The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
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Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isnt actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.
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But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesnt matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes hes doing so for religious reasons.
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But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the groups theology, told me, embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion that neglects what their religion has historically and legally required.
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He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. People want to absolve Islam, he said. Its this Islam is a religion of peace mantra. As if there is such a thing as Islam! Its what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts. Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.
All Muslims acknowledge that Muhammads earliest conquests were not tidy affairs, and that the laws of war passed down in the Koran and in the narrations of the Prophets rule were calibrated to fit a turbulent and violent time. In Haykels estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition, Haykel said. Islamic State fighters are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.
The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam. The tax on Christians finds clear endorsement in the Surah Al-Tawba, the Korans ninth chapter, which instructs Muslims to fight Christians and Jews until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. The Prophet, whom all Muslims consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves.
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the caliphate has continued to embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.
