The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (49 page)
Read The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS Online
Authors: Robert Spencer
Tags: #Religion, #Islam, #History, #Political Science, #Terrorism, #Non-Fiction
The article in
Dabiq
also pointed to a hadith about “the ‘Uran
men whose eyes were gouged out by the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) with heated iron” and to several historical examples of burning alive used as a punishment in the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs.
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Besides Islamic punishments, the Islamic State authorities are also reviving the jizya tax on the “People of the Book”—demanding that the Christians of Mosul “pay the
jizya
with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued” as Muslims are commanded in the Qur’an to force Christians to do (9:29) and, also in line with the Qur’an, killing those who “turn away” from Islam (4:89), among whom they count all the Muslims fighting on the side of the “Crusaders,” that is, the Western powers. Thus the headline of the
Dabiq
article justifying the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot calls him “murtadd”—the word for apostate, derived from the verb for “turn away.”
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Brutal—like Muhammad
The Islamic State regularly justifies its own brutality by invoking Muhammad’s example. The September 2014 issue of
Dabiq
includes copious
citations of the Qur’an and hadith, along with invocations of incidents from Muhammad’s life in which he was just as brutal and bloodthirsty as the Islamic State has ever been.
One
Dabiq
article justifies the shooting of Muslims in Syria who had been accused of rebelling against the authority of the caliphate by recalling a particularly spine-chilling incident from the early Muslim accounts of Muhammad’s life—one that we have already seen referred to in passing to justify the pilot’s burning alive:
Narrated Abu Qilaba: Anas said, “Some people of ‘Ukl or ‘Uraina tribe came to Medina and its climate did not suit them. So the Prophet ordered them to go to the herd of (Milch) camels and to drink their milk and urine (as a medicine). So they went as directed and after they became healthy, they killed the shepherd of the Prophet and drove away all the camels. The news reached the Prophet early in the morning and he sent (men) in their pursuit and they were captured and brought at noon. He then ordered to cut their hands and feet (and it was done), and their eyes were branded with heated pieces of iron, They were put in ‘Al-Harra’ and when they asked for water, no water was given to them.” Abu Qilaba said, “Those people committed theft and murder, became infidels after embracing Islam and fought against Allah and His Apostle.”
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OSTRICH ALERT
“If you want to know why ISIS exists, don’t bother searching Islamic texts, or examining Islamic traditions.”
—Salon
magazine, February 19, 2015
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“This hadith,” the
Dabiq
article explains, “shows the severity of the prophetic punishment against the treacherous, false claimants of Islam.” The executed
Syrians, it asserts, were guilty of a “wicked deed” that called for a punishment similar to that which Muhammad had meted out.
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There is, of course, no end to the articles assuring Americans that the Islamic State is misunderstanding and misinterpreting Islamic texts, but this message has not gotten through to the thousands of Muslims from the West who have already joined the Islamic State, and the others who attempt to do so every day.
Those who glibly dismiss the numbers of these Muslims as only a minuscule percentage of the billion-plus Muslims worldwide are missing the point. If twenty-five thousand young Christians had flocked from all over the world to join a terror group, no one would wave the phenomenon away by pointing out that there are over a billion Christians in the world.
If the Islamic State is not Islamic, its success represents a massive failure on the part of Muslim authorities. They have failed, and failed spectacularly, to communicate the true, peaceful tenets of their religion—teachings that are so obvious to non-Muslims such as John Kerry and Joe Biden—to tens of thousands of their young people. They are presiding over a catechetical disaster of proportions unknown in the history of the world: never before has such global havoc been wrought by people acting upon a massive misunderstanding of the core beliefs of their own religion.
OSTRICH ALERT
“The extremism that we see, the radical exploitation of religion which is translated into violence, has no basis in any of the real religions. There’s nothing Islamic about what ISIL/Daesh stands for, or is doing to people.”
—Secretary of State John Kerry
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The thing is, those young people can read the Qur’an. They can see what it says, and see that the Islamic State is acting in accord with the plain words of a book that repeatedly tells its readers that it is clear (6:114, 11:1, 16:89, 41:3)—and also with the example of Muhammad and the rulings of traditional Islamic jurisprudence. Articles explaining how the Qur’an really means
something quite different from what it seems to say keep appearing, but they have not managed to staunch the flow of foreign jihadis into the Islamic State.
UNFORTUNATELY, THERE’S A LOT IN THERE FOR MASS-MURDERING SOCIOPATHS TO LIKE
Professor Caner K. Dagli of the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, explains away ISIS’s reading of the Qur’an: “Its members search for text snippets that support their argument, claim that these fragments are reliable even if they are not, and disregard all contrary evidence—not to mention Islam’s vast and varied intellectual and legal tradition. Their so-called ‘prophetic methodology’ is nothing more than cherry-picking what they like and ignoring what they do not.”
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It would be refreshing if their authors, instead of devoting their efforts to calming jittery infidels and convincing us that there is no problem within Islam that anyone, Muslim or non-Muslim, need address, would formulate programs designed to convince young Muslims that the Islamic State’s understanding of Islam is wrong. But no such programs exist in mosques in the U.S. or anywhere else at this time. Programs of that kind would require Muslim leaders to confront what no one anywhere on the political spectrum seems willing to examine: the Qur’anic roots of the Islamic State’s “extremism.”
Nothing is gained, however, by ignoring and avoiding uncomfortable questions—and meanwhile, the only beneficiary of all this denial is the Islamic State.
But Muslims Have Condemned the Islamic State!
In September 2014, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Fiqh Council of North America held a press
conference in Washington at which they announced with great fanfare that they had refuted the religious ideology of the Islamic State.
They issued a lengthy “open letter” (not, interestingly enough, a fatwa, which would be an actual religious ruling) addressed to the Islamic State’s Caliph Ibrahim, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, explaining how he was misunderstanding Islam. The international media was, predictably, thrilled.
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But unfortunately, and not surprisingly, there is less to this repudiation of the Islamic State than meets the eye.
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Even the “moderates” who signed on to this open letter endorsed elements of Islam that most non-Muslim Westerners consider to be “extremist.”