The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  The Fourth Rightly Guided Caliph: Ali Finally Gets His Chance

  After the assassination of Uthman, Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali, who had first sought to become caliph twenty-four years earlier upon the death of Muhammad, finally got his chance. However, as was perhaps inevitable, his authority was never fully accepted, and his rocky five years as caliph coincide with the period known as the First Fitna (Disturbance) or First Civil War.40

  Some of the most prominent companions of Muhammad refused to accept Ali’s authority, including Muhammad’s last and favorite wife, Aisha. Upon learning that Uthman had been assassinated, Aisha organized an armed uprising against Ali, culminating in the Battle of the Camel, fought in Basra on November 7, 656—so named because Aisha, fully veiled as Muhammad had ordered for all his wives, directed her forces from the back of a camel, on which she was concealed inside a howdah.

  Aisha’s men lost and she was captured, but Ali magnanimously forgave her and spared her life.41 Ali faced another rebellion, led by Muawiya, the governor of Syria, who claimed the caliphate for himself. Ali fought Muawiya in the Battle of Siffin in 657, near Raqqa, the present-day capital of the Islamic State. After a bloody battle, to avoid further bloodletting both claimants agreed to accept the decision of a panel of arbitrators.42

  Their leader, Abu Musa al-Ashari, announced their decision: “We have devised a solution after a good deal of thought and it may put an end to all contention and separatist tendencies. It is this. Both of us remove Ali as well as Muawiya from the caliphate. The Muslims are given the right to elect a caliph as they think best.”43

  Ali was indignant and reneged on his pledge to accept the arbitrators’ decision, thereby enraging a group of his supporters who then left his camp, earning forever the name Khawarij, or Kharijites, “those who left.” The Kharijites—whom we have already met as the historical group to whom any new group of rigorist Muslims known for violence against fellow Muslims they regard as heretics is inevitably compared—rejected both Ali and Muawiya, declared that all who didn’t reject them as well were unbelievers, and plotted to assassinate both of them, as well as other Muslim leaders—but the plot was foiled.44

  Ali defeated many of the Khawarij at the Battle of Nahrawan near Baghdad in 658, and gradually the sect died out, but the Ibadi school of Islamic thought that is dominant in Oman today has historical links with the Kharijites. And more importantly, as we have seen, many modern Muslim and non-Muslim scholars castigate contemporary jihad groups, including the Islamic State, as neo-Kharijites.45 There certainly are similarities between the Kharijites and the Islamic State: in their readiness to pronounce takfir—that is, declare to be unbelievers—Muslims who oppose them and to say they can lawfully be killed; in their extremely rigorous understanding of how Islamic law should be applied; and in their rejection of the authority of Muslim rulers they consider to have strayed from Islamic norms.

  Islam has always been susceptible to these rigorist movements; they can easily find justification in the Qur’an and the teachings of Muhammad.

  Given all this rebellion and civil strife, it came as no surprise to anyone when Ali was finally assassinated in January 661—by a Khawarij, Abdul Rahman ibn Muljam, who stabbed him with a sword coated with poison while he was praying in the Great Mosque of Kufa in Iraq, which he had made his capital.46

  That ended the twenty-nine-year period of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, who are still considered by many Muslims today to be the representatives of a golden age that Muslims must strive to restore. And yet it was the period of the Wars of Apostasy; the brutal conquest of huge swaths of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia; the systematic oppression of the non-Muslim populations in those lands; and bloody civil strife among Muslims that, as we shall see, ultimately led to the Sunni-Shi’ite schism that persists, and remains violent, to this day.

  Contrary to assertions—which were heard after the Islamic State’s declaration of the caliphate—that historically the caliph was always chosen by the peaceful and unanimous consent of the worldwide Muslim community, the caliphate was often rent by dissent, rival claimants, and bloodshed.47 In late June 2014, the internationally renowned Muslim Brotherhood sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi denounced the Islamic State’s proclamation of itself as the caliphate: “We look forward to the coming, as soon as possible, of the caliphate . . . but the declaration issued by the Islamic State is void under Sharia and has dangerous consequences for the Sunnis in Iraq and for the revolt in Syria.” Qaradawi said that the Islamic State was “known for its atrocities and radical views,” and that the title of caliph could “only be given by the entire Muslim nation.”48 Yet the history of the Rightly Guided Caliphs is full of “atrocities and radical views,” and demonstrates that the title of caliph was most often not “given by the entire Muslim nation.” During the “golden age” when they ruled, three of the four “Rightly Guided Caliphs” were assassinated, and three of the four faced violent challenges to their authority.

  The Umayyad Caliphate

  Ali’s rival Muawiya succeeded him, and the caliphate became a family dynasty; when Muawiya died in 680, he was followed as caliph by his son, Yazid I. This succession, however, touched off another period of civil war, the Second Fitna, as some of the Muslims refused to accept the hereditary accession to the caliphate.49 Hussein, the son of Ali and grandson of Muhammad, refused to swear allegiance to Yazid. At the Battle of Karbala in Iraq in 680, Hussein and his six-month-old son were killed.50 The split between the supporters of Yazid and those of Hussein solidified into a schism that persists to this day between the Sunnis and the shiat Ali, the party of Ali, the Shi’ites.

  Yazid’s party was by far the largest, and came to be known as the Umayyad caliphate, after the Meccan family to which Muawiya belonged. At their peak the Umayyads ruled a vast empire stretching from Spain to India, but they had to deal with internal strife and rebellion on a more or less perpetual basis. The caliph Abd al-Malik, who ruled from 685 to 705 and built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, fought a protracted conflict with a rival caliph, Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, who had never accepted the hereditary succession, and who at one point ruled much more of the Islamic world than did Abd al-Malik.51

  The wars, both civil and foreign, continued. Several Muslim revolts against the caliphate were put down in Iraq in the early eighth century. The caliph Sulayman (715–717) tried and failed to conquer Constantinople, then the greatest city in the world.52 Yazid II (720–724) ordered that all Christian images throughout the caliphate be destroyed, believing that Allah would let him reign for forty years if he did so.53 So the Islamic State is hardly the first caliphate to destroy pre-Islamic artifacts.

  LIVING ON THE WEALTH OF THE CONQUERED

  The collection of the jizya remained of cardinal importance for the Umayyad caliphate’s finances. In the early eighth century, al-Jarrah ibn Abdullah al-Hakami, the Muslim governor of Khurasan in Central Asia (modern Afghanistan) saw that the large number of people converting to Islam was eroding the tax base, as converts were exempt from the jizya. So he decreed that only those converts who demonstrated a comprehensive knowledge of the Qur’an and were circumcised would be exempt from paying the jizya. Not surprisingly, an anti-Umayyad movement soon grew up in that area.54

  The Umayyads expanded into Spain and even into southern France before being stopped at the Battle of Tours by Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer) in 732. A few years later, Muslims in Spain revolted against Umayyad rule. Discontent was spreading: the caliph Al-Walid (743–744) was widely despised for his open drinking and debauchery, for which he tried to compensate by violently persecuting a sect called the Qadaris—Muslims who had the temerity to claim that human beings had free will and were not simply under Allah’s absolute control.55

  Then in 750, a rival clan, the Abbasids, overthrew the Umayyad caliphate altogether. The Abbasid caliphate was to prove more durable, lasting in various permutations nearly eight hundred years.

  The Abbasid Caliphate />
  The Abbasid caliphate takes its name from Muhammad’s uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, from whom its caliphs were descended.56 Although this caliphate lasted until the sixteenth century and at its height ruled over territory from Spain to India roughly corresponding to the expanse ruled by the Umayyads, from the beginning it was beset by challenges from within, losing control over Spain and North Africa, including Egypt, within its first five decades.

  The Abbasids never regained complete control over those territories. In the tenth century, a Shi’ite movement originating in Syria gained control of North Africa and established the Shi’ite Fatimid caliphate, which lasted until the latter half of the twelfth century.57 And in Islamic al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) in 929, Abdul Rahman III, the last living member of the Umayyad royal family, declared his own caliphate centered in Córdoba and challenging the Abbasids in North Africa.58 There were now three competing caliphs: the Abbasid in Baghdad, the Umayyad in Córdoba, and the Fatimid in Tunisia and, after 969, in Cairo.

  FOLLOWING IN MUHAMMAD’S FOOTSTEPS

  The first Abbasid caliph, Abul Abbas, was known as al-Saffah—the Blood Shedder—a title that he richly deserved for the ways by which he persuaded his foes not to mount active resistance to his rule.63

  Also in the tenth century, the Abbasids lost much of Iraq, Iran, and the surrounding regions to the Shi’ite Buwayhid (or Buyid) dynasty.59 The Buyids then gave way to the Seljuq Turks (who were Sunni), who also gained control of more Abbasid domains, reducing the caliph to a figurehead with little real political power outside of his base around Baghdad.60 The Seljuqs also won a stunning victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in eastern Anatolia in the summer of 1071, ending forever the Byzantine hold on Anatolia, and paving the way for the advent of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey.61

  In 1258 the Mongols sacked Baghdad, ending Abbasid rule there, but the Abbasids relocated to Cairo and continued their caliphate, drastically weakened and fragmented, until the Ottomans, the last Muslim group to lay effective claim to the caliphate before the Islamic State, removed them from power in Cairo in 1517.62

  The history of the Abbasid caliphate thus vividly illustrates the fact that the unity of the Muslims that is supposed to be guaranteed and enabled by the caliph is more of a theological fiction than a reality. Only rarely did the caliph actually unite all the Muslims, and even more rarely did he sleep easily in his bed without having to worry about rivals who were determined to unseat and supplant him, or diminish his domains to insignificance and his theological and juridical authority to that of a figurehead.

  The Golden Age of Tolerance?

  Despite the failure of any of its earthly manifestations to live up to its ideals, however, the caliphate remained a potent symbol for Muslims worldwide, and to this day many, both Muslims and non-Muslims, regard the early period of the Abbasid caliphate as the high-water mark for Muslim cultural and societal advancement. The Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad from the eighth century to 1258 is generally considered to be the great cultural and intellectual golden age of Islam, with Baghdad becoming an international center of culture and learning. This is the time of Muslim philosophers Ibn Rushd and Ibn Sina (known in the West as Averroes and Avicenna). Claims for the Golden Age under the Abassids are often inflated nowadays by people trying to show another face of Islam besides violence and terror, but in any case, this vaunted Golden Age of Islam did not generally extend to the caliphate’s subject people.

  Like any laws, Sharia laws are often honored in the breach, and at various periods many Jews and Christians did attain to positions of power and influence. But at other times the laws mandating their subjugation and humiliation were strictly reinforced. The Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil (847–861) was so intent on making sure that Jews and Christians were thoroughly humiliated and subjugated that he ordered them to wear yellow clothing so that they could always be recognized as non-Muslims and treated accordingly. He also demanded that they put images of devils on their homes, and not ride horses, but only mules or donkeys.64

  And in the Umayyad domains of al-Andalus, so widely touted these days as a beacon of tolerance and proto-multiculturalism, things were little better. Historian María Rosa Menocal speaks of Andalusia as a fount of “our cultural memories and possibilities.”65 In his foreword to Menocal’s book on Islamic al-Andalus, Harold Bloom laments that “there are no Muslim Andalusians visible anywhere in the world today.”66 However, historian Richard Fletcher has noted that “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.”67 On December 30, 1066, Muslim mobs rampaged through Jewish areas of Granada and murdered around four thousand Jews.68 What had enflamed them was that the Berber King Badis had appointed a Jew, Samuel ibn Naghrila, to be vizier of Granada, and that Samuel had passed on the office to his son Joseph. The Muslims were outraged that these Jews had authority over Muslims, which they saw as a “breach of Shari’ah.”69

  The Muslim jurist Abu Ishaq composed a poem that incited the mobs: “I myself arrived in Granada and saw that these Jews were meddling in its affairs. . . . So hasten to slaughter them as a good work whereby you will earn God’s favour, and offer them up in sacrifice, a well-fattened ram.”70 A Muslim chronicler (and later Sultan of Granada), Abd Allah, said that “both the common people and the nobles were disgusted by the cunning of the Jews, the notorious changes they had brought in the order of things, and the positions they occupied in violation of their pact [i.e., the dhimma].” He recounted that the mob “put every Jew in the city to the sword and took vast quantities of their property.”71

  Joseph ibn Naghrila was murdered, and his dead body crucified on Granada’s city gates, in accord with the Qur’an’s command to crucify those who “spread corruption in the land” (5:33).72

  The Ottoman Caliphate

  One of the principal challenges to the authority of the Abbasid caliphate came from the Ottoman Turks, who had migrated from Central Asia to Anatolia in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and gained power over other Turkish domains in Anatolia. In 1362, the Ottoman sultan Murad I proclaimed himself the caliph, rejecting the authority of the Abbasid caliph Al-Mustakfi I in Cairo, who by then was recognized by few Muslims outside his immediate domains in any case.

  Ninety-one years later, the Ottoman claim to constitute the authentic caliphate was considerably strengthened by the Sultan Mehmet II’s conquest of Constantinople (and the consequent destruction of the Christian Byzantine Empire) on May 29, 1453. Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad himself had prophesied the Muslim conquest of Constantinople.

  ONE DOWN, ONE TO GO

  The modern-day Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, writing about “signs of the victory of Islam,” has referred to a hadith:

  The Prophet Muhammad was asked: “What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya [Rome]?” He answered: “The city of Hirqil [i.e. the Byzantine emperor Heraclius] will be conquered first”—that is, Constantinople—Romiyya is the city called today “Rome,” the capital of Italy. The city of Hirqil [that is, Constantinople] was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe (that it too will be conquered). This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice—once from the South, from Andalusia, and a second time from the East, when it knocked several times on the door of Athens.73

  The Muslims had first tried to conquer Constantinople in 711 and had made numerous attempts after that; Mehmet’s victory was the culmination of seven hundred years of efforts to destroy the great Christian empire. The caliphate, going back to the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, had always been a might-makes-right proposition, and Mehmet’s resounding victory was taken as a clear sign of Allah’s favor on the Ottomans. The Abbasid claim to the caliphate was weaker than ever, and the Ottoman stronger.

  The Ottomans continued to pressure Christian Eur
ope. On October 7, 1571, they were defeated by the Holy League, a group of Mediterranean Christian states, in the Battle of Lepanto, preventing further Ottoman expansion into Europe. Nonetheless, they kept coming, impelled by Muhammad’s prophecy about the conquest of Rome following that of Constantinople, and by the jihad imperative. In the summer of 1683 the Ottomans besieged Vienna, as they had done unsuccessfully in 1529; the siege was broken on September 11—a date on which Muslim warriors of a later century would choose to embark on their own jihad.

  Unable to conquer Christian Europe, the Ottomans contented themselves with making the lives of the Christians within their domains miserable, ensuring that they would “feel themselves subdued,” as per the Qur’an’s command (9:29). One specifically Ottoman feature of this persecution was the devshirme, the seizure, enslavement, forced conversion, and impressment into military service of Christian boys. The Sultan Orkhan began this practice in the fourteenth century, and his successors continued it until late in the seventeenth.

  Taken from their homes at a young age, the boys were told to convert to Islam or they would be killed. Then they were given strict military training; once they successfully completed it, they would join the Janissaries, the caliph’s special forces.74 All in all, around two hundred thousand boys were enslaved and exploited in this way.75 The reality of life as a dhimmi in the Ottoman caliphate being what it was, some families welcomed the seizure of their sons, as they saw it as a path to a better life than they could possibly provide.76