What is the Islamic State?
What ISIS Really Wants?
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.
The Islamic State awaits the army of “Rome,” whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.
Where
did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these
questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the
answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential
comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations
commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he
had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not
defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In
the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State,
variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements
that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to
significant strategic errors.
The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area
larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader
since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance
on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp
Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he
stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to
deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations—upgrading
his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from
hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists
that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and
volume, and is continuing.
Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.
The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS),
follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to
the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know
its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the
triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the
Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a
dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived
to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8
million.
We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two
ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the
logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it.
The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden
as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since
al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain
the group’s priorities and current leadership.
Bin Laden viewed
his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in
his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a
geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State,
by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down
structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and
military arms, and its territory into provinces.)
We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest
campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. Peter
Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997, titled
his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden as
a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized terror
and franchised it out. He requested specific political concessions, such
as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia. His foot soldiers
navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohamed Atta’s last full day
of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at Pizza Hut.
There is a temptation to rehearse
this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern
political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit
the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks
nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered
commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal
environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.
The
most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic State’s
officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to “moderns.”
In conversation, they insist that they will not—cannot—waver from
governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad
and his earliest followers. They often speak in codes and allusions that
sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims, but refer to specific
traditions and texts of early Islam.
To take one example: In
September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief
spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and
Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him,
run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To Western ears, the
biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop
destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to
vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery
alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an
“uncircumcised geezer.”)
But Adnani was not merely talking trash.
His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his
exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to
leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a
defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.
The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very
Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn
largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe.
But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from
coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State
adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its
billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic
methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of
Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State;
nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious,
millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be
combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and
back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with
the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way
that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its
own excessive zeal.
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What ISIS Really Wants
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 comi...
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