Islamic State’s Extremist Views under Scrutiny
By James Traub
March 28, 2015
Islamic State is scaring the daylights out of us. Al-Qa’ida announced itself to the world with an unspeakable bang but across time retreated (and regrouped) in the face of drone attacks and heightened surveillance and law-enforcement efforts. Islamic State seems only to proliferate, like a lethal virus that has escaped from the lab and begun madly self-replicating.
Already established across a chunk of Iraq and Syria equal in size to Britain, it has begun to colonise Libya and perhaps the Sinai, Afghanistan and Yemen. Kurdish soldiers and American pilots are killing hundreds or thousands of Islamic State warriors, but still more stream across the Turkish border to die a glorious death. Islamic State seems to be nourished from a demonic wellspring.
It has advanced to the centre of our lives, and our nightmares, with astonishing speed. In January last year, Barack Obama called the organisation the “jayvee” to al-Qa’ida’s varsity. Within six months of that ill-considered taunt, Islamic State had routed the Iraqi army; conquered Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city; gained control over a vast swath of Syria; and declared a caliphate in its territory.
Islamic State was a much better organised, more adaptive and more media-savvy organisation than almost anyone — very much including US intelligence — understood. The US President had his metaphor backward. On the strength of three recent books about this new generation of extremists, I would say al-Qa’ida is IBM and Islamic State is Apple.
ISIS: The State of Terror, by Jessica Stern and JM Berger, reads at times like a Harvard Business School case study on developing organisational culture in the digital world. After al-Qa’ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri formally disavowed it in February last year, Islamic State launched a Twitter campaign through its base of online followers imploring its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to declare the caliphate. The group’s publicists then took to social media to turn the “demand” into a groundswell.
“Instead of the Jihadi elite,” the authors write, “living (sometimes literally) on a mountaintop, reading The New York Times and watching Al Jazeera to gauge the mood of the Muslim ¬masses, the newly rechristened Islamic State had adopted a feedback loop model.”
Earlier this month, Islamic State was reported to have established its own version of Facebook, whose name translates idiomatically as “Caliphate book”.
If it’s any consolation to Obama, Zawahiri had misread Islamic State as badly as the US President had. Zawahiri thought indiscriminate brutality was a poor business model. He urged Baghdadi to stop murdering Sunnis who refused to join their anti-Shi’ite cause. Muslims around the world, he wrote, would not accept “the slaughtering of hostages”. He was wrong, of course. Islamic State’s snuff films have proved to be an effective marketing tool, especially with foreign audiences. Important Islamic State messages are simultaneously released in English, French and German, then translated further. Beheading British and US prisoners enacts a deeply satisfying drama of vengeance and power reversal to those who feel crushed by, and in, the West.
But Islamic State would not be nearly so powerful an organisation if it appealed only to bloodlust. Unlike al-Qa’ida, which offers the possibility of victory only in some remote era, Islamic State, by occupying territory and declaring the caliphate, invites its followers to live in the prophesied paradise. It offers destruction right now, redemption right now.
Stern, a lecturer on terrorism at Harvard University who served in the Clinton administration, and Berger, a Brookings Institution fellow specialising in the study of extremism, describe a video released by Islamic State at the end of Ramadan last year in which foreign fighters urge Muslims everywhere to immigrate to “the land of Khilafah”. A chant plays in the background: “Our state was established upon Islam, / and although it wages jihad upon the enemies, / it governs the affairs of the people. / It looks after its flock with love and patience.” The camera, the authors note, lingers on a child “holding a realistic-looking submachine gun”.
The caliphate constitutes an exercise in nation-building and a viable alternative to the apostate regimes around the world. In a recent report for the Brookings Institution, Middle East analyst Charles Lister notes that, within two days of the conquest of Mosul, Islamic State had issued a 16-point document laying out its governing principles. Elsewhere in Iraq, he writes, Islamic State has filled the vacuum of authority with policing, education, sharia courts, humanitarian aid and the like. A favourite data point of terrorism experts is the consumer protection bureau that Islamic State has established in Raqqa, its Syrian capital. Islamic State promises slaughter to angry young men and a Salafism kibbutz to their sisters.
If Islamic State really were a business school case, we would want to understand how its distinctive culture evolved. On this subject, Stern and Berger largely rely on second-hand sources. We must turn instead to ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, who have talked to many jihadists and tell a far more detailed and nuanced story.
Weiss is a fellow at the Institute of Modern Russia in New York and Hassan is an analyst at the Delma Institute in Abu Dhabi. Islamic State, they note, traces its origin to an entrepreneur of violence very different from Osama bin Laden, a child of Saudi privilege who grew up to become an austere ideologue. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of Islamic State, was a semi-literate but charismatic Jordanian thug.
“His first stint in prison was for drug possession and sexual assault,” the authors write. He “bootlegged alcohol” and may have been a pimp. Zarqawi’s desperate mother enrolled him in religious classes at a mosque. He emerged a committed Salafist and warrior for Islam. After five years in a Jordanian jail for militant activities, Zarqawi travelled to Afghanistan in 1999. When bin Laden asked him to make bayat — to pledge allegiance — he refused. This ruthless jihadist was a born schismatic.
Zarqawi moved to Iraq in the aftermath of the US invasion. It was he who masterminded the truck-bomb attack in Baghdad in 2003 that killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the chief UN representative in the country, and 21 others. In this and other spectacular killings, the authors note, Zarqawi had help from Iraq’s dethroned Baath¬ist leaders.
The central role Baathists have played in the rise of Islamic State is seen as a paradox and a potential source of weakness. How long, after all, can secularists and millenarians make common cause? The answer seems to be: longer than we think. Weiss and Hassan point out that in his last years Saddam Hussein organised an Islamic Faith campaign designed to give religious legitimacy to his secular totalitarianism and create a new category of Salafist-Baathists. Zarqawi was a point of contact between the groups, for his long career of crime had introduced him to a highly differentiated violent underworld. Most fundamentally, Zarqawi was motivated by the same hatred of Shi’ism that had moved Iraq’s Sunnis to rise up in rebellion against the Shi’ite government installed by the US. In a letter Zarqawi wrote to bin Laden in 2004, he described Shi’ism — not the West, not secularism — as “the looming danger and the true challenge”. His goal was to provoke a civil war by hitting Shi’ites and their holy places. Single-minded sectarianism is the common coin of jihadists and Baathists.
In 2004, Zarqawi finally made bayat to bin Laden and renamed his organisation al-Qa’ida in Iraq. In 2006, four AQI operatives blew up the al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, triggering the civil war Zarqawi sought. Four months later, he was killed by a US airstrike. But AQI had momentum and the organisation was earning as much as $US200 million a year in criminal enterprises that ranged from kidnapping to oil smuggling. Its new leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, renamed the group the Islamic State of Iraq, prefiguring the goal of the caliphate, and embarked on a ferocious campaign of car bombs to kill Shi’ites and Sunni rivals.
Jihadist atrocities finally triggered the Sunni backlash known as the Awakening. This was the moment when Islamic State could have been destroyed. The 2007 surge brought an interval of peace and hopes for a non-sectarian Iraq. But Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shi’ite triumphalist with the same zero-sum world view as his Sunni enemies, turned on the “Sons of Iraq” who had helped the US defeat the terrorists. Maliki, in effect, proved that what the Sunni extremists had been saying about Iraq’s Shi’ite rulers was true.
Could anything have been done to prevent this slide back into sectarian violence? Weiss and Hassan argue that the Bush and Obama administrations, equally eager to see the last of Iraq, disengaged politically as well as militarily, abandoning the Sunni tribes to Maliki’s Shi’ite mercies. At the very least, neither foresaw the maelstrom that Iraq would become.
And that was all the space the Islamic State jihadists needed. Masri was killed in a US-led raid in April 2010, and Islamic State regrouped under Baghdadi. He formed additional alliances with Baathist leaders while adding to Islamic State’s ranks through deftly executed attacks on prisons in Iraq holding veteran jihadists.
Maliki was Islamic State’s first gift; the next was Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose savage campaign to liquidate what began as a peaceful uprising turned Syria into a charnel house. Islamic State infiltrated a small group across the border and this cadre, in turn, founded Jabhat al-Nusra, also known as al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qa’ida. Al-Nusra became part of the Syrian rebellion, while Islamic State preferred to ignore Assad and focus on establishing a foothold in Syria. The two groups split, and a civil war broke out among Syrian insurgents. Islamic State won that war, absorbing many of al-Nusra’s foot soldiers and terrorising any non-extremist rebels. Islamic State again emerged stronger.
Since Islamic State is not a flourishing hi-tech start-up but a band of apocalyptic murderers, it is very much to the point to ask who, or what, should be blamed for its development. This is a bitterly contested question. If we understand Islamic State essentially as an extremist religious organisation, then the problem presumably lies with Islam itself and must be addressed by the Islamic world.
I was recently on a talk show with Asra Nomani, an Indian-American journalist and self-described Muslim feminist and reformer. She brandished a copy of the hadiths— the teachings of Mohammed — and observed that many of the most horrible acts committed by Islamic State, including slavery and the killing of apostates, enjoyed religious sanction.
This is also the theme of a much-discussed recent essay in The Atlantic in which journalist Graeme Wood observes that Islamic State, far from being “un-Islamic”, as Muslim scholars and Obama insist, relies for its doctrine on ¬“coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam”.
This is self-evidently true. Weiss and Hassan point out that Baghdadi holds a doctorate from the University of Islamic Sciences in Iraq. Like Zarqawi before him, he takes the doctrine of takfir — of treating non-Sunni and non-Salafist Muslims as apostates deserving death — to an extreme.
But takfir is by no means obscure or rare in the Islamic world: it is embedded, for example, in the Wahhabism that is the official faith of Saudi Arabia. Millions of peace-loving Egyptians hold to the Salafist view that the words of the prophet constitute the sole guide to religious truth. Islamic State is not Islam but it is certainly Islamic. This is not an observation about ancient scripture but about current practice. Extremist Christians, Jews or Hindus might point to similar justifying passages in their own sacred texts, but they would not gain much traction because far fewer of their co-religionists would sympathise with their views.
So, yes, Islamic State is a failing of Islam. So long as Saudi Arabia is known, practises and promulgates a rigid, intolerant brand of the faith, it will remain almost impossible to refute the terrorists’ claim that their brand of Islam is the true faith.
Islamic State, however, presents other kinds of problems, too. Many of the European “lone wolves” who carry out attacks at home in the name of Islamic State or al-Qa’ida are, like the young Zarqawi, bored and alienated young men who find in Islam a rationale for their violence. These are the recruits who thrill to the pornographic violence of Islamic State’s online presence.
A combustible mix of social marginalisation and extremist ideology drives these freelance killers. In the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls vowed to crack down on extremism and to put an end to the “ethnic apartheid” within which many of France’s Muslims are raised. Both sides of that equation seem necessary, though it will prove difficult, if not impossible, to contrive the right mix of hard and soft tactics.
But Islamic State is also a problem in geopolitics. The war in Iraq crystallised for many Muslims the longstanding sense of insult that came of Western incursions into the Middle East. Islamic State was born in Iraq. Should we say, then, that it constitutes a particularly virulent response to the US invasion? That is, would a less bellicose American policy have deprived Islamic State of a reason for being? Many on the Left make this argument. Neither of the two books discussed so far even addresses it, chiefly because, unlike al-Qa’ida, Islamic State seems only passingly interested in the iniquities of the West. One of the distinguishing features of the group’s obsessive Takfiri culture is a relentless focus on the “near enemy” of Islamic regimes rather than the “far” ones of the Western democracies. Weiss and Hassan argue that Zarqawi and his allies gave little thought to fighting the Americans until the Bush administration installed a Shi’ite government in Baghdad. Of course, if George W. Bush’s fatal mistake was not invading Iraq but opening the Pandora’s box of sectarianism, that’s still a very big mistake.
In The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution, a quickie book rushed into print to ride the wave of Islamic State anxiety (entire sentences are repeated in several different chapters), Patrick Cockburn makes a different case for American responsibility. In the aftermath of 9/11, he argues, the US should have confronted Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the true sponsors of Islamist extremism. Instead, those countries became allies in the war on terror.
This may well be true, though Cockburn, a Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper, does not say what the US could have done to change Saudi or Pakistani behaviour. He also writes that in recent years the US and its Gulf allies “created the conditions for the rise of ISIS”. His reasoning is that those states, along with Turkey, “kept the war going in Syria” by supporting the rebels long after it had become clear that Assad could not be dislodged. In that sectarian cauldron, Cockburn argues, Islamic State was made.
Just as many people now argue Bush should have left Saddam in place, Cockburn is insisting Obama and his allies should have let Assad crush the rebels. To be fair, the US President pretty much did just that. But the greater flaw in this argument — even leaving aside the moral horror of permitting Assad to barrel-bomb his own citizens into oblivion — is that until recently Assad treated Islamic State as a convenient foil rather than a threat. Assad needed a rampant Islamic State to make his case that he was fighting foreign terrorists rather than homegrown activists. The Obama administration’s hesitant policy on Syria made the situation worse by sending mixed mes¬sages about whether Assad was the enemy or a potential ally against the extremists. But it was Assad who created the conditions for the rise of Islamic State.
Cockburn is, however, absolutely right when he says the coalition the US has assembled to fight Islamic State is so rife with conflicting ambitions that it may not be able to hold together. For Saudi Arabia and some of its Gulf partners, the campaign in Iraq and Syria is only one episode in a vast struggle between Sunni and Shi’ite. This immense campaign operates at the level of sect and of state, with Saudi Arabia and Iran the leading combatants. The two nations are fighting a series of proxy wars, as the US and the Soviet Union once did — but in a more combustible environment.
This is a catastrophe of which we have seen only the early stages. The US has no influence with Iran and is watching helplessly as Iranian forces take a leading role in the fight against Islamic State in Iraq. I doubt any American leader could persuade King Salman bin Abdulaziz, the new Saudi leader, to stop viewing the Middle East as a cockpit for sectarian struggle. Certainly Obama can’t.
Each of these books has relatively little to say about what we may do about Islamic State, perhaps because so few avenues look promising. Stern and Berger are deeply sceptical of the current US-led military campaign and propose a policy of “containment and constriction, rather than simply smashing Islamic State into ever more virulent bits”. They suggest a counter-messaging campaign may succeed in disrupting and discrediting Islamic State’s sophisticated marketing tactics. On the other hand, they put no store in “nation-building exercises such as foreign aid, jobs programs, education initiatives and democratic reforms”.
Really? This seems much too dismissive. Islamic State is not just a religious phenomenon or a pawn in a sectarian battle but also a symptom of a political and even civilisational bankruptcy. Arab regimes have never discovered, and only rarely sought, a foundation of popular legitimacy. The fury and despair of ordinary citizens finally exploded into the Arab Spring. Both the failure of those regimes and of the popular response to them have helped fuel a whole range of extremist responses, including Islamic State.
In a recent essay for Politico, The Barbarian Within Our Gates, Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief for the Al Arabiya News channel, compared Islamic State with “the vermin that take over a ruined city”. The problem is the ruined city — the collapse of an old political and cultural order. It may be vain to think outsiders can do anything to help put that order back together, much less make it more legitimate in the eyes of its own people; but it’s hard to imagine Islamic extremism losing its allure without there being more jobs, education and democracy in the Middle East.
Islamic State may be the kind of monster that cannot be killed but rather must be allowed to destroy itself. At some point even an agile and media-savvy death cult will burn itself out or eat itself up. Or Islamic State may be undone by its ambition to create rather than to kill. Al-Qa’ida provides vindication to its followers only in eschatological time — after death or at some far-off rapture when the “hidden imam” returns. It is thus unfalsifiable.
Not so Islamic State, and bad governance could undermine its claims to divine legitimacy. This process may have already begun: a recent news story in The Washington Post observed that water in Mosul had become undrinkable owing to a shortage of chlorine, while in Raqqa “water and electricity are available for no more than three or four hours a day, garbage piles up uncollected, and the city’s poor scavenge for scraps”. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that several Islamic State officials had fled with thousands of dollars in cash, while Syrian jihadists had begun to whine that foreign fighters were getting cushier accommodations and larger salaries. The underlying premise of a policy of containment and constriction is that Islamic State will collapse of its own contradictions.
Containment requires patience, and patience is hard to muster in the face of persistent savagery. We will need to remind ourselves that Islamic State is not Nazism or Soviet communism. It is terrifying, but it does not threaten our civilisation. Stern and Berger offer an admonition that we should keep in our wallet and pull out whenever the anxiety level gets too high: “You are significantly more likely to die in a car accident, especially if you fail to wear a seat belt, than to be attacked by ISIS. Wear a seat belt.”
James Traub is a foreign policy journalist and author. He writes a weekly column for ForeignPolicy.com.
Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/islamic-states-extremist-views-under-scrutiny/story-fn9n8gph-1227279225687
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