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  But as the historian Bernard Lewis notes, “Islamic tradition gives recognition to the principle of justifiable revolt.”52 Takfir is also a recognized principle in Islamic tradition, with the limits on how often it can be used essentially subjective.53 In other words, the actions of the Khawarij—and of their modern counterparts in ISIS—can be justified by generally accepted principles of Islamic law.

  Thus it is difficult for Muslims to criticize the Islamic State and other jihad groups that fight against Muslim rulers they consider to be unjust. And thus the Islamic State continues to gain recruits, even after most Muslim organizations and spokesmen in the West have denounced it.

  The Wahhabis

  In the strictness of their Islamic observance, the Islamic State resembles the Wahhabis, who before the rise of ISIS were the world’s best-known modern-day Muslim hard-liners. Although the Saudis don’t refer to it by that name—for them it is just plain, unadulterated Islam—Wahhabi Islam is the official religion of the Kingdom of the Two Holy Places. That’s another name for Saudi Arabia, which includes the two cities Muhammad called home, Mecca and Medina, and their two great mosques (the Two Holy Places). By virtue of this blessed location, the Saudis consider themselves to be the guardians not just of Muhammad’s mosque but of his legacy—the guardians of Islam itself. The House of Saud has spent untold billions of dollars to spread the Wahhabi understanding of Islam around the world, and in many areas (notably East Africa and Central Asia) it has supplanted, or is in the process of supplanting, more relaxed forms of cultural Islam that had held sway in those places for centuries.

  Those who place high hopes on the reform of Islam should note that Wahhabism is a reform movement—indeed, the quintessential reform movement in Islam. Muhammad ibn Abdul al-Wahhab was an eighteenth-century Muslim who proclaimed his intention to restore Islam’s original purity by rejecting all innovation (bid’a) and basing his religious observance strictly on what the Qur’an and Muhammad taught.

  Wahhab set out to extinguish all Islamic practices that he considered not to have come from either source: thus Wahhabi mosques lack minarets—the towers that the caller to prayer, the muezzin, climbs in order to chant the azan, the call to prayer. Wahhab also rejected the veneration of Muslim saints and prayers at their shrines, a practice that had become widespread by the eighteenth century. Wahhab pointed to hadiths in which Muhammad himself condemned this practice, calling it shirk, the combination of idolatry and polytheism that is the worst sin of all in Islam: associating partners with Allah in worship.

  The Wahhabis were often just as brutal as the Islamic State is today. In an 1803 attack that could have come from today’s headlines about ISIS, the Wahhabis entered Ta’if, a city near Mecca, massacred all the men, and enslaved all the women and children.54

  Like the Khawarij, Wahhab declared all Muslims who disagreed with him to be unbelievers who could be lawfully killed as heretics and apostates. In 1744 Wahhab entered into an alliance with an Arab chieftain, Muhammad ibn Saud, and together they set out on jihad against those enemies, fighting against the Ottoman authorities, who Wahhab believed had lost all legitimacy by departing from the tenets of Islam.

  Not long after Wahhab’s death in 1792, the Wahhabis captured the Two Holy Places of Mecca and Medina and after that gradually expanded their domains until finally, in 1932, the Wahhabi sheikh ibn Saud captured Riyadh and established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

  Oil money has made Wahhabi ideals mainstream, even dominant, among Muslims worldwide. The Saudis have spent as much as $100 billion to spread Wahhabism worldwide.55 However, other Muslims still make the same complaints against the Wahhabis as were made long ago against the Khawarij: they’re Qur’anic rigorists, but nonetheless they misunderstand the noble book, and their piety is a false front: “While claiming to be adherents to ‘authentic’ Sunnah [Muslim tradition], these deviants are quick to label anyone who opposes their beliefs . . . as ‘sufi,’ [that is, akin to adherents of the mystical Sufi sect, elements of which many Muslims consider heretical] while exploiting the Muslims’ love for Islam by overexaggerating the phrase ‘Qur’an and Sunnah’ in their senseless rhetoric.”56 The same criticisms are made about the new self-styled caliphate today.

  Al-Qaeda is simply an especially virulent outgrowth of Wahhabism. And ISIS is just an especially virulent outgrowth of al-Qaeda.

  The Case for ISIS’s Bloody Tactics: How Zarqawi Laid the Intellectual and Theological Foundations of the Islamic State

  Muslims in the West, the president of the United States, and our media regularly condemn the atrocities committed by ISIS as un-Islamic. And we have seen that the Islamic State’s bloody deeds have made even al-Qaeda terrorists uncomfortable—though they seem to have found it difficult to articulate a principled case, grounded in Islamic texts and the accepted scholarly rulings of Islamic jurisprudence, against those bloodthirsty acts, instead falling back on tactical and prudential arguments.

  ISIS, on the other hand, does not hesitate to justify its atrocities by Islamic law. The groundwork for that justification was laid in the course of the long-running controversy between al-Qaeda and the precursor organization of the Islamic State, which began not long after Zarqawi gave his allegiance (and that of the precursor organization, al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers) to Osama bin Laden and ended in the 2014 break between the two groups. In the process of defending himself from criticism, Zarqawi ended up delineating and justifying many of the distinctive approaches of what would become the Islamic State.

  For example, Zarqawi’s group was criticized for killing Muslims as well as non-Muslims, in apparent defiance of the Qur’an’s injunction, “never is it for a believer to kill a believer except by mistake” (4:92).

  OSTRICH ALERT

  “Eliminating the ISIL threat. . . . will mean demolishing the distortion of one of the world’s great peaceful religions.”

  —Secretary of State John Kerry57

  Responding to this criticism, on May 20, 2005, Zarqawi released an audiotape in which he presented a detailed defense of his operations. In the process, he set out what would turn out to be the Islamic State’s eventual justification for many of its increasingly barbaric enormities.

  Zarqawi argued not on prudential but on theological grounds: making copious reference to Islamic sources, he portrayed the murderous behavior of al-Qaeda in the Land of Two Rivers as legitimate jihad operations that every Muslim should endorse.

  Zarqawi insisted that his group was behaving in a strictly Islamic manner: “the Mujahideen carry out their operations under strict adherence to the rules of engagement as set forth by Allah, His messenger, our prophet Muhammad, and his companions.” His followers’ Islam-approved methods followed from their overall goal as jihad warriors: “And why not? After all, the Mujahideen took to the battle fields only to establish the Deen [religion] of Allah (Islam), to make the word of Allah high above any others, and to gain the pleasure of Allah.”

  This statement is noteworthy in light of the fact that Western analysts universally ascribe the roots of jihad terror to poverty, lack of educational or economic opportunity—anything other than an endeavor to “establish the Deen of Allah” and “to make the word of Allah high above any others, and to gain the pleasure of Allah.”58

  Having thus situated his endeavors firmly within the Islamic religious imperative to wage war against non-Muslims, Zarqawi began his justification, by Islamic law, of killing Muslims as well as Americans. His intention, he said, was to “put forth and clarify the judgment and the rules of Allah’s Sharia’ah (Islamic Jurisprudence) in connection with those incidents in which Muslims are killed as a result rather than the main target of Mujahideen operations.”

  It is noteworthy that at that point Zarqawi warned that he did “not intend to address the legality of martyrdom operations for it has been decided by more than one scholar already.” That is, he was taking for granted that suicide attacks were permissible—most likely in light of the fact that the Qur’an g
uarantees a place in Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111).

  Zarqawi also took for granted that Muslims had a responsibility before Allah to wage war against unbelievers. “There is no doubt,” Zarqawi proclaimed, “that Allah commanded us to strike the Kuffar (unbelievers), kill them, and fight them by all means necessary to achieve the goal.” He argued that any means at all were permissible in this endeavor:

  The servants of Allah who perform Jihad to elevate the word (laws) of Allah, are permitted to use any and all means necessary to strike the active unbeliever combatants for the purpose of killing them, snatch their souls from their body, cleanse the earth from their abomination, and lift their trial and persecution of the servants of Allah. The goal must be pursued even if the means to accomplish it affect both the intended active fighters and unintended passive ones such as women, children and any other passive category specified by our jurisprudence.

  He was making the case, in other words, that operations such as 9/11 were fully sanctioned by Islamic law, even if women and children were killed in them. And the same things would be true, he argued, even if Muslims were killed as collateral damage:

  This permissibility extends to situations in which Muslims may get killed if they happen to be with or near the intended enemy, and if it is not possible to avoid hitting them or separate them from the intended Kafirs. Although spilling sacred Muslim blood is a grave offense, it is not only permissible but it is mandated in order to prevent more serious adversity from happening, stalling or abandoning Jihad that is.

  Zarqawi was killed over two years before Barack Obama became president, and eight years before President Obama declared: “ISIL is not ‘Islamic.’ No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.”59 Obama was assuming that because its victims were Muslim, the Islamic State must not be Islamic; however, ISIS’s foremost founding figure had long before explained why that was a false assumption.

  Moreover, as far as Zarqawi was concerned, those who denied that it was permissible to kill Muslims in jihad operations were enabling the victory of the infidels over the Muslims, and the consequent disunity and subjugation of the worldwide Muslim community:

  If one says that we must not allow the killing of Muslims under any circumstance, especially in light of modern war tactics, this means nothing except stalling or permanently abandoning Jihad. This will lead to handing over the land and people to the unbelievers who are full of hate for Islam and Muslims. The unbelievers will have a free hand to humiliate and persecute Islam and Muslims and Muslims will be forced to live by Kafir rules and be treated like slaves. Many Muslims will be pressured or forced to give up their religion, Islam will be altered, modified, and replaced with another form that will be totally different from that which was revealed to the one who was sent with the sword, peace and prayer be upon him.

  The “one who was sent with the sword” is, of course, the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

  Zarqawi was harshly critical of Muslim scholars who rejected his jihad, referring to them as “the wicked scholars” who “have looked the other way and sold their Deen (religion) for a miserable price in this life.” He predicted that one outcome of the conflict between al-Qaeda and the Americans in Iraq would be to separate “the true believers from the rest,” and he fulminated against “the defeatists from our own skin” who “decided to stab the true Mujahideen [warriors of jihad] in the back and throw doubts about the permissibility of their operations.”60

  These people, he asserted, were nothing less than traitors to Islam itself, allying with unbelievers in defiance of the Qur’an’s prohibition on such alliances (3:28, 5:51). They had, Zarqawi said, “in fact directly or indirectly helped the cross worshippers in their campaign against Mujahideen. The defeatists, the unfaithful, and the ill-intentioned people from our own skin, have criticized our operations against the enemies of Allah on the bases that some of these operations results in killing so called ‘innocent civilians.’”61

  These principles would become the hallmarks of the Islamic State: that any means were acceptable in fighting against and killing non-Muslims, which was an Islamic responsibility, and that it was acceptable to kill fellow Muslims in service of the goal of implementing Islamic law over the world.

  It’s All about the PR

  Some senior al-Qaeda leaders, however, were skeptical. They believed that Zarqawi was too brutal and that his tactics were unwise: to implement Islamic law abruptly in areas of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq where it had not been fully enforced in living memory would only alienate less fervent Muslims who might otherwise support the movement, as well as repulse the non-Muslim world to the degree that it might take more severe action against the jihadis than it otherwise would.

  In response to Zarqawi’s robust defense from Islamic law of the slaughter of innocents and fellow Muslims, Osama’s lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri—the scholarly and bespectacled Cairo surgeon, a man of wealth and education, in contrast to Zarqawi’s hardscrabble upbringing and education in the school of hard knocks—was reduced to arguing on prudential grounds that the kind of bloodthirsty jihad Zarqawi was waging would not make his group popular with the larger Muslim population.

  In the same July 9, 2005, letter in which he had laid out al-Qaeda’s four-step plan for reviving the caliphate, Zawahiri, who became the leader of al-Qaeda after bin Laden’s death, praised Zarqawi’s successes and very gently remonstrated with him for doing things that could turn public opinion against him.62 Zawahiri is exceedingly polite and deferential in the letter, but cannot help allowing a hint of condescension to slip through now and again.

  “I want to be the first to congratulate you,” Zawahiri wrote, “for what God has blessed you with in terms of fighting battle in the heart of the Islamic world, which was formerly the field for major battles in Islam’s history, and what is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era, and what will happen, according to what appeared in the Hadiths of the Messenger of God about the epic battles between Islam and atheism.” He praises Zarqawi in fulsome terms, writing that “God has blessed you and your brothers while many of the Muslim mujahedeen have longed for that blessing, and that is Jihad in the heart of the Islamic world. He has, in addition to that, granted you superiority over the idolatrous infidels, traitorous apostates, and those turncoat deviants.”

  Only then does he begin to upbraid Zarqawi gently for the ferocity of his jihad in Iraq. He warns:

  Among the things which the feelings of the Muslim populace who love and support you will never find palatable—also—are the scenes of slaughtering the hostages. You shouldn’t be deceived by the praise of some of the zealous young men and their description of you as the shaykh of the slaughterers, etc. They do not express the general view of the admirer and the supporter of the resistance in Iraq, and of you in particular by the favor and blessing of God.

  Zawahiri anticipates Zarqawi’s objection:

  And your response, while true, might be: Why shouldn’t we sow terror in the hearts of the Crusaders and their helpers? And isn’t the destruction of the villages and the cities on the heads of their inhabitants more cruel than slaughtering? And aren’t the cluster bombs and the seven ton bombs and the depleted uranium bombs crueler than slaughtering? And isn’t killing by torture crueler than slaughtering? And isn’t violating the honor of men and women more painful and more destructive than slaughtering?

  These are Qur’anic references that Zawahiri knew Zarqawi would understand. The Qur’an directs Muslims to “make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into the enemies of Allah” (8:60)—hence Zawahiri’s anticipated question from Zarqawi, “Why shouldn’t we sow terror in the hearts of the Crusaders and their helpers?”

  Likewise, his refrain about various alleged Western atrocities being “crueler than slaughtering” is a reference to the Qur’an’s declaration that “persecution is worse than slaughter�
� (2:191, 2:217). Islamic tradition explains that this statement from the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad after he ordered a group of Muslims to raid one of the trading caravans of their enemies, the Quraysh, at Nakhla, a settlement near Mecca. In order not to lose their chance at the caravan altogether, the raiders struck during one of the sacred months of the Arabic calendar, during which violence was forbidden—violating the sacred month.

  Muhammad, it is said, at first received them coldly—until Allah revealed to him the phrase, “persecution is worse than slaughter.” The Muslims were persecuted by the Quraysh, or claimed they were, and so slaughtering them even in the sacred month was acceptable: the prohibition against fighting in the sacred month could be set aside for extenuating circumstances.

  Zawahiri was thus anticipating that Zarqawi would object to his request to rein in his jihad by pointing out enemy atrocities and justifying his response with the Qur’anic phrase. And he stood by his statement that public opinion in this case would trump even the directive from the Muslim holy book, for their supporters, he said, did not comprehend this principle, and Zarqawi’s actions would be vulnerable to “a campaign by the malicious, perfidious, and fallacious campaign by the deceptive and fabricated media. And we would spare the people from the effect of questions about the usefulness of our actions in the hearts and minds of the general opinion that is essentially sympathetic to us.”

  This was the core of the difference between al-Qaeda and what would become ISIS: al-Qaeda believed that the tactics practiced by Zarqawi, which he would pass on to the Islamic State, were counterproductive, arousing the horror and revulsion of the world, which could backfire by stirring the infidels to fury against the Muslims—an infuriated foe is harder to defeat than a complacent one.

  Of course this was a bit rich coming from the masterminds of the single event most responsible for sparking the present round of the conflict between the West and the Islamic world: the September 11 attacks. Nothing aroused the anger of the world in the way that 9/11 did, and both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State read the Qur’an, which directs them to “strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah” (8:60). As Zawahiri conceded, Zarqawi would be “justified” in objecting to his letter by pointing to this divine imperative. He could also have pointed to the fact that al-Qaeda and his group shared the same goals and the same beliefs, but differed only in tactics.