Al-Baghdadi then called on Muslims to “rush” to the Islamic State, because “it is your state. Rush, because Syria is not for the Syrians, and Iraq is not for the Iraqis. The earth is Allah’s. ‘Indeed, the earth belongs to Allah. He causes to inherit it whom He wills of His servants. And the [best] outcome is for the righteous’ [Al-A’raf: 128]. The State is a state for all Muslims. The land is for the Muslims, all the Muslims. O Muslims everywhere, whoever is capable of performing hijrah (emigration) to the Islamic State, then let him do so, because hijrah to the land of Islam is obligatory.”31
The caliph especially urged professionals to heed this call:
We make a special call to the scholars, fuqaha’ (experts in Islamic jurisprudence), and callers, especially the judges, as well as people with military, administrative, and service expertise, and medical doctors and engineers of all different specializations and fields.32
The warriors of jihad should not worry about the formidable military might of the infidels, for success would come through obedience to Allah, not by means of weapons:
O soldiers of the Islamic State, do not be awestruck by the great numbers of your enemy, for Allah is with you. I do not fear for you the numbers of your opponents, nor do I fear your neediness and poverty, for Allah (the Exalted) has promised your Prophet (peace be upon him) that you will not be wiped out by famine, and your enemy will not himself conquer you and violate your land. Allah placed your provision under the shades of your spears. Rather, I fear for you your own sins. Accept each other and do not dispute. Come together and do not argue. Fear Allah in private and public, openly and secretly. Stay away from sins. Expel from your ranks those who openly commit sin. Be wary of pride, haughtiness, and arrogance. Do not become proud on account of gaining some victories. Humble yourselves before Allah. Do not be arrogant towards Allah’s slaves. Do not underestimate your enemy regardless of how much strength you gain and how much your numbers grow.33
He called upon them also to “persevere in reciting the Quran with comprehension of its meanings and practice of its teachings. This is my advice to you. If you hold to it, you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills.”34
It would be an understatement to say that the new caliph’s inaugural speech was an essentially Islamic call. It was nothing else but Islamic—as was the Islamic State’s statement declaring the caliphate. The fact that both statements contained threats of the imminent conquest of non-Muslim lands only pointed up the dangers of the willful ignorance of Western authorities in insisting that the Islamic State was not Islamic: they were depriving themselves of the only means by which the outlook, motives, and goals of the Islamic State could be properly understood.
The Caliph’s Wristwatch—and the West’s Myopia
Instead of paying attention to what the caliph said and its implications, the Western media opted to focus on his wristwatch. Oliver Duggan wrote in the Telegraph, “His choice of accessory, which is believed to be either a Rolex, Sekonda or £3,500 Omega seamaster, has been highlighted as jarring with the content of his controversial speech.”35 The New York Post quoted a Muslim calling the caliph a hypocrite: “Why does the ‘Caliph’ wear a fancy watch if the possessions of this life ultimately mean nothing?”36 The UK’s Daily Mail chortled: “Terror warlord al-Baghdadi denounces the West—but is spotted wearing ‘£3,500 James Bond wristwatch.’”37 “‘Follow my every word and you too will have a Rolex’; Islamic State leader wears luxury watch to first-ever public address,” laughed Twitchy.38 “ISIS Leader Mocked for Wearing Expensive Wristwatch in First Public Appearance,” said Daniel Politi in Slate.39
Apparently journalists didn’t know about Islam’s doctrines regarding plunder and the spoils of war. By wearing his expensive watch, the caliph was likely signaling to Muslims worldwide that if they joined his caliphate, they, too, would share in the spoils of war and be able to plunder the infidels of their expensive goods. In this, they would be following in Muhammad’s example. But Western reporters and pundits persist in their ignorant assumption that Islam and its Prophet must somehow have the exact same attitude towards wealth as Christians and their Savior—after all, Islam and Christianity are both “religion.”
ACTUALLY, MUHAMMAD IS NOT MUCH LIKE JESUS
The New Testament Gospel according to Mark, considered by most scholars the first Gospel to be written, quotes Jesus as saying: “One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. . . . How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! . . . It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
Ibn Ishaq, the first biographer of Muhammad, quotes the prophet of Islam as saying: “Allah made booty lawful and good. He used it to incite the Muslims to unity of purpose. So enjoy what you have captured.”40 Ibn Ishaq recounts of the early Muslims: “Allah saw what was in their hearts [what they coveted] so he rewarded them with victory and with as much spoil as they could take. Allah promised that they would soon capture a great deal of booty.”41 And: “Allah taught them how to divide the spoil. He made it lawful and said, ‘A fifth of the booty belongs to the Apostle (Mohammed),’” which is a reference to the Qur’anic stipulation that Muhammad gets a fifth of what is captured.42
The Caliphates That Nobody Noticed
Lending weight to the Islamic State’s case to be the true caliphate that can rightfully demand the allegiance of the entire Muslim community worldwide was the fact that other Muslim groups in the modern world have tried and failed to do what the Islamic State has done.
There have been other attempts to restore the caliphate.
The Taliban
On April 4, 1996, members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Afghan city of Kandahar proclaimed Taliban leader Mullah Omar the Emir ul-Momineen (Commander of the Believers)—one of the earliest titles of the caliph. Repairing to the Shrine of the Cloak, which houses what is said to be a cloak that Muhammad himself wore, Omar asked the keeper of the shrine to allow him to borrow the relic. Then he went to a mosque in the city, climbed onto its roof, and wrapped himself repeatedly in Muhammad’s cloak while the ecstatic crowd repeatedly acclaimed him as the Emir ul-Momineen—the leader of Afghanistan, but not just of Afghanistan—of all the Muslims worldwide, the caliph.43
In May 2002, a U.S. official explained that al-Qaeda and the Taliban planned first to “take over the whole country” of Afghanistan, and then “expand the caliphate.”44 The American invasion of Afghanistan and toppling of the Taliban from power, however, quashed any hope that Omar and his followers might have had to get Muslims outside Afghanistan to accept his claim to be the caliph. Only one group did: the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat in Algeria. It wrote to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq in May 2006, praising his jihad against the foes of Islam, seeking his help in Algeria, and declaring that Mullah Omar was the “caliph of the Muslims.”45
This pledge was likely motivated by the Algerian jihadis’ need for help, and it represented the high-water mark of Mullah Omar’s pretensions to be the caliph—aside from the heady moments in Kandahar when he had wrapped himself in the alleged cloak of his beloved prophet.
The Muslim Brotherhood
When the Islamic State declared its caliphate, it is likely that no one was more shocked, dismayed, and outraged than the members and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. That Egypt-based international Islamic organization had been founded in 1928 with the primary goal of restoring the caliphate, and it had had its best-ever chance to do so in 2012, when its Freedom and Justice Party came to power in Egypt. But only a year later, the Egyptian military removed the Freedom and Justice Party from power after a popular uprising and then moved swiftly to cripple the Brotherhood and prevent it from coming to power in Egypt again for the foreseeable future.
And then—only a few months after the Brotherhood had been driven from power—the upstart jih
adis of ISIS came out of nowhere and declared their caliphate in Iraq and Syria, stealing not only al-Qaeda’s thunder but the Brotherhood’s as well.
When the imam and teacher Hasan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, he was trying to reverse what he termed “a wave of dissolution which undermined all firm beliefs,” a wave that he claimed was “engulfing Egypt in the name of intellectual emancipation. This trend attacked the morals, deeds and virtues under the pretext of personal freedom. Nothing could stand against this powerful and tyrannical stream of disbelief and permissiveness that was sweeping our country.”
Al-Banna was particularly incensed by the abolition of the caliphate four years earlier; he denounced the new secular Turkish government for separating “the state from religion in a country which was until recently the site of the Commander of the Faithful.” According to the Brotherhood’s founder, the abolition of the caliphate and the establishment of secular Turkey were manifestations of a “Western invasion which was armed and equipped with all [the] destructive influences of money, wealth, prestige, ostentation, power and means of propaganda.”46
To combat this attack, Muslims worldwide needed an organization of their own:
Islam does not recognize geographical boundaries, nor does it acknowledge racial and blood differences, considering all Muslims as one Umma. The Muslim Brethren consider this unity as holy and believe in this union, striving for the joint action of all Muslims and the strengthening of the brotherhood of Islam, declaring that every inch of land inhabited by Muslims is their fatherland . . . The Muslim Brethren do not oppose every one’s working for one’s own fatherland. They believe that the caliphate is a symbol of Islamic Union and an indication of the bonds between the nations of Islam. They see the caliphate and its re-establishment as a top priority, subsequently; an association of Muslims people should be set up, which would elect the imam.47
In other words, the association that would elect the imam (that is, the caliph) was supposed to be the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to Brynjar Lia, a historian of the Brotherhood: “Quoting the Qur’anic verse ‘And fight them till sedition is no more, and the faith is God’s’ [Sura 2:193], the Muslim Brothers urged their fellow Muslims to restore the bygone greatness of Islam and to re-establish an Islamic empire. Sometimes they even called for the restoration of ‘former Islamic colonies’ in Andalus (Spain), southern Italy, Sicily, the Balkans and the Mediterranean islands.”48
Al-Banna declared, “Islam is faith and worship, a country and a citizenship, a religion and a state. It is spirituality and hard work. It is a Qur’an and a sword.”49 In 1947, he wrote to King Faruq of Egypt and to “the kings, princes, and rulers of the various countries of the Islamic world,” demanding, among other things, “a strengthening of the bonds between all Islamic countries, especially the Arab countries, to pave the way for practical and serious consideration of the matter of the departed Caliphate.”50
Al-Banna proclaimed the Brotherhood’s goal to recapture, under the banner of the caliph, all the lands that had once belonged to Islam, and in the traditional Muslim view, thus belonged by right to the Muslims forever:
We want the Islamic flag to be hoisted once again on high, fluttering in the wind, in all those lands that have had the good fortune to harbor Islam for a certain period of time and where the muzzein’s call sounded in the takbirs and the tahlis. Then fate decreed that the light of Islam be extinguished in these lands that returned to unbelief. Thus Andalusia, Sicily, the Balkans, the Italian coast, as well as the islands of the Mediterranean, are all of them Muslim Mediterranean colonies and they must return to the Islamic fold. The Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea must once again become Muslim seas, as they once were, even if Mussolini has usurped the right to rebuild the Roman Empire. This so-called empire of ancient times was founded on cupidity and lust. It is thus our duty to rebuild the Islamic Empire, that was founded on justice and equality and that spread the light of the true way among the people.51
The caliphate wouldn’t content itself with just recapturing those lands, either. Historian Charles Wendell, who translated some of al-Banna’s pivotal works into English, noted that “it seems beyond dispute” that al-Banna “envisioned as his final goal a return to the world-state of the Four Orthodox Caliphs . . . and, this once accomplished, an aggressive march forward to conquer the rest of the earth for God and His Sacred Law.”52
The hope in 2012 was clear: had the Muslim Brotherhood retained and consolidated its power in Egypt, and (with American help) toppled Assad in Syria and Gaddafi in Libya, it could have established a caliphate stretching from Tunisia across North Africa and into Syria, which once declared would have attracted other Sunni Muslims, and become a significant power. Instead, the Brotherhood was toppled and shattered—and the upstarts in Mosul and Raqqa seized their own opportunity instead.
Jihadis Worldwide Pledge Allegiance to the New Caliphate
The names “ISIS” and “ISIL,” while favored of the Western media and the Obama administration, are really misnomers—not just because the Islamic State has dropped the “in Iraq and the Levant” part of its name, but also because the Islamic State is no longer just in Iraq and Syria. It now commands the allegiance of jihad groups the world over. Here again we see the appeal of the concept of the caliphate; while al-Qaeda had (and has) numerous affiliates and allied groups around the world, these affiliations were often merely a matter of two groups making a common cause. But with the Islamic State it is a different story: the caliph Ibrahim, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claims to be the earthly leader of all Muslims, and many jihad groups have accepted this claim, pledging their allegiance—making “bayat”—to him or declaring their support for the Islamic State’s jihad.
Note that, as we have already seen, while al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula proclaimed its “solidarity” with the Islamic State in August 2014, in November and December, however, several leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula denounced the Islamic State’s beheading videos—and the tensions between the two groups have increased since then. Terror analyst Saeed Al-Jamhi has explained: “There are disagreements within AQAP, as one group believes that ISIL is not affiliated with the global leadership of Al-Qaeda, while the other one, which is led by Jalal Baleedi, supports what ISIL is doing. This divides Al-Qaeda in Yemen and probably its role will fade while ISIL’s role will increase.”53 But also note that this rift did not keep AQAP-trained Chérif and Saïd Kouachi and ISIS-pledged Amedy Coulibaly from carrying out coordinated terror attacks at the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery in France in January 2015.
Groups in the Western Sahara, Sudan, Tunisia and even farther afield offered help to the Islamic State.54 Especially noteworthy was the “bayat” of Boko Haram, a notoriously bloodthirsty jihad group that had aroused international disgust with its brutality, particularly toward Nigerian Christians, and its kidnapping and enslavement of schoolgirls in an operation that foreshadowed the Islamic State’s foray into the kidnapping and sexual enslavement of non-Muslim women. Boko Haram was an established group with shadowy sources of wealth and no tangible earthly benefit to be gained by allying itself with the Islamic State and pledging its allegiance to the caliph Ibrahim. Nevertheless in April 2015, it renamed itself the Islamic State in West Africa.56
Its only possible motive was a theological imperative. The same could be said of Abu Sayyaf, a jihad group that had won renown and inspired fear in the Philippines for years before it pledged its fealty to the Islamic State in September 2014, and of the bloodthirsty Pakistani Taliban, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.57
The Pakistani Taliban, the Shura Council of the Youth of Islam in Libya, the Mujahedeen Shura Council in the Environs of Jerusalem, and others among these groups had previously been aligned with al-Qaeda, but when the Islamic State declared its caliphate, they backed the strong horse, and shifted their allegiance.
Chapter Seven
THE CALIPHATE’S BLOODY HISTORY
The caliphate,
for all its importance in Islam, was not constructed by Muhammad, or (by most accounts) attributed to Allah in the Qur’an—at least in any clear or explicit way. Rather it was born out of necessity.
Did you know?
•The rules of dhimmitude are meant to keep Christians subordinate to Muslims under Islamic rule
•Despite modern myths about the “tolerance” of Muslims’ rule, Christians at the time referred to them as “oppressors”
•Christians were so persecuted in the Ottoman Empire that some welcomed their sons’ forcible conversion to Islam and impressment into the caliph’s special forces
According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad had just completed unifying Arabia and was beginning to move against the Byzantine Empire in Syria and Palestine when his final illness struck. Such severe pain came upon him that he feared he had been poisoned, as he had been several years earlier after his massacre of the Jews at the oasis of Khaybar in Arabia. He called out to his youngest and favorite wife: “O Aisha! I still feel the pain caused by the food I ate at Khaibar, and at this time, I feel as if my aorta is being cut from that poison.”1
On his deathbed, Muhammad is said to have uttered the incandescent phrase: “I have been made victorious with terror.”2 He also gave the order to “turn Al-Mushrikun (polytheists, pagans, idolaters, and disbelievers in the Oneness of Allah and in His Messenger Muhammad) out of the Arabian Peninsula.”3
He is not recorded as saying anything, however, about who should succeed him as the political, spiritual, and military leader of the Muslims. He had no sons who had survived to adulthood; Aisha said that if he had chosen a successor, it would have been Abu Bakr, one of his most devoted followers.4 However, other Muslims insisted that Muhammad had actually chosen one of his earliest followers, his son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib, to succeed him.
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