic “beliefs.” The “end of times” strain may be very strong in
ISIS, Barrett warns, but: “The Ba’athist elements are still key in Iraq and
without them the Islamic State would probably not be able to hold on to the
city of Mosul.”
Baghdadi’s appointment as
leader of ISIS in 2010 was orchestrated by a former Ba’athist colonel in
Hussein’s army, Haji Bakr, according to another recent study produced by
Barrett, in which he noted how Bakr had “initially attracted criticism from
fellow members of the group for his lack of a proper beard and lax observance
of other dictates of their religious practice”. Nevertheless, pragmatism
trumped ideology as Bakr’s “organisational skills . . . and network of fellow
ex-Ba’athists made him a valuable resource” for ISIS.
Apparently, Baghdadi’s
supposed caliphate in Iraq and Syria was less the will of God and more the will
of Saddam.
The Theologian
Perhaps the most
astonishing achievement of Isis has been not the sheer size of the territory it
has captured, but the way in which it has united the world’s disparate (and
often divided) 1.6 billion Muslims against it.
Whether Sunni or Shia,
Salafi or Sufi, conservative or liberal, Muslims—and Muslim leaders—have almost
unanimously condemned and denounced ISIS not merely as un-Islamic but actively
anti-Islamic.
Consider the various
statements of Muslim groups such as the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation,
representing 57 countries (ISIS has “nothing to do with Islam”); the Islamic
Society of North America (ISIS' actions are “in no way representative of what
Islam actually teaches”); al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most prestigious
seat of learning in the Sunni Muslim world (ISIS is acting “under the guise of
this holy religion . . . in an attempt to export their false Islam”); and even
Saudi Arabia’s Salafist Grand Mufti, Abdul Aziz al ash-Sheikh (ISIS is “the
number-one enemy of Islam”).
In September 2014, more
than 120 Islamic scholars co-signed an 18-page open letter to Baghdadi, written
in Arabic, containing what the Slate website’s Filipa Ioannou described as a
“technical point-by-point criticism of ISIS' actions and ideology based on the
Quran and classical religious texts.”
Yet buffoonish
right-wingers such as the Fox News host Sean Hannity continue to refer to the
alleged “silence of Muslims” over the actions of ISIS and ask, “Where are the
Muslim leaders?” Meanwhile, academics who should know better, such as
Princeton’s Bernard Haykel, insist that the leaders of ISIS “have just as much
legitimacy as anyone else.”
Legitimacy, however,
“comes through endorsement by religious leaders. If Sunni Islam’s leaders
consider ISIS inauthentic, then that is what it is,” says Abdal Hakim Murad,
who teaches Islamic studies at Cambridge University and serves as the dean of
the Cambridge Muslim College, which trains imams for British mosques. The
blond-haired, 54-year-old Murad is a convert and is also known as Timothy
Winter (his brother is the Telegraph football
writer Henry). Murad has been described by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies
Centre in Jordan as “one of the most well-respected western theologians”, whose
“accomplishments place him amongst the most significant Muslims in the world”.
The religious world,
whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian, is “packed with fringe and fundamentalist
groups that claim the mantle of total authenticity,” Murad tells me. To
accept those groups’ assertions at face value is “either naive or tendentious.”
He continues: “Just as
Christianity in Bosnia 20 years ago was not properly represented by the
churchgoing militias of Radovan Karadzic and just as Judaism is
not represented by West Bank settlers who burn mosques, so, too, Islam is
not represented by ISIS.”
Contrary to a lazy
conventional wisdom which suggests that a 1,400-year-old faith with more than a
billion adherents has no hierarchy, “Islam has its leadership, its
universities, its muftis and its academies, which unanimously repudiate ISIS,”
Murad explains. For the likes of Haykel to claim that the ISIS interpretation
of Islam has “just as much legitimacy” as the mainstream view, he adds, is
“unscholarly,” “incendiary” and likely to “raise prejudice and comfort the
far-right political formations”.
As for ISIS' obsession
with beheadings, crucifixions, hand-chopping and the rest, Murad argues: “With
regard to classical sharia punishments, the religion’s teachings in every
age are determined by scholarly consensus on the meaning of the complex
scriptural texts”—rather than by self-appointed “sharia councils” in the midst
of conflict zones.
Many analysts have laid
the blame for violent extremism among Muslims at the ideological door of
Salafism, a regressive and ultra-conservative brand of Islam, which owes a
great deal to the controversial teachings of an 18th-century preacher named
Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and which today tends to be behind much of the
misogyny and sectarianism in the Muslim-majority world. Yet, as even Wood
concedes in his Atlantic report, “Most Salafis are not
jihadists and most adhere to sects that reject the Islamic State.”
Salafists tend to be
apolitical, whereas groups such as ISIS are intensely political. Even the
traditionalist Murad, who has little time for what he has deemed the “cult-like
universe of the Salafist mindset”, agrees that the rise of extremism within the
movement is a consequence, rather than a cause, of violence and conflict.
“The roots of ISIS have
been located in rage against . . . the 2003 occupation of Iraq. Before that
event, Salafist extremism was hardly heard of in Syria and Iraq, even though
the mosques were full in those countries,” Murad says. “Angry men, often having
suffered in US detention, have reached for the narrowest and most violent
interpretation of their religion they can find. This is a psychological
reaction, not a faithful adherence to classical Muslim norms of jurisprudence.”
In the view of this
particular Muslim theologian, ISIS owes a “debt to European far-right
thinking.” The group’s “imposition of a monolithic reading of the huge and
hugely complex founding literature of the religion is something very new in
Islamic civilisation, representing a totalitarian impulse that seems closer to
European fascism than to classical Islamic norms.”
The Radical
Raised in Toronto, the son
of Indian immigrant parents, Mubin Shaikh went from enjoying a hedonistic
teenage lifestyle involving drugs, girls and parties to embracing a militant
and “jihadist” view of the world, full of hate and anger.
He felt as though he “had
become a stranger in my own land, my own home,” Shaikh told PBS in 2007, referring
to an identity crisis that helped spark his “jihadi bug.” After 11
September 2001, he wanted to fight in Afghanistan or Chechnya because: “It felt
like the right thing to do.”
It is a familiar path,
trodden by the likes of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the brothers accused of
bombing the Boston Marathon, as well as Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, the Charlie
Hebdo attackers in Paris. (A former friend of Chérif said that
the younger, pot-smoking Kouachi “couldn’t differentiate between Islam and
Catholicism” before he became radicalized by “images of American soldiers
humiliating Muslims at the Abu Ghraib prison”, as the New
York Times put it.)
Yet Shaikh eventually
relinquished his violent views after studying Sufi Islam in the Middle
East and then boldly volunteered with the Canadian Security Intelligence
Service to infiltrate several radical groups in Toronto.
The bald and bearded
Shaikh, now aged 39 and an adviser to Canadian officials, tells me it is
“preposterous” to claim that the killing of Christians and Yazidis by ISIS is
rooted in Islamic scripture or doctrine. If it was, “Muslims would have been
doing those sorts of things for the past 50-plus years. Yet we find no such
thing.”
He offers three distinct
explanations for why ISIS should not be considered or treated as an “Islamic”
phenomenon. First, Shaikh argues, “The claim that ISIS is ‘Islamic’ because it
superficially uses Islamic sources is ridiculous, because the Islamic sources
themselves say that those who do so [manifest Islam superficially] are
specifically un-Islamic.”
He points to an order
issued by the first and original Muslim caliph, Abu Bakr, which declared:
“Neither kill a child, women [nor] the elderly . . . When you come upon those
who have taken to live in monasteries, leave them alone.”
Takfiris are those who
declare other Muslims to be apostates and, for Shaikh, “It is the height of
incredulity to suggest that they [members of ISIS] are in fact ‘Islamic’ – an
opinion shared only by ISIS and [Islamophobes] who echo their claims.”
As for Baghdadi’s supposed
scholarly credentials, Shaikh jokes, “Even the devil can quote scripture.”
Second, he argues, it is
dangerous to grant ISIS any kind of theological legitimacy amid efforts to
formulate a coherent “countering violent extremism” (CVE) strategy in the West.
“It is quite possibly a fatal blow in that regard because, essentially, it is
telling Muslims to condemn that which is Islamic.” It is, he says, a
“schizophrenic approach to CVE which will never succeed”.
Third, Shaikh reminds me
how the former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often included verses
from the Bible at the top of the intelligence briefings that he presented to
President George W Bush. “Could we say [Iraq] was a ‘Christianity-motivated
war’? How about verses of the Bible [reportedly] engraved on to rifles for use
in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars?”
The former radical points
out that highlighting only the role of religion in the radicalization process
to the exclusion of, or above, other factors is short-sighted. “Fear, money . .
. adventure, alienation and, most certainly, anger at the west for what
happened in Iraq . . . [also] explain why people join [ISIS],” he tells me.
Shaikh therefore wants a
counterterrorism approach focused not merely on faith or theology, but on
“political, social and psychological” factors.
The Pollster
What Dalia Mogahed doesn’t
know about Muslim public opinion probably isn’t worth knowing. And the former
Gallup pollster and co-author, with the US academic John L Esposito, of Who
Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, based on six
years of research and 50,000 interviews with Muslims in more than 35 countries,
says that the survey evidence is clear: the overwhelming majority of the
world’s Muslims reject ISIS-style violence.
Gallup polling conducted
for Mogahed’s book found, for instance, that 93 per cent of Muslims condemned
the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. The 40-year-old Egyptian-American
scholar tells me, “In follow-up questions, Gallup found that not a single respondent
of the nearly 50,000 interviewed cited a verse from the Quran in defence of
terrorism but, rather, religion was only mentioned to explain why 9/11 was
immoral.”
The 7 per cent of Muslims
who sympathised with the attacks on the twin towers “defended this position
entirely with secular political justifications or distorted concepts of
‘reciprocity’, as in: ‘They kill our civilians. We can kill theirs.’”
It is thus empirically
unsound to conflate heightened religious belief with greater support for violence.
Mogahed, who became the first hijab-wearing Muslim woman to hold a position at
the White House when she served on Barack Obama’s advisory council on
“faith-based and neighbourhood partnerships”, says that she was “surprised” by
the results, as they “flew in the face of everything we were being told and
every assumption we were making in our counterterrorism strategy.”
As for Haykel’s claim that
Islam is merely “what Muslims do and how they interpret their texts”, Mogahed
is scathingly dismissive. “If Islam is indeed ‘what Muslims do’, then certainly
numbers should be a powerful factor dictating which Muslims we see as
representing it,” she says. “ISIS is a tiny minority whose victims are, in
fact, mostly other Muslims.
“By what logic would this
gang of killers, which has been universally condemned and brutalizes Muslims
more than anyone else, get to represent the global [Muslim] community?”
The former White House
adviser continues: “Any philosophy or ideology, from Christianity to
capitalism, has normative principles and authorities that speak to those norms.
Each also has deviants who distort it to meet political or other goals.
If I deny the existence of Christ but call myself a Christian, I’d be
wrong. If I say the state should usurp all private property and redistribute it
equally among citizens but call myself a capitalist, I would be wrong. Islam is
no different.”
Echoing Murad, Mogahed points
out, “Islam’s authorities have loudly and unanimously declared ISIS
un-Islamic.” Because of this, “Making a claim that violates normative
principles of a philosophy, as defined by those with the authority to decide,
is illegitimate.”
What about Haykel’s claim
that ISIS fighters are constantly quoting Quranic verses and the hadith,
or traditions from the life of the Prophet, and that they “mug for their
cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion and they do it
all the time”? Why do they do that if they don’t believe this stuff – if it
isn’t sincere?
“The Quran [and] hadith according
to whom?” she responds. “As interpreted by whom? As understood by whom?”
Mogahed, who served as the
executive director of the Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies until 2012 and who
now works for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) and runs
her own consulting firm based in Washington DC, argues that ISIS uses Islamic
language and symbols today for the same reason as Palestinian militant groups
used the language of secular Arab nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s.
“Any organisation uses the
dominant social medium of its society,” she says. “Today, the dominant social
currency in the Arab world is Islam. More than 90 per cent of Arab Muslims say
religion is an important part of their daily life, according to Gallup
research. Everyone, not just ISIS, speaks in Islamic language, from
pro-democracy advocates to civil society groups fighting illiteracy.”
For Mogahed, therefore, “a
violent reading of the Quran is not leading to political violence. Political
violence is leading to a violent reading of the Quran.”
In a recent despatch from
Zarqa in Jordan, birthplace of the late AQI leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and
“one of the country’s most notorious hotbeds of Islamic radicalism,” Foreign
Policy magazine’s David Kenner sat down with a group of young,
male ISIS supporters.
“None of them appeared to
be particularly religious,” Kenner noted. “Not once did the conversation turn to
matters of faith, and none budged from their seats when the call to prayer
sounded. They appeared driven by anger at humiliations big and small—from the
police officers who treated them like criminals outside their homes to the
massacres of Sunnis in Syria and Iraq—rather than by a detailed exegesis of
religious texts.”
It cannot be said often
enough: it isn’t the most pious or devout of Muslims who embrace terrorism, or
join groups such as ISIS. Nor has a raft of studies and surveys uncovered any
evidence of a “conveyor belt” that turns people of firm faith into purveyors of
violence.
Religion plays little, if
any, role in the radicalisation process, as Sageman and countless experts
testify. It is an excuse, rather than a reason. ISIS is as much the product of
political repression, organised crime and a marriage of convenience with
secular, power-hungry Ba’athists as it is the result of a perversion of Islamic
beliefs and practices. As for Islamic scholars, they “unanimously repudiate”
ISIS, to quote Murad, while ordinary Muslims “universally condemn” Baghdadi and
his bloodthirsty followers, in the words of Mogahed.
The so-called Islamic
State is, therefore, “Islamic” in the way the British National Party is
“British” or the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) is
“democratic.” No serious analyst considers the latter two entities to be
representative of either Britishness or democracy; few commentators claim that
those who join the BNP do so out of a sense of patriotism and nor do they
demand that all democrats publicly denounce the DPRK as undemocratic. So why
the double standard in relation to the self-styled Islamic State and the
religion of Islam? Why the willingness to believe the hype and rhetoric from
the spin doctors and propagandists of ISIS?
We must be wary of the
trap set for us by Baghdadi’s group—a trap that far too many people who should
know better have frustratingly fallen for. A former U.S. State Department
official who has worked on counterterrorism issues tells me how worried he is
that the arguments of the Atlantic’s Wood, Haykel,
Bergen and others have been gaining traction in policymaking circles in recent
months. “It was disconcerting to be at [President Obama’s Countering Violent
Extremism summit in February] and hear so many people discussing the [Atlantic]
article while the president and others were trying to marginalise extremist
claims to Islamic legitimacy.”
Mogahed is full-square
behind her former boss’s decision to delink violent extremism from the Islamic
faith in his public pronouncements. “As [Obama] recently remarked, giving
groups like ISIS religious legitimacy is handing them the ideological victory
they desperately desire,” she says. This may be the most significant point of
all to understand, as politicians, policymakers and security officials try (and
fail) to formulate a coherent response to violent extremism in general and ISIS
in particular.
To claim that ISIS is
Islamic is egregiously inaccurate and empirically unsustainable, not to mention
insulting to the 1.6 billion non-violent adherents of Islam across the planet.
Above all else, it is dangerous and self-defeating, as it provides Baghdadi and
his minions with the propaganda prize and recruiting tool that they most crave.
This article originally appeared in New Statesman.
