Purity of Essence

I read a long and depressing Atlantic article about the Islamic State which offers an interesting glimpse into their mindset.

Example:

In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an “uncircumcised geezer.”)

But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.

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.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t 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. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.

Although I recognize that the current characterizations of the group (as not Islamic) may be of strategic value in combating them rhetorically, I do think it is an intellectual mistake to maintain that they are not Muslims, because they are. Everything about them radiates absolute, extreme, fundamentalist Islam. They want to emulate and implement the original Islam of Mohammad and his times. That what they are implementing is a modern horror story does not make it something other than Islam. To maintain that they are not real Muslims is worse than maintaining the Crusaders and the Inquisitors were not real Christians, because the violent extremes of the latter can easily be distinguished from the original Christianity as practiced by Jesus and his early followers. As I have said many times, the notion of Christian Holy War is rebutted by the example and conduct of Jesus himself, while Muslim Holy War is called jihad, and according to Islamic State, it is a religious duty. So are crucifixion, amputations, slavery, and stoning.

It would be facile, even exculpatory, to call the problem of the Islamic State “a problem with Islam.” The religion allows many interpretations, and Islamic State supporters are morally on the hook for the one they choose. And yet simply denouncing the Islamic State as un-Islamic can be counterproductive, especially if those who hear the message have read the holy texts and seen the endorsement of many of the caliphate’s practices written plainly within them.

Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of apostasy.

The Islamic State’s ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain subset of the population. Life’s hypocrisies and inconsistencies vanish in its face. Musa Cerantonio and the Salafis I met in London are unstumpable: no question I posed left them stuttering. They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win. If they had been froth-spewing maniacs, I might be able to predict that their movement would burn out as the psychopaths detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else.

I am anything but a Muslim scholar. It is not for me to decide who is not a Muslim. And even though I was raised as a Christian and went to a religious school, it is not for me to decide who is and who is not a Christian. (Which is why I take Obama’s declaration of his own Christianity at it’s face value, and think it is counterproductive to do otherwise.)

As a small-l libertarian, I can’t even lay claim to being a conservative. So the criticism of me by conservatives as not a conservative is legitimate because I admit that I am not. But to say that a self labeled conservative is “not conservative” is much more complicated because it gets into who owns the ideological definitions of these things. Even more complicated is whether enemies of a particular ism get to decide who is a member of that ideological camp. So when conservatives say I am not a conservative, I find that a lot easier to accept than when liberals say that I am a conservative (which they have). It puts me in the impossible logical position being not a conservative and a conservative at the same time.

I don’t really have the answers to these questions, but I am more and more of a fan of impurity. I trust it more than purity.

MORE: For those who want to learn more about IS (and hear some of them speak for themselves), this video documentary is not bad.