The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  IF YOU BELIEVE THAT, I HAVE SOME SWAMPLAND IN FLORIDA . . .

  Abu Bakr had expressed the unshakeable fervor of his devotion to Muhammad when a skeptic doubted Muhammad’s story about traveling to Jerusalem and then to Paradise on a winged white horse with a human head: “If he says so then it is true. And what is so surprising in that? He tells me that communications from God from heaven to earth come to him in an hour of a day or night and I believe him, and that is more extraordinary than that at which you boggle!”6

  Even traditions revered by Sunnis (as distinguished from Shi’ites, the party of Ali—shiat Ali, whence the word Shia) contain evidence for Muhammad’s choice of Ali. One hadith has Muhammad asking Ali, “Aren’t you satisfied with being unto me what Aaron was unto Moses?”5 This could signify that Ali was to be Muhammad’s successor (khalifa, caliph), for the Qur’an depicts Moses saying to Aaron, “Take my place among my people” (7:142).

  Aisha, however, haughtily dismissed Ali’s claim (for a variety of reasons the two of them had been at odds for years): “When did he appoint him by will? Verily, when he died he was resting against my chest (or said: in my lap) and he asked for a washbasin and then collapsed while in that state, and I could not even perceive that he had died, so when did he appoint him by will?”7 She quoted Muhammad as saying, “It is not befitting that a group, among whom is Abu Bakr, be led by other than him.”8 Ali was duly passed over for Abu Bakr, one of Muhammad’s most fanatical followers.

  The controversy over Ali continued. He was passed over for caliph twice more, when Muhammad’s companions Umar and then Uthman were chosen to succeed Abu Bakr. Finally, according to Islamic tradition, Ali got his chance in 656. Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali are considered the four “Khulafa Rashidun” or “Rightly Guided Caliphs,” and the period of their reigns (632–661) is known as the first and greatest golden age of Islam.

  It was a golden age awash with blood.

  Abu Bakr, the First Rightly Guided Caliph: The Wars of Apostasy

  Islamic tradition records that Abu Bakr’s reign as caliph was brief (only two years) but eventful. The first crisis he faced was the one of legitimacy: he wasn’t the charismatic prophet who had unified Arabia, and with that prophet dead, the umma was in danger of breaking apart. Prophets started arising all over Arabia and rejecting Abu Bakr’s authority: Aswad al-Ansi in Yemen; Talha ibn Khuwaylid of the Asad tribe; the prophetess Sajah of the Tamim tribe; and Musaylima of the Hanifa tribe.9 Other Arabic tribes simply preferred to govern themselves rather than be ruled from Medina. All these rebels declared that while they had pledged allegiance to Muhammad, that allegiance ended with his death, and it wasn’t transferable to any successor.

  Abu Bakr and the Muslims maintained that the rebellious Arabs had not just pledged allegiance to Muhammad as a person; they had entered Islam, and the penalty for leaving Islam was death, as per Muhammad’s dictum: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”10 Abu Bakr sent his best warrior, Khalid ibn al-Walid, to crush the most virulent rebellions, and three other commanders (one of whom being his rival, Ali ibn Ali Talib) to defeat the rest in what became known as the Wars of Apostasy (the “Ridda” Wars). The prophets were defeated and their followers forced back into Islam, and the other rebellious Arab tribes were likewise brought back into the fold.11

  Historians continue to argue, as they have for centuries, over whether the Wars of Apostasy were primarily religious or primarily political.12 In Islam, however, this is a distinction without a difference. The apostate Arabs refused to pay the compulsory alms (zakat) into the treasury, which could arguably be seen as a rebellion against the caliph as a political leader (though the requirement to pay zakat is also a religious duty—one of the five Pillars of Islam). But they also refused to pray the mandatory Islamic prayers. “Islam,” explains a modern-day proselytizing article, “is an all-embracing way of life. It extends over the entire spectrum of life, showing us how to conduct all human activities in a sound and wholesome manner.”13 As far as Abu Bakr and his supporters were concerned, to reject his authority was a political act, but it also amounted to the religious act of rejecting Islam—the two were not separable. Eulogizing Abu Bakr, Umar put it this way: “he successfully waged the apostasy wars, and thanks to him, Islam is now supreme in Arabia.”14

  NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

  After Muhammad’s death, Abu Bakr is said to have proclaimed, “Whoever worshipped Muhammad, then Muhammad is dead, but whoever worshipped Allah, then Allah is alive and shall never die.”15

  In the same way, as we have seen, the Islamic State today has declared that to reject its authority is to place oneself outside the fold of the Muslims.

  The Wars of Apostasy successfully concluded, Abu Bakr began to expand his domains, launching wars against both of the two great powers of the day, the Persian Empire and the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire. During his caliphate, the Arabs invaded Iraq and began the process of wresting it from the Persians. As Abu Bakr was dying in August 634, Khalid ibn al-Walid won a decisive battle against the Byzantines at Ajnadain in Syria. The Byzantines’ hold on their Syrian province was drastically weakened. Two years later, Khalid and his forces defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Yarmouk in Syria, further weakening the Christian empire and paving the way for more conquests.16

  Islamic tradition also credits Abu Bakr and his successor, Umar ibn al-Khattab, with beginning the process of collecting the various revelations of the Qur’an and establishing the definitive text for the Muslim holy book. During the Wars of Apostasy, according to Islamic tradition, many people who had memorized parts of the Qur’an were killed during a battle, and the Qur’an was in danger of being lost altogether.17 Umar realized what was at stake and urged Abu Bakr to act; Abu Bakr chose a Muslim named Zaid bin Thabit, who was said to be a hafiz—one who had memorized the whole Qur’an—to consult the people who had memorized parts of the Qur’an, collect the Qur’an’s revelations together, codify, and publish them (although if he had really been a hafiz, he wouldn’t have needed to do anything but sit down and write it all out himself from memory). Islamic tradition ultimately credits Uthman, the third caliph, with completing this work.18

  Umar ibn al-Khattab, the Second Rightly Guided Caliph: The Empire Expands

  In his final illness Abu Bakr chose Umar to succeed him, and the transition went smoothly.19 Umar’s ten-year caliphate was a time of energetic expansion, as his men completed the conquests of Persia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, and more.20 He oversaw the conquest and Islamization of a significant portion of the Byzantine Empire.

  Islamic tradition holds that the conquering Muslims offered the conquered people conversion to Islam, submission as inferiors under Islamic rule, or death—just as the Islamic State does today. In 636, when the Arabs took Basra in Iraq, Umar instructed his lieutenant Utbah bin Ghazwan to “summon the people to God; those who respond to your call, accept it from them, but those who refuse must pay the poll tax out of humiliation and lowliness. If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency. Fear God with regard to what you have been entrusted.”21

  Umar emphasized that the Muslims must be sure to collect the jizya tax from the subjugated peoples, as it was nothing less than the Muslims’ source of livelihood: “I advise you to fulfill Allah’s dhimma (financial obligation made with the dhimmi) as it is the dhimma of your Prophet and the source of the livelihood of your dependents.”22

  It is a myth commonly believed nowadays that the conquered people welcomed Umar’s armies as liberators, as their tax rates were lower than those of the Byzantines, and that the Muslims were generally less oppressive rulers. John Esposito, the Catholic apologist for Islam at Georgetown University, has said, “In many ways, local populations found Muslim rule more flexible and tolerant than that of Byzantium and Persia.”23 The online “MacroHistory and World Timeline” states flatly: “In Egypt, Constantinople’s Catholic authorities had persecuted, flogged, tortured and executed Monophysit
e Christians, and the Monophysites saw the Arabs as liberators. So too did Egypt’s peasants, who had felt oppressed by tyrannical, mostly Greek, landlords.”24

  This is, however, politically motivated modern-day mythmaking. The German professor Harald Suermann of the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies at Bonn University notes that the evidence of The Panegyric of the Three Holy Children of Babylon, a Christian homily dating from soon after the Arab conquest, clearly refutes this idea. Suermann points out “[T]he Panegyric calls the Muslims ‘oppressors’. This evidence suggests that the idea that the Copts received the Muslims as liberators is no longer tenable.”25 Parts of the seventh-century homily are, disturbingly, applicable to the conquests of the Islamic State more than thirteen hundred years after the sermon was written—where, for example, the text says that the conquerors “give themselves up to prostitution, massacre and lead into captivity the sons of men, saying: ‘We both fast and pray.’”26

  Other accounts from close to the time of these conquests cast the invaders in a decidedly negative light—perhaps understandably, since they were written by the defeated.

  John of Nikiou, a seventh-century Coptic Christian bishop, wrote in the 690s about what happened when Umar’s army had arrived in his native town some fifty years before:

  Then the Muslims arrived in Nikiou. There was not one single soldier to resist them. They seized the town and slaughtered everyone they met in the street and in the churches—men, women and children, sparing nobody. Then they went to other places, pillaged and killed all the inhabitants they found. . . . But let us now say no more, for it is impossible to describe the horrors the Muslims committed when they occupied the island of Nikiou . . .

  LIBERATORS, OR OCCUPATION FORCE?

  Umar himself is said to have asked rhetorically: “Do you think that these vast countries, Syria, Mesopotamia, Kufa, Basra, Misr [Egypt] do not have to be covered with troops who must be well paid?”27 Yet if local populations welcomed Muslim rule as more flexible and tolerant than that of Byzantium and Persia, why was there any need for troops?

  Umar’s commander, Amr ibn al-As, was extremely brutal:

  Amr oppressed Egypt. He sent its inhabitants to fight the inhabitants of the Pentapolis [Tripolitania] and, after gaining a victory, he did not allow them to stay there. He took considerable booty from this country and a large number of prisoners. . . . The Muslims returned to their country with booty and captives. The patriarch Cyrus felt deep grief at the calamities in Egypt, because Amr, who was of barbarian origin, showed no mercy in his treatment of the Egyptians and did not fulfill the covenants which had been agreed with him.

  Like the Islamic State jihadis when they entered Mosul in June of 2014, Amr’s men began to demand payment of the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims prescribed in the Qur’an:

  Amr’s position became stronger from day to day. He levied the tax that had been stipulated . . . But it is impossible to describe the lamentable position of the inhabitants of this town, who came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month, finding no one to help them because God had abandoned them and had delivered the Christians into the hands of their enemies.28

  When the Arabs conquered Armenia in 642—in scenes that may remind us of the Islamic State’s genocidal rampage through the Yazidi population of Northern Iraq in August 2014—they killed untold numbers of people and took captive many more: “The enemy’s army rushed in and butchered the inhabitants of the town by the sword. . . . After a few days’ rest, the Ismaelites [Arabs] went back whence they had come, dragging after them a host of captives, numbering thirty-five thousand.”29

  According to legend, Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, turned the city over to a magnanimous and tolerant Umar after the Arab conquest in 637. Taking Umar around the city, Sophronius invited the caliph to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but Umar replied, “If I had prayed inside the Church, you would be losing it and it would have gone from your hands because after my death the Muslims would seize it saying, ‘Umar has prayed here.’”30 This is pious fiction. In reality, Sophronius lamented the advent of “the Saracens who, on account of our sins, have now risen up against us unexpectedly and ravage all with cruel and feral design, with impious and godless audacity.”31

  This is a far cry from the legend, often taken as historical fact, that Umar graciously turned down Sophronius’s invitation to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for fear that his followers would use his prayer as a pretext to turn the church into a mosque.32 In his actual writings, Sophronius never mentions this incident, or Umar.

  Nevertheless, in the popular legend, Umar and Sophronius conclude a pact in which the Christians are not allowed to build new churches, carry arms, or ride on horses, and must pay a poll tax, jizya, to the Muslims, but are generally allowed to practice their religion and live in relative peace.33 In fact this “Pact of Umar” is not likely to be authentic, but it does reflect the core tenets of the Islamic legal system of the dhimma, or contract of protection, which denies equality of rights to non-Muslims in the Islamic state and is oppressive in numerous other ways. As we have already seen, the Islamic State has imposed the same system upon the Christians who remain in its domains—no building or repairing churches, no public Christian worship, no Christian aid and comfort to the Muslims’ enemies, and so forth.

  NOT THAT THIS HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ISLAM

  In a sermon from December 636 or 637, Sophronius laments “so much destruction and plunder” and the “incessant outpourings of human blood.” He says that churches have been “pulled down” and “the cross mocked,” and that the “vengeful and God-hating Saracens . . . plunder cities, devastate fields, burn down villages, set on fire the holy churches, overturn the sacred monasteries, oppose the Byzantine armies arrayed against them, and in fighting raise up the trophies [of war] and add victory to victory.”34

  SPEAKING IN GOBBLEDYGOOK

  “Speaking in social-anthropological terms—and this provides an important corrective to the view that Islam is fundamentally oppressive, if not persecutory—the rules of the Pact of ‘Umar and other restrictions served as a means to create and preserve a ‘natural’ hierarchy, in the sense that it characterizes most religious societies in premodern times.”

  —spectacularly ineffective myth-busting from Mark R. Cohen in The “Golden Age” of Jewish-Muslim Relations: Myth and Reality (p. 33) (one wonders why only Islam found a need to “create and preserve” this purportedly “natural” hierarchy—supposedly shared by “most” religions—by means of the elaborate rules of dhimmitude)

  Umar lived by the sword, and he died by the sword. In 644, Fayruz al-Nihawandi (a.k.a. Abu Luluah), a slave who had been captured by the Muslims during the conquest of Persia, stabbed Umar multiple times while he was leading prayers in the mosque in Medina. He died three days later.35

  The Third Rightly Guided Caliph, Uthman: Armed Revolt

  The next “Rightly Guided Caliph” was Uthman ibn Affan, under whom the rapid expansion of the Arab empire continued. Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s son-in-law, was passed over again, and his partisans, the party of Ali (shiat Ali, whence the word Shia), never accepted Uthman as the legitimate caliph, just as many Muslims today do not accept the pretensions of the Islamic State’s caliph Ibrahim today.

  Ali’s supporters mocked Uthman for having run away during some of the early battles of the Muslims, “like a donkey runs from the lion.”36 Uthman didn’t deny this; he just said he had permission: a hadith depicts a Muslim asking the caliph Umar’s son Abdullah, who was an old man by this time, if he was aware that Uthman fled from the Battle of Uhud, was absent also from the Battle of Badr, and didn’t even attend when Muhammad’s closest companions pledged their fealty to him. Abdullah explains that Allah “excused” Uthman from Uhud, that Uthman was absent from Badr because Muhammad asked him to stay behind and care for his ailing wife, who was Muhammad’s daughter, and that Uthman was on anot
her assignment from Muhammad when the prophet’s companions gathered to pledge their loyalty.37

  Uthman thus claimed the authority of both Allah and Muhammad to excuse his apparent cowardice. The fact that this defense wasn’t universally dismissed as an unacceptable act of presumption demonstrates the stature that the caliph had in the eyes of at least some of the Muslims.

  Uthman is also credited with compiling the Qur’an as it stands today (finishing the work begun by Umar) and distributing the copies of the correct version to the Muslim provinces, which now stretched across North Africa and the Middle East and into Persia. The story goes that in the early 650s, a Muslim named Hudhaifa bin al-Yaman warned Uthman that the Muslims were in danger of becoming like the Jews and Christians: “O chief of the Believers! Save this nation before they differ about the Book (Quran) as Jews and the Christians did before.”38 So the caliph appointed a commission to standardize and codify the Qur’anic text, and once this work was done in 653, Uthman is supposed to have distributed the final version and burned all the variants.39 The Qur’an isn’t mentioned anywhere in the historical record for several decades after Uthman’s caliphate, so the historical value of this later story about the third caliph is very low, but it does illustrate the authority of the caliph: no one else would have had the stature to edit and standardize what were considered divine revelations—but Uthman is credited with the achievement despite the fact that his authority was so widely challenged.

  Besides the opposition of Ali’s supporters, Uthman also faced armed revolt from Egypt and elsewhere; the rebels offered the title of caliph to several prominent Muslims, including Ali, but could find no takers. Finally, Uthman was assassinated in 656 by some of those who had rebelled against his rule. The challenges to his caliphate by the party of Ali and the Egyptian insurrectionists exemplify what became a recurring feature of the history of the caliphate: despite his status as successor of Muhammad, there were always some Muslims who refused to accept the caliph’s rule—and seldom a shortage of heavily armed men ready to supplant him by force.