{"id":658,"date":"2015-02-22T15:37:01","date_gmt":"2015-02-22T15:37:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/?p=658"},"modified":"2015-03-15T23:28:06","modified_gmt":"2015-03-15T23:28:06","slug":"what-isis-really-wants-%d8%9f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/?p=658","title":{"rendered":"What ISIS Really Wants \u061f"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s what that means for its strategy\u2014and for how to stop it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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\u2019s appeal. \u201cWe have not defeated the idea,\u201d he said. \u201cWe do not even understand the idea.\u201d In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as \u201cnot Islamic\u201d and as al-Qaeda\u2019s \u201cjayvee team,\u201d statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014upgrading 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate\u2019s 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\u2014and headline player in\u2014the imminent end of the world.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS<\/span>), 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2011Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as \u201cSheikh Osama,\u201d a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda\u2019s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group\u2019s priorities and current leadership.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State\u2019s medieval religious nature. Peter Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled his first book Holy War, Inc.<\/i> 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\u2019s last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nearly all the Islamic State\u2019s decisions adhere to what it calls, on its billboards, license plates, and coins, \u201cthe Prophetic methodology.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is a temptation to rehearse this observation\u2014that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise\u2014and 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<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State\u2019s officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to \u201cmoderns.\u201d In conversation, they insist that they will not\u2014cannot\u2014waver 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State\u2019s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and \u201csmash his head with a rock,\u201d poison him, run him over with a car, or \u201cdestroy his crops.\u201d To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments\u2014the stoning and crop destruction\u2014juxtaposed 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 \u201cuncircumcised geezer.\u201d)<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar<\/i>, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away<\/strong><\/p>\n

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very<\/i> 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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, \u201cthe Prophetic methodology,\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\"307796482\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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I. Devotion<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In November, the Islamic State released an infomercial-like video tracing its origins to bin Laden. It acknowledged Abu Musa\u2019b al Zarqawi, the brutal head of al\u2011Qaeda 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\u2019s successor, Ayman al Zawahiri, the owlish Egyptian eye surgeon who currently heads al\u2011Qaeda. 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Zawahiri\u2019s companion in isolation is a Jordanian cleric named Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, 55, who has a fair claim to being al-Qaeda\u2019s 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<\/i>, the \u201cpious forefathers.\u201d 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Islamic State awaits the army of \u201cRome,\u201d whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maqdisi taught Zarqawi, who went to war in Iraq with the older man\u2019s advice in mind. In time, though, Zarqawi surpassed his mentor in fanaticism, and eventually earned his rebuke. At issue was Zarqawi\u2019s penchant for bloody spectacle\u2014and, as a matter of doctrine, his hatred of other Muslims, to the point of excommunicating and killing them. In Islam, the practice of takfir<\/i>, or excommunication, is theologically perilous. \u201cIf a man says to his brother, \u2018You are an infidel,\u2019\u2009\u201d the Prophet said, \u201cthen one of them is right.\u201d 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maqdisi wrote to his former pupil that he needed to exercise caution and \u201cnot issue sweeping proclamations of takfir<\/i>\u201d or \u201cproclaim people to be apostates because of their sins.\u201d The distinction between apostate and sinner may appear subtle, but it is a key point of contention between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s beard, voting in an election\u2014even for a Muslim candidate\u2014and 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Following takfiri<\/i> 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 \u201capostates\u201d 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<\/i>, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\"Musa<\/a>
Musa Cerantonio, an Australian preacher reported to be one of the Islamic State\u2019s most influential recruiters, believes it is foretold that the caliphate will sack Istanbul before it is beaten back by an army led by the anti-Messiah, whose eventual death\u2014 when just a few thousand jihadists remain\u2014will usher in the apocalypse. (Paul Jeffers\/Fairfax Media)<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Centuries have passed <\/span>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Their skepticism is comprehensible. In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics\u2014notably the late Edward Said\u2014who pointed out that calling Muslims \u201cancient\u201d was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose\u2014the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar<\/i>while beheading an apostate, sometimes he\u2019s doing so for religious reasons.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic<\/i>. 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\u2019s theology, told me, \u201cembarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion\u201d that neglects \u201cwhat their religion has historically and legally required.\u201d Many denials of the Islamic State\u2019s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an \u201cinterfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every academic I asked about the Islamic State\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. \u201cEven the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,\u201d Haykel said. \u201cThey mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time<\/i>.\u201d He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. \u201cPeople want to absolve Islam,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s this \u2018Islam is a religion of peace\u2019 mantra. As if there is such a thing as \u2018Islam\u2019! It\u2019s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.\u201d Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. \u201cAnd these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

All Muslims acknowledge that Muhammad\u2019s earliest conquests were not tidy affairs, and that the laws of war passed down in the Koran and in the narrations of the Prophet\u2019s rule were calibrated to fit a turbulent and violent time. In Haykel\u2019s 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. \u201cSlavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,\u201d Haykel said. Islamic State fighters \u201care smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our failure to appreciate the essential differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda has led to dangerous decisions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s ninth chapter, which instructs Muslims to fight Christians and Jews \u201cuntil they pay the jizya<\/i> with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.\u201d The Prophet, whom all Muslims consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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. \u201cWhat\u2019s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,\u201d Haykel said. \u201cThere is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don\u2019t normally have.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2011century 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: \u201cThe Wahhabis were not wanton in their violence.\u201d They were surrounded by Muslims, and they conquered lands that were already Islamic; this stayed their hand. \u201cISIS<\/span>, by contrast, is really reliving the early period.\u201d Early Muslims were surrounded by non-Muslims, and the Islamic State, because of its takfiri<\/i> tendencies, considers itself to be in the same situation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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. \u201cWe will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,\u201d Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. \u201cIf 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.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In October, Dabiq<\/i>, the magazine of the Islamic State, published \u201cThe Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,\u201d 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\u2019s anonymous author wrote,<\/strong><\/p>\n

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] \u2026 Enslaving the families of the kuffar<\/i> [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 \u2026 and thereby apostatizing from Islam.<\/strong><\/p>\n

II. Territory<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter R. Neumann, a professor at King\u2019s 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\u2014physically isolated in their homes\u2014to 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u201cnew spiritual authorities\u201d 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cerantonio\u2014a big, friendly man with a bookish demeanor\u2014told 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<\/i>, and his obsession with Islamic apocalypticism felt familiar. He seemed to be living out a drama that looks, from an outsider\u2019s perspective, like a medieval fantasy novel, only with real blood.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Last June, Cerantonio and his wife tried to emigrate\u2014he wouldn\u2019t say to where (\u201cIt\u2019s illegal to go to Syria,\u201d he said cagily)\u2014but 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\u2019s 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\u2014a technically unaffiliated ideologue who nonetheless speaks with what other jihadists have taken to be a reliable voice on matters of the Islamic State\u2019s doctrine.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We met for lunch in Footscray, a dense, multicultural Melbourne suburb that\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cerantonio explained the joy he felt when Baghdadi was declared the caliph on June 29\u2014and the sudden, magnetic attraction that Mesopotamia began to exert on him and his friends. \u201cI was in a hotel [in the Philippines], and I saw the declaration on television,\u201d he told me. \u201cAnd I was just amazed, and I\u2019m like, Why am I stuck here in this bloody room?<\/i>\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 Atat\u00fcrk, euthanized it in 1924. But Cerantonio, like many supporters of the Islamic State, doesn\u2019t acknowledge that caliphate as legitimate, because it didn\u2019t 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Baghdadi spoke at length of the importance of the caliphate in his Mosul sermon. He said that to revive the institution of the caliphate\u2014which had not functioned except in name for about 1,000 years\u2014was a communal obligation. He and his loyalists had \u201chastened to declare the caliphate and place an imam\u201d at its head, he said. \u201cThis is a duty upon the Muslims\u2014a duty that has been lost for centuries \u2026 The Muslims sin by losing it, and they must always seek to establish it.\u201d 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019a<\/i> (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 <\/i>(ignorant) and therefore die a \u201cdeath of disbelief.\u201d 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. \u201cI would go so far as to say that Islam has been reestablished\u201d by the caliphate.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I asked him about his own baya\u2019a<\/i>, and he quickly corrected me: \u201cI didn\u2019t say that I\u2019d pledged allegiance.\u201d Under Australian law, he reminded me, giving baya\u2019a<\/i> to the Islamic State was illegal. \u201cBut I agree that [Baghdadi] fulfills the requirements,\u201d he continued. \u201cI\u2019m just going to wink at you, and you take that to mean whatever you want.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni law\u2014being a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and physical and mental integrity; and having \u2019amr<\/i>, 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\u2019s Islamic State achieved that long before June 29, Cerantonio said, and as soon as it did, a Western convert within the group\u2019s ranks\u2014Cerantonio described him as \u201csomething of a leader\u201d\u2014began 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Social-media posts from the Islamic State suggest that executions happen more or less continually.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cerantonio said a faction arose that was prepared to make war on Baghdadi\u2019s group if it delayed any further. They prepared a letter to various powerful members of ISIS<\/span>, airing their displeasure at the failure to appoint a caliph, but were pacified by Adnani, the spokesman, who let them in on a secret\u2014that 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. \u201cIf he\u2019s legitimate,\u201d Cerantonio said, \u201cyou must give him the baya\u2019a<\/i>.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

After Baghdadi\u2019s July sermon, a stream of jihadists began flowing daily into Syria with renewed motivation. J\u00fcrgen Todenh\u00f6fer, 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Bernard<\/a>
Bernard Haykel, the foremost secular authority on the Islamic State\u2019s ideology, believes the group is trying to re-create the earliest days of Islam and is faithfully reproducing its norms of war. \u201cThere is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness\u201d about the group\u2019s dedication to the text of the Koran, he says. (Peter Murphy)<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In\u00a0London,<\/span> 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\u2019s law.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Choudary, 48, is the group\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before the caliphate, \u201cmaybe 85 percent of the Sharia was absent from our lives,\u201d Choudary told me. \u201cThese laws are in abeyance until we havekhilafa<\/i>\u201d\u2014a caliphate\u2014\u201cand now we have one.\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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. (\u201cI have been plagued with this great matter, plagued with this responsibility, and it is a heavy responsibility,\u201d Baghdadi said in his sermon.) In return, the caliph commands obedience\u2014and those who persist in supporting non-Muslim governments, after being duly warned and educated about their sin, are considered apostates.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019 hands. \u201cThe problem,\u201d he explained, \u201cis that when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and don\u2019t provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia\u2014the whole package\u2014they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia.\u201d 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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. (\u201cIsn\u2019t it free in Britain, too?,\u201d I asked. \u201cNot really,\u201d he said. \u201cSome procedures aren\u2019t covered, such as vision.\u201d) This provision of social welfare was not, he said, a policy choice of the Islamic State, but a policy obligation<\/i> inherent in God\u2019s law.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"ss\"<\/a>
Anjem Choudary, London\u2019s most notorious defender of the Islamic State, says crucifixion and beheading are sacred requirements. (Tal Cohen\/Reuters) <\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

III. The Apocalypse<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In broad strokes, al-Qaeda acts like an underground political movement, with worldly goals in sight at all times\u2014the 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. \u201cBin Laden and Zawahiri are from elite Sunni families who look down on this kind of speculation and think it\u2019s something the masses engage in,\u201d says Will McCants of the Brookings Institution, who is writing a book about the Islamic State\u2019s apocalyptic thought.<\/strong><\/p>\n

During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic State\u2019s immediate founding fathers, by contrast, saw signs of the end times everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival of the Mahdi\u2014a 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 \u201ctalking all the time about the Mahdi and making strategic decisions\u201d based on when they thought the Mahdi was going to arrive. \u201cAl-Qaeda had to write to [these leaders] to say \u2018Cut it out.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

For certain true believers\u2014the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles\u2014visions 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\u2014and the world\u2014might 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\u2019s 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\u2019s final showdown with an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s Waterloo or its Antietam.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cDabiq is basically all farmland,\u201d one Islamic State supporter recently tweeted. \u201cYou could imagine large battles taking place there.\u201d The Islamic State\u2019s propagandists drool with anticipation of this event, and constantly imply that it will come soon. The state\u2019s magazine quotes Zarqawi as saying, \u201cThe spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify \u2026 until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq.\u201d A recent propaganda video shows clips from Hollywood war movies set in medieval times\u2014perhaps because many of the prophecies specify that the armies will be on horseback or carrying ancient weapons.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of beheading. \u201cHere we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq, eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive,\u201d said a masked executioner in a November video, showing the severed head of Peter (Abdul Rahman) Kassig, the aid worker who\u2019d 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Prophetic narration that foretells the Dabiq battle refers to the enemy as Rome. Who \u201cRome\u201d 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\u2014the 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

After mujahideen reported having seen American soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts upon the arrival of the first guests at a party.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus\u2014the second-most-revered prophet in Islam\u2014will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cOnly God knows\u201d whether the Islamic State\u2019s armies are the ones foretold, Cerantonio said. But he is hopeful. \u201cThe 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,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you go to the mosques now, you\u2019ll find the preachers are silent about this subject.\u201d 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Abu<\/a>
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was declared caliph by his followers last summer. The establishment of a caliphate awakened large sections of Koranic law that had lain dormant, and required those Muslims who recognized the caliphate to immigrate. (Associated Press)<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

IV. The Fight<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The ideological purity of the Islamic State has one compensating virtue: it allows us to predict some of the group\u2019s actions. Osama bin Laden was seldom predictable. He ended his first television interview cryptically. CNN\u2019s Peter Arnett asked him, \u201cWhat are your future plans?\u201d Bin Laden replied, \u201cYou\u2019ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing.\u201d By contrast, the Islamic State boasts openly about its plans\u2014not all of them, but enough so that by listening carefully, we can deduce how it intends to govern and expand.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u201coffensive jihad,\u201d the forcible expansion into countries that are ruled by non-Muslims. \u201cHitherto, we were just defending ourselves,\u201d 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<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014a 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Choudary\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s seat at the United Nations. \u201cThis is not permitted,\u201d Abu Baraa said. \u201cTo send an ambassador to the UN is to recognize an authority other than God\u2019s.\u201d This form of diplomacy is shirk<\/i>, 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\u2014for example by voting for political candidates who favor a caliphate\u2014is shirk<\/i>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s authority in the Islamic State\u2019s eyes.) To the Islamic State these are not options, but acts of apostasy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The United States <\/span>and its allies have reacted to the Islamic State belatedly and in an apparent daze. The group\u2019s 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\u2019t yet committed mass atrocities. Adnani, the spokesman, told followers then that the group\u2019s ambition was to \u201crestore the Islamic caliphate,\u201d and he evoked the apocalypse, saying, \u201cThere are but a few days left.\u201d Baghdadi had already styled himself \u201ccommander of the faithful,\u201d a title ordinarily reserved for caliphs, in 2011. In April 2013, Adnani declared the movement \u201cready to redraw the world upon the Prophetic methodology of the caliphate.\u201d In August 2013, he said, \u201cOur goal is to establish an Islamic state that doesn\u2019t recognize borders, on the Prophetic methodology.\u201d 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\u2019d heard its message.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If we had identified the Islamic State\u2019s 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\u2019s third-largest city. Yet, just over a year ago, Obama told The New Yorker<\/i> that he considered ISIS<\/span> to be al-Qaeda\u2019s weaker partner. \u201cIf a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn\u2019t make them Kobe Bryant,\u201d the president said.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s life. The plan facilitated\u2014indeed, required\u2014the interaction of some of the founding figures of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and could hardly have looked more hastily improvised.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly bleed it appears the best of bad military options.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It entailed the enlistment of Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, the Zarqawi mentor and al-Qaeda grandee, to approach Turki al-Binali, the Islamic State\u2019s chief ideologue and a former student of Maqdisi\u2019s, even though the two men had fallen out due to Maqdisi\u2019s 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<\/i> reported that the U.S. government, through an intermediary, had asked Maqdisi to intercede with the Islamic State on Kassig\u2019s behalf.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s severed head appeared in the Dabiq video a few days later.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Maqdisi gets mocked roundly on Twitter by the Islamic State\u2019s fans, and al\u2011Qaeda is held in great contempt for refusing to acknowledge the caliphate. Cole Bunzel, a scholar who studies Islamic State ideology, read Maqdisi\u2019s opinion on Henning\u2019s status and thought it would hasten his and other captives\u2019 death. \u201cIf I were held captive by the Islamic State and Maqdisi said I shouldn\u2019t be killed,\u201d he told me, \u201cI\u2019d kiss my ass goodbye.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kassig\u2019s death was a tragedy, but the plan\u2019s success would have been a bigger one. A reconciliation between Maqdisi and Binali would have begun to heal the main rift between the world\u2019s two largest jihadist organizations. It\u2019s 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\u2019s two main terrorist antagonists reveals astonishingly poor judgment.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chastened by our earlier indifference,<\/span> we are now meeting the Islamic State via Kurdish and Iraqi proxy on the battlefield, and with regular air assaults. Those strategies haven\u2019t dislodged the Islamic State from any of its major territorial possessions, although they\u2019ve kept it from directly assaulting Baghdad and Erbil and slaughtering Shia and Kurds there.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019 front lawn, and it is committing daily atrocities in the territory it already controls.<\/strong><\/p>\n

One way to un-cast the Islamic State\u2019s spell over its adherents would be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq now under caliphate rule. Al\u2011Qaeda 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\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 givenbaya\u2019a<\/i> 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<\/span>, after all, happened only because our previous occupation created space for Zarqawi and his followers. Who knows the consequences of another botched job?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014they 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The humanitarian cost of the Islamic State\u2019s 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\u2019s core is rare among jihadist groups for its focus on the \u201cfar enemy\u201d (the West); most jihadist groups\u2019 main concerns lie closer to home. That\u2019s 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 \u201cdeal with the rafida<\/i> [Shia] first \u2026 then al-Sulul<\/i> [Sunni supporters of the Saudi monarchy] \u2026 before the crusaders and their bases.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Musa Cerantonio and Anjem Choudary could mentally shift from contemplating mass death to discussing the virtues of Vietnamese coffee, with apparent delight in each.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A few \u201clone wolf\u201d 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\u2014and it does in its propaganda\u2014it hasn\u2019t yet planned and financed one. (The Charlie Hebdo<\/i> attack in Paris in January was principally an al\u2011Qaeda operation.) During his visit to Mosul in December, J\u00fcrgen Todenh\u00f6fer 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. \u201cThe fact is that the returnees from the Islamic State should repent from their return,\u201d he said. \u201cI hope they review their religion.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2011Qaeda\u2014increasing, in one swoop, the unity of its base\u2014it could wax into a worse foe than we\u2019ve 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<\/i> featured a long account of an al\u2011Qaeda 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Without a catastrophe such as this, however, or perhaps the threat of the Islamic State\u2019s storming Erbil, a vast ground invasion would certainly make the situation worse.<\/strong><\/p>\n

V. Dissuasion<\/strong><\/h3>\n

It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the Islamic State \u201ca problem with Islam.\u201d 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\u2019s practices written plainly within them.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now<\/i>, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture<\/i>. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. \u201cThe only principled ground that the Islamic State\u2019s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid,\u201d Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of apostasy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Islamic State\u2019s ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain subset of the population. Life\u2019s 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Non-muslims cannot tell <\/span>Muslims how to practice their religion properly. But Muslims have long since begun this debate within their own ranks. \u201cYou have to have standards,\u201d Anjem Choudary told me. \u201cSomebody 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.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is, however, another strand of Islam that offers a hard-line alternative to the Islamic State\u2014just 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<\/i> and ridicule. But they also know that some other Muslims read the Koran as assiduously as they do, and pose a real ideological threat.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Baghdadi is Salafi. The term Salafi<\/i> 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<\/i>, the land of Islam, even, perhaps, with the implementation of monstrous practices such as slavery and amputation\u2014but at some future point. Their first priority is personal purification and religious observance, and they believe anything that thwarts those goals\u2014such as causing war or unrest that would disrupt lives and prayer and scholarship\u2014is forbidden.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A theological alternative to the Islamic State exists\u2014just as uncompromising, but with opposite conclusions.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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. \u201cMost of what they\u2019ll say about how to pray and how to dress is exactly what I\u2019ll say in my masjid<\/i> [mosque]. But when they get to questions about social upheaval, they sound like Che Guevara.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Baghdadi showed up, Pocius adopted the slogan \u201cNot my khalifa<\/i>.\u201d \u201cThe times of the Prophet were a time of great bloodshed,\u201d he told me, \u201cand he knew that the worst possible condition for all people was chaos, especially within the umma<\/i> [Muslim community].\u201d Accordingly, Pocius said, the correct attitude for Salafis is not to sow discord by factionalizing and declaring fellow Muslims apostates.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Instead, Pocius\u2014like a majority of Salafis\u2014believes that Muslims should remove themselves from politics. These quietist Salafis, as they are known, agree with the Islamic State that God\u2019s law is the only law, and they eschew practices like voting and the creation of political parties. But they interpret the Koran\u2019s hatred of discord and chaos as requiring them to fall into line with just about any leader, including some manifestly sinful ones. \u201cThe Prophet said: as long as the ruler does not enter into clear kufr<\/i>[disbelief], give him general obedience,\u201d Pocius told me, and the classic \u201cbooks of creed\u201d all warn against causing social upheaval. Quietist Salafis are strictly forbidden from dividing Muslims from one another\u2014for example, by mass excommunication. Living without baya\u2019a<\/i>, Pocius said, does indeed make one ignorant, or benighted. But baya\u2019a<\/i> need not mean direct allegiance to a caliph, and certainly not to Abu Bakr al\u2011Baghdadi. 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s kosher to tear off squares of toilet paper on the Sabbath (does that count as \u201crending cloth\u201d?), 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Islamic State, of course, would agree, and say that God has anointed Baghdadi. Pocius\u2019s retort amounts to a call to humility. He cites Abdullah Ibn Abbas, one of the Prophet\u2019s 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 theumma<\/i>, was forbidden. Even the manner of the establishment of Baghdadi\u2019s caliphate runs contrary to expectation, he said. \u201cThe khilafa<\/i> is something that Allah is going to establish,\u201d he told me, \u201cand it will involve a consensus of scholars from Mecca and Medina. That is not what happened. ISIS<\/span> came out of nowhere.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Islamic State loathes this talk, and its fanboys tweet derisively about quietist Salafis. They mock them as \u201cSalafis of menstruation,\u201d for their obscure judgments about when women are and aren\u2019t clean, and other low-priority aspects of life. \u201cWhat we need now is fatwa about how it\u2019s haram [forbidden] to ride a bike on Jupiter,\u201d one tweeted drily. \u201cThat\u2019s what scholars should focus on. More pressing than state of Ummah.\u201d Anjem Choudary, for his part, says that no sin merits more vigorous opposition than the usurpation of God\u2019s law, and that extremism in defense of monotheism is no vice.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pocius doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cless than a citizen.\u201d (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.)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Still, his quietist<\/i> 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Western officials would probably do best to refrain from weighing in on matters of Islamic theological debate altogether. Barack Obama himself drifted into takfiri <\/i>waters when he claimed that the Islamic State was \u201cnot Islamic\u201d\u2014the 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<\/i>against Muslims. Non-Muslims\u2019 practicing takfir <\/i>elicits chuckles from jihadists (\u201cLike a pig covered in feces giving hygiene advice to others,\u201d one tweeted).<\/strong><\/p>\n

I suspect that most Muslims appreciated Obama\u2019s sentiment: the president was standing with them against both Baghdadi and non-Muslim chauvinists trying to implicate them in crimes. But most Muslims aren\u2019t<\/i>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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Within the narrow bounds<\/span> 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I could enjoy their company, as a guilty intellectual exercise, up to a point. In reviewing Mein Kampf<\/i> in March 1940, George Orwell confessed that he had \u201cnever been able to dislike Hitler\u201d; something about the man projected an underdog quality, even when his goals were cowardly or loathsome. \u201cIf he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon.\u201d The Islamic State\u2019s 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\u2014especially when it is also a burden.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fascism, Orwell continued, is<\/strong><\/p>\n

psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life \u2026 Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people \u201cI offer you a good time,\u201d Hitler has said to them, \u201cI offer you struggle, danger, and death,\u201d and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet \u2026 We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019t last until the end of time.<\/strong><\/section>\n
<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source :\u00a0theatlantic<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n

Read More…<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":666,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1,3],"tags":[11,18,10,32,12,17,9],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press","category-raqqa","category-syria","tag-is","tag-isil","tag-isis","tag-islamic-state","tag-raqqa","tag-raqqa-is-being-slaughtered-silently","tag-syria"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/Capture.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":668,"href":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions\/668"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raqqa-sl.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}