The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  Following the establishment of this state, the third stage would be to “extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq,” followed by the fourth stage, which “may coincide with what came before: the clash with Israel, because Israel was established only to challenge any new Islamic entity.”

  Zawahiri wrote in an extremely deferential manner to Zarqawi, repeatedly assuring the Iraq commander that his analysis was not “infallible.” Nonetheless, he did not hesitate to give him direction, emphasizing that “the mujahedeen must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq, and then lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal.” If they did that, “we will return to having the secularists and traitors holding sway over us. Instead, their ongoing mission is to establish an Islamic state, and defend it, and for every generation to hand over the banner to the one after it until the Hour of Resurrection.”

  Zawahiri summed up the “two short-term goals” as “removing the Americans and establishing an Islamic amirate in Iraq, or a caliphate if possible.” Attaining them, he wrote, would ensure possession of “the strongest weapon which the mujahedeen enjoy–after the help and granting of success by God,” which was “popular support from the Muslim masses in Iraq, and the surrounding Muslim countries.”

  He Who Hesitates Is Lost

  But al-Qaeda hesitated to declare a caliphate for fear that the Americans would nip it in the bud.

  As a letter apparently from Osama bin Laden, found in the trove of documents at the Abbottabad compound and declassified in May 2015, explained,

  We should stress on the importance of timing in establishing the Islamic State. We should be aware that planning for the establishment of the state begins with exhausting the main influential power that enforced the siege on the Hamas government, and that overthrew the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan and Iraq despite the fact this power was depleted. We should keep in mind that this main power still has the capacity to lay siege on any Islamic State, and that such a siege might force the people to overthrow their duly elected governments. We have to continue with exhausting and depleting them till they become so weak that they can’t overthrow any State that we establish. That will be the time to commence with forming the Islamic state.

  Bin Laden saw the restoration of the caliphate as the ultimate goal of al-Qaeda’s activities: “the result that we deployed for” was “to reinstate the wise Caliphate and eliminate the disgrace and humiliation that our nation is suffering from.” But he argued against “insisting on the formation of an Islamic State at the time being”—and instead wanted his followers “to work on breaking the power of our main enemy by attacking the American embassies in the African countries, such as Sierra Leone, Togo, and mainly to attack the American oil companies” first.38

  In the event, bin Laden’s appraisal of the risks of declaring a caliphate appears to have been overcautious. (Perhaps, after America’s strong initial response to the September 11 attacks, he was in once-burned-twice-shy mode.) So far, the Islamic State has survived and thriven. America may “still ha[ve] the capacity to lay siege on any Islamic State,” but we don’t seem to have the political will—or, perhaps, the necessary understanding of the threat—to do so effectively.

  Al-Qaeda Still Hearts ISIS

  When the Islamic State did boldly go where Osama bin Laden was afraid to, declaring the caliphate on June 29, 2014, at least some members of bin Laden’s organization were apparently so heartened that they were ready to paper over the rift between al-Qaeda and ISIS. In August 2014, just six months after al-Qaeda’s declaration that it had no organizational relationship with ISIS, “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP), al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, declared its “solidarity” with the Islamic State: “We announce solidarity with our Muslim brothers in Iraq against the crusade. Their blood and injuries are ours and we will surely support them. We assert to the Islamic Nation [that is, to all Muslims worldwide] that we stand by the side of our Muslim brothers in Iraq against the American and Iranian conspiracy and their agents of the apostate Gulf rulers.”39

  But then the AQAP leadership apparently had second thoughts. Just a couple of months later, in November 2014, Harith bin Ghazi al-Nadhari, a Muslim cleric affiliated with the al-Qaeda branch in Yemen, denounced the Islamic State for claiming Yemen as part of its new caliphate. “We did not want to talk about the current dispute and the sedition in Syria,” said al-Nadhari, “however, our brothers in the Islamic State . . . surprised us with several steps, including their announcement of the caliphate [and] they announced the expansion of the caliphate in a number of countries which they have no governance, and considered them to be provinces that belonged to them.”40

  Al-Nadhari asserted that “the announcement of the caliphate for all Muslims by our brothers in the Islamic State did not meet the required conditions.” Like Adam Gadahn (or whoever the author really was) in the twenty-one-page letter found in the Abbottabad compound, he seemed to be concerned about the particularly bloodthirsty tactics ISIS was becoming known for. He complained that the Islamic State was “going too far in interpretations in terms of spilling inviolable blood under the excuse of expanding and spreading the power of the Islamic State.”41

  And the next month, Nasr bin Ali al-Ansi, a senior AQAP commander, criticized the Islamic State’s practice of filming its beheadings: “Filming and promoting it among people in the name of Islam and Jihad is a big mistake and not acceptable whatever the justifications are. This is very barbaric. Sheik Osama bin Laden used to say anyone with sound instincts cannot stand watching scenes of killings.”42

  However, at the same time that he denounced the Islamic State’s beheadings, al-Ansi also declared that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula still supported the Islamic State’s “jihad against crusaders.”43

  The new caliphate was bloody and brutal—like its antecedents going back to the beginning of Islamic history.

  The Assassins

  Though the Obama administration, the media, and Muslim spokesmen in the West often suggest that ISIS is not authentically Muslim, the history of Islam abounds with similar groups that have spread terror with their ruthless brutality and their rigorist fidelity to the cruelest tenets of Islamic law. The Islamic State may have begun in the aftermath of the U.S. defeat of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, but its antecedents in Islamic tradition go back much farther than that. One Muslim group that was almost as notorious (and as hated and feared) as ISIS is today was a Shi’ite Muslim sect, the Nizari Ismailis of the Middle Ages—popularly known as the Assassins.

  The Assassins flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in territory now in Iran and Syria. By their activities—particularly the planned murders of many of their opponents—they gave the English language its word for one who commits a planned and deliberate murder, especially a public killing for political or ideological reasons.

  The word Assassin is derived from Hashashin, “hashish smokers,” a name given to the group by its opponents on the basis of stories about their leader, a mysterious figure known as the Old Man of the Mountain, and his novel method for recruiting new members. The fullest account comes from Marco Polo’s Travels:

  Mulehet is a country in which the Old Man of the Mountain dwelt in former days; and the name means “Place of the Aram.” I will tell you his whole history as related by Messer Marco Polo, who heard it from several natives of that region.

  The Old Man was called in their language ALOADIN. He had caused a certain valley between two mountains to be enclosed, and had turned it into a garden, the largest and most beautiful that ever was seen, filled with every variety of fruit. In it were erected pavilions and palaces the most elegant that can be imagined, all covered with gilding and exquisite painting. And there were runnels too, flowing freely with wine and milk and honey and water; and numbers of ladies and of the most beautiful damsels in the world, who could play on all manner of instruments, and sung most sweetly, and danced in a manner that it was charming
to behold. For the Old Man desired to make his people believe that this was actually Paradise. So he had fashioned it after the description that Mahommet gave of his Paradise, to wit, that it should be a beautiful garden running with conduits of wine and milk and honey and water, and full of lovely women for the delectation of all its inmates. And sure enough the Saracens of those parts believed that it was Paradise!

  Now no man was allowed to enter the Garden save those whom he intended to be his ASHISHIN. There was a Fortress at the entrance to the Garden, strong enough to resist all the world, and there was no other way to get in. He kept at his Court a number of the youths of the country, from 12 to 20 years of age, such as had a taste for soldiering, and to these he used to tell tales about Paradise, just as Mahommet had been wont to do, and they believed in him just as the Saracens believe in Mahommet. Then he would introduce them into his garden, some four, or six, or ten at a time, having first made them drink a certain potion which cast them into a deep sleep, and then causing them to be lifted and carried in. So when they awoke, they found themselves in the Garden.44

  According to the legend that surrounded the Assassins, the “potion” that made these young men susceptible to the suggestion that they had visited Paradise was hashish.45 The Old Man would get his potential recruits high on the drug—an experience for which they had no cultural referent in those pre–Sgt. Pepper days—and then introduce them to his gardens, which, as Marco Polo related, had been scrupulously designed to correspond to the Qur’an’s descriptions of Paradise—fruits, women, and all:

  Indeed, you [disbelievers] will be tasters of the painful punishment,

  And you will not be recompensed except for what you used to do—

  But not the chosen servants of Allah.

  Those will have a provision determined—

  Fruits; and they will be honored

  In gardens of pleasure

  On thrones facing one another.

  There will be circulated among them a cup from a flowing spring,

  White and delicious to the drinkers;

  No bad effect is there in it, nor from it will they be intoxicated.

  And with them will be women limiting [their] glances, with large eyes,

  As if they were eggs, well-protected. (37:38–49)

  The Old Man of the Mountain, according to Marco Polo’s account, used his young recruits’ experience of Paradise to manipulate them into doing his murderous bidding:

  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

  STILL CHASING THE SAME CARROT

  Wissam Haddad, the former head of the al-Risalah Islamic Centre in Bankstown, Australia, and a supporter of the Islamic State, was asked in December 2014 what he thought about four Muslim brothers from Australia who had gone to Syria to join the Islamic State. Haddad explained: “There is something that Allah is offering more than any person or country can offer and that’s paradise. One of the scholars said how can you fight a people who look down the barrel of a gun and see paradise. It’s what we are all after, eternal bliss, eternal paradise, which is a lot better than the world we live in.”47

  Abu Mariam, a Muslim from Toulouse, France, who also left his home to travel to Syria and join the Islamic State, echoed Haddad’s sentiments: “I am but a contribution to the conquest of Islam, and I also look forward to reach[ing] paradise via jihad for the cause of Allah. We [Muslims] are all promised paradise because we listened to the words of Allah. Islam is a really great religion. It includes all aspects of life. It gives meaning to human life.” His voice cracked as he continued: “I have devoted my entire life to jihad . . . I am only looking up to paradise; is there anything better than this?”48

  The Old Man of the Mountain would have been pleased.

  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.