The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (10 page)

           
When therefore they awoke, and found themselves in a place so charming, they deemed that it was Paradise in very truth. And the ladies and damsels dallied with them to their hearts’ content, so that they had what young men would have; and with their own good will they never would have quitted the place.

This elaborate ruse was all in aid of the Old Man’s recruitment program:

           
Now this Prince whom we call the Old One kept his Court in grand and noble style, and made those simple hill-folks about him believe firmly that he was a great Prophet. And when he wanted one of his
Ashishin
to send on any mission, he would cause that potion whereof I spoke to be given to one of the youths in the garden, and then had him carried into his Palace. So when the young man awoke, he found himself in the Castle, and no longer in that Paradise; whereat he was not over well pleased. He was then conducted to the Old Man’s presence, and bowed before him with great veneration as believing himself to be in the presence of a true Prophet. The Prince would then ask whence he came, and he would reply that he came from Paradise! and that it was exactly such as Mahommet had described it in the Law. This of course gave the others who stood by, and who had not been admitted, the greatest desire to enter therein.

Thus the young men were induced to commit murder:

           
So when the Old Man would have any Prince slain, he would say to such a youth: “Go thou and slay So and So; and when thou returnest my Angels shall bear thee into Paradise. And shouldst thou die, natheless even so will I send my Angels to carry thee back into Paradise.” So he caused them to believe; and thus there was no order of his that they would not affront any peril to execute, for the great desire they had to get back into that Paradise of his. And in this manner the Old One got his people to murder any one whom he desired to get rid of. Thus, too, the great dread that he inspired all Princes withal, made them become his tributaries in order that he might abide at peace and amity with them.
⁴⁶

The Old Man’s promise to these young men that they would enter Paradise if they were killed in the process of killing for him would already have been familiar to them—because that same promise is in the Qur’an: “Indeed, Allah has purchased from the believers their lives and their properties; for that they will have Paradise. They fight in the cause of Allah, so they kill and are killed” (9:111).

The Islamic State doesn’t engage in such elaborate ruses as the Old Man of the Mountain, but it does lure young Muslims with the same promise of Paradise, offered in the same way to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah.

The Khawarij

The Kharijites (or Khawarij) are another of the most often-mentioned ancient Muslim sects, since in their violence and rigorousness they resemble today’s jihad movements. Muslim spokesmen in the West frequently brand groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda “neo-Kharijites,” implying that the jihadis are Islamic heretics with no standing in the religion.

But reality is not quite that simple.

The Khawarij, or “those who go out,” left the Muslim community during the civil strife known as the First Fitna (disturbance, unrest) in the late 650s, when Ali ibn Abi Talib, and Muawiya, the governor of Syria, were vying for the caliphate. Finding the behavior of both to be unacceptable on Islamic grounds, the Kharijites left—and then plotted to kill them both.

The Khawarij held that Muslims must not obey a sinful ruler and that they have a duty to overthrow him. They considered those who did not do so to be unbelievers.

On the one hand, this idea is directly contradicted by numerous statements attributed to Muhammad:

           
You should listen to and obey your
Imam
(Muslim ruler) even if he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin.
⁴⁹

           
There will be leaders who will not be led by my guidance and who will not adopt my ways. There will be among them men who will have the hearts of devils in the bodies of human beings. . . . You will listen to Amir and carry out his orders; even if your back is flogged and your wealth is snatched, you should listen and obey.
⁵⁰

On the other, however, some hadiths depict Muhammad mandating an obedience that was not quite so unconditional:

           
It is obligatory upon a Muslim that he should listen (to the ruler appointed over him) and obey him whether he likes it or not, except that he is ordered to do a sinful thing. If he is ordered to do a sinful act, a Muslim should neither listen to him nor should he obey his orders.
⁵¹

The hadith literature was first published around two hundred years after Muhammad is supposed to have died, and around 180 years after the Kharijites first “went out.” In those days, rival factions among the Muslims fabricated sayings of Muhammad to support their own positions.

The conflict between the nascent Muslim establishment—both Muawiya’s camp, which became the Sunnis, and Ali’s party, which became the Shi’ites—and the Kharijites gave rise to these conflicting hadiths. The ones depicting Muhammad enjoining absolute obedience even to an unjust ruler were placed in his mouth by supporters of the caliphate, while those in which Muhammad forbids obedience to a ruler who orders Muslims to sin are likely to have come from the Khawarij and their supporters.

Also favorable to the Khawarij are Qur’an verses such as this one, enjoining Muslims to fight against Muslims who oppress their brethren: “And if two factions among the believers should fight, then make settlement between the two. But if one of them oppresses the other, then fight against the one that oppresses until it returns to the ordinance of Allah. And if it returns, then make settlement between them in justice and act justly. Indeed, Allah loves those who act justly” (49:9).

Numerous Islamic authorities have branded the Islamic State and other jihad groups neo-Khawarij for their rejection of the legitimacy of relatively secular Muslim rulers such as Hosni Mubarak and Saddam Hussein, who did not govern in accord with Islamic law, and sinful rulers such as the House of Saud, the most conspicuous of all conspicuous consumers. Muslim spokesmen frequently label modern-day jihad groups “
takfiris
” because,
like the Khawarij, they are eager to pronounce
takfir
against fellow Muslims—in other words, to declare them outside the fold of Islam for some heresy.

But as the historian Bernard Lewis notes, “Islamic tradition gives recognition to the principle of justifiable revolt.”
⁵²
Takfir is also a recognized principle in Islamic tradition, with the limits on how often it can be used essentially subjective.
⁵³
In other words, the actions of the Khawarij—and of their modern counterparts in ISIS—can be justified by generally accepted principles of Islamic law.

Thus it is difficult for Muslims to criticize the Islamic State and other jihad groups that fight against Muslim rulers they consider to be unjust. And thus the Islamic State continues to gain recruits, even after most Muslim organizations and spokesmen in the West have denounced it.

The Wahhabis

In the strictness of their Islamic observance, the Islamic State resembles the Wahhabis, who before the rise of ISIS were the world’s best-known modern-day Muslim hard-liners. Although the Saudis don’t refer to it by that name—for them it is just plain, unadulterated Islam—Wahhabi Islam is the official religion of the Kingdom of the Two Holy Places. That’s another name for Saudi Arabia, which includes the two cities Muhammad called home, Mecca and Medina, and their two great mosques (the Two Holy Places). By virtue of this blessed location, the Saudis consider themselves to be the guardians not just of Muhammad’s mosque but of his legacy—the guardians of Islam itself. The House of Saud has spent untold billions of dollars to spread the Wahhabi understanding of Islam around the world, and in many areas (notably East Africa and Central Asia) it has supplanted, or is in the process of supplanting, more relaxed forms of cultural Islam that had held sway in those places for centuries.

Those who place high hopes on the reform of Islam should note that Wahhabism
is
a reform movement—indeed, the quintessential reform movement in Islam. Muhammad ibn Abdul al-Wahhab was an eighteenth-century Muslim who proclaimed his intention to restore Islam’s original purity by rejecting all innovation (
bid’a
) and basing his religious observance strictly on what the Qur’an and Muhammad taught.

Wahhab set out to extinguish all Islamic practices that he considered not to have come from either source: thus Wahhabi mosques lack minarets—the towers that the caller to prayer, the muezzin, climbs in order to chant the
azan,
the call to prayer. Wahhab also rejected the veneration of Muslim saints and prayers at their shrines, a practice that had become widespread by the eighteenth century. Wahhab pointed to hadiths in which Muhammad himself condemned this practice, calling it
shirk,
the combination of idolatry and polytheism that is the worst sin of all in Islam: associating partners with Allah in worship.

The Wahhabis were often just as brutal as the Islamic State is today. In an 1803 attack that could have come from today’s headlines about ISIS, the Wahhabis entered Ta’if, a city near Mecca, massacred all the men, and enslaved all the women and children.
⁵⁴

Like the Khawarij, Wahhab declared all Muslims who disagreed with him to be unbelievers who could be lawfully killed as heretics and apostates. In 1744 Wahhab entered into an alliance with an Arab chieftain, Muhammad ibn Saud, and together they set out on jihad against those enemies, fighting against the Ottoman authorities, who Wahhab believed had lost all legitimacy by departing from the tenets of Islam.

Not long after Wahhab’s death in 1792, the Wahhabis captured the Two Holy Places of Mecca and Medina and after that gradually expanded their domains until finally, in 1932, the Wahhabi sheikh ibn Saud captured Riyadh and established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Oil money has made Wahhabi ideals mainstream, even dominant, among Muslims worldwide. The Saudis have spent as much as $100 billion to spread Wahhabism worldwide.
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However, other Muslims still make the same complaints against the Wahhabis as were made long ago against the Khawarij: they’re Qur’anic rigorists, but nonetheless they misunderstand the noble book, and their piety is a false front: “While claiming to be adherents to ‘authentic’ Sunnah [Muslim tradition], these deviants are quick to label anyone who opposes their beliefs . . . as ‘sufi,’ [that is, akin to adherents of the mystical Sufi sect, elements of which many Muslims consider heretical] while exploiting the Muslims’ love for Islam by overexaggerating the phrase ‘Qur’an and Sunnah’ in their senseless rhetoric.”
⁵⁶
The same criticisms are made about the new self-styled caliphate today.

Al-Qaeda is simply an especially virulent outgrowth of Wahhabism. And ISIS is just an especially virulent outgrowth of al-Qaeda.

The Case for ISIS’s Bloody Tactics: How Zarqawi Laid the Intellectual and Theological Foundations of the Islamic State