What ISIS Really Wants

What ISIS Really Wants

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a
religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it
is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here's what that means for
its strategy—and for how to stop it.

________________________________
Graeme WoodMARCH 2015


at is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of
these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know
the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential
comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations
commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he
had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State's appeal. "We have not
defeated the idea," he said. "We do not even understand the idea." In
the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State,
variously, as "not Islamic" and as al-Qaeda's "jayvee team,"
statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have
contributed to significant strategic errors.

The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area
larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its
leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known
appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity
at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last
year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in
Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in
generations—upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition,
and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims.
The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was
unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing.

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It
is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has
spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State's
countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the
caliphate's supporters have toiled mightily to make their project
knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of
principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make
it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that
change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a
harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world.

The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham
(ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the
path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the
West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is
less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group
whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the
realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or
Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred
people, but some 8 million.

We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two
ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the
logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it.
The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin
Laden as "Sheikh Osama," a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved
since al-Qaeda's heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists
disdain the group's priorities and current leadership.

Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not
expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible,
operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The
Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate,
and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into
civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)

We are misled in a second way, by a well-intentioned but dishonest
campaign to deny the Islamic State's medieval religious nature. Peter
Bergen, who produced the first interview with bin Laden in 1997,
titled his first book Holy War, Inc. in part to acknowledge bin Laden
as a creature of the modern secular world. Bin Laden corporatized
terror and franchised it out. He requested specific political
concessions, such as the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia.
His foot soldiers navigated the modern world confidently. On Mohamed
Atta's last full day of life, he shopped at Walmart and ate dinner at
Pizza Hut.

Nearly all the Islamic State's decisions adhere to what it calls, on
its billboards, license plates, and coins, "the Prophetic
methodology."

There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are
modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing
medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In
fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of
a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization
to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing
about the apocalypse.

The most-articulate spokesmen for that position are the Islamic
State's officials and supporters themselves. They refer derisively to
"moderns." In conversation, they insist that they will
not—cannot—waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam
by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers. They often speak
in codes and allusions that sound odd or old-fashioned to non-Muslims,
but refer to specific traditions and texts of early Islam.

To take one 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.

Control of territory is an essential precondition for the Islamic
State's authority in the eyes of its supporters. This map, adapted
from the work of the Institute for the Study of War, shows the
territory under the caliphate's control as of January 15, along with
areas it has attacked. Where it holds power, the state collects taxes,
regulates prices, operates courts, and administers services ranging
from health care and education to telecommunications.

I. Devotion

In November, the Islamic State released an infomercial-like video
tracing its origins to bin Laden. It acknowledged Abu Musa'b al
Zarqawi, the brutal head of al‑Qaeda in Iraq from roughly 2003 until
his killing in 2006, as a more immediate progenitor, followed
sequentially by two other guerrilla leaders before Baghdadi, the
caliph. Notably unmentioned: bin Laden's successor, Ayman al Zawahiri,
the owlish Egyptian eye surgeon who currently heads al‑Qaeda. Zawahiri
has not pledged allegiance to Baghdadi, and he is increasingly hated
by his fellow jihadists. His isolation is not helped by his lack of
charisma; in videos he comes across as squinty and annoyed. But the
split between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State has been long in the
making, and begins to explain, at least in part, the outsize bloodlust
of the latter.

Zawahiri's companion in isolation is a Jordanian cleric named Abu
Muhammad al Maqdisi, 55, who has a fair claim to being al-Qaeda's
intellectual architect and the most important jihadist unknown to the
average American newspaper reader. On most matters of doctrine,
Maqdisi and the Islamic State agree. Both are closely identified with
the jihadist wing of a branch of Sunnism called Salafism, after the
Arabic al salaf al salih, the "pious forefathers." These forefathers
are the Prophet himself and his earliest adherents, whom Salafis honor
and emulate as the models for all behavior, including warfare,
couture, family life, even dentistry.

The Islamic State awaits the army of "Rome," whose defeat at Dabiq,
Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.

Maqdisi taught Zarqawi, who went to war in Iraq with the older man's
advice in mind. In time, though, Zarqawi surpassed his mentor in
fanaticism, and eventually earned his rebuke. At issue was Zarqawi's
penchant for bloody spectacle—and, as a matter of doctrine, his hatred
of other Muslims, to the point of excommunicating and killing them. In
Islam, the practice of takfir, or excommunication, is theologically
perilous. "If a man says to his brother, 'You are an infidel,' " the
Prophet said, "then one of them is right." If the accuser is wrong, he
himself has committed apostasy by making a false accusation. The
punishment for apostasy is death. And yet Zarqawi heedlessly expanded
the range of behavior that could make Muslims infidels.

Maqdisi wrote to his former pupil that he needed to exercise caution
and "not issue sweeping proclamations of takfir" or "proclaim people
to be apostates because of their sins." The distinction between
apostate and sinner may appear subtle, but it is a key point of
contention between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is
straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take
the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam.
These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing
Western clothes or shaving one's beard, voting in an election—even for
a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates.
Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well,
because the Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to
innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. (The Islamic
State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the
graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the
Koran or in the example of the Prophet.) That means roughly 200
million Shia are marked for death. So too are the heads of state of
every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by
running for office or enforcing laws not made by God.

Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to
purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of
objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the
slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest
that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass
executions every few weeks. Muslim "apostates" are the most common
victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians
who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live,
as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge
their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in
dispute.

Musa Cerantonio, an Australian preacher reported to be one of the
Islamic State's most influential recruiters, believes it is foretold
that the caliphate will sack Istanbul before it is beaten back by an
army led by the anti-Messiah, whose eventual death— when just a few
thousand jihadists remain—will usher in the apocalypse. (Paul
Jeffers/Fairfax Media)

Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and
since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological
disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which
Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the
Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as
it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions
and statements suggest.

Their skepticism is comprehensible. In the past, Westerners who
accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to
deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed
out that calling Muslims "ancient" was usually just another way to
denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions
in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting
social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their
oil.

Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of
the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the
exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if
religious ideology doesn't matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely
it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked
executioner says Allahu akbarwhile beheading an apostate, sometimes
he's doing so for religious reasons.

Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the
Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to
know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing
Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But
Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the
Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group's
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." Many denials of the
Islamic State's religious nature, he said, are rooted in an
"interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition."

Every academic I asked about the Islamic State's ideology sent me to
Haykel. Of partial Lebanese descent, Haykel grew up in Lebanon and the
United States, and when he talks through his Mephistophelian goatee,
there is a hint of an unplaceable foreign accent.

According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused
with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. "Even the
foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly," Haykel said. "They mug for
their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion,
and they do it all the time." 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. "It's this 'Islam is a religion of peace' mantra. As if there is
such a thing as 'Islam'! It's 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 Muhammad's earliest conquests were not
tidy affairs, and that the laws of war passed down in the Koran and in
the narrations of the Prophet's rule were calibrated to fit a
turbulent and violent time. In Haykel's 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."

Our failure to appreciate the essential differences between ISIS and
al-Qaeda has led to dangerous decisions.

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 Koran's 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.

Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as
strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for
hundreds of years. "What's striking about them is not just the
literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these
texts," Haykel said. "There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness
that Muslims don't normally have."

Before the rise of the Islamic State, no group in the past few
centuries had attempted more-radical fidelity to the Prophetic model
than the Wahhabis of 18th‑century Arabia. They conquered most of what
is now Saudi Arabia, and their strict practices survive in a diluted
version of Sharia there. Haykel sees an important distinction between
the groups, though: "The Wahhabis were not wanton in their violence."
They were surrounded by Muslims, and they conquered lands that were
already Islamic; this stayed their hand. "ISIS, by contrast, is really
reliving the early period." Early Muslims were surrounded by
non-Muslims, and the Islamic State, because of its takfiri tendencies,
considers itself to be in the same situation.

If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would
it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with
public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving
people, even some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, 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."

In October, Dabiq, the magazine of the Islamic State, published "The
Revival of Slavery Before the Hour," an article that took up the
question of whether Yazidis (the members of an ancient Kurdish sect
that borrows elements of Islam, and had come under attack from Islamic
State forces in northern Iraq) are lapsed Muslims, and therefore
marked for death, or merely pagans and therefore fair game for
enslavement. A study group of Islamic State scholars had convened, on
government orders, to resolve this issue. If they are pagans, the
article's anonymous author wrote,

Yazidi women and children [are to be] divided according to the Shariah
amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the
Sinjar operations [in northern Iraq] … Enslaving the families of the
kuffar [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly
established aspect of the Shariah that if one were to deny or mock, he
would be denying or mocking the verses of the Koran and the narrations
of the Prophet … and thereby apostatizing from Islam.

II. Territory

Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are thought to have immigrated to
the Islamic State. Recruits hail from France, the United Kingdom,
Belgium, Germany, Holland, Australia, Indonesia, the United States,
and many other places. Many have come to fight, and many intend to
die.

Peter R. Neumann, a professor at King's College London, told me that
online voices have been essential to spreading propaganda and ensuring
that newcomers know what to believe. Online recruitment has also
widened the demographics of the jihadist community, by allowing
conservative Muslim women—physically isolated in their homes—to reach
out to recruiters, radicalize, and arrange passage to Syria. Through
its appeals to both genders, the Islamic State hopes to build a
complete society.

In November, I traveled to Australia to meet Musa Cerantonio, a
30-year-old man whom Neumann and other researchers had identified as
one of the two most important "new spiritual authorities" guiding
foreigners to join the Islamic State. For three years he was a
televangelist on Iqraa TV in Cairo, but he left after the station
objected to his frequent calls to establish a caliphate. Now he
preaches on Facebook and Twitter.

Cerantonio—a big, friendly man with a bookish demeanor—told me he
blanches at beheading videos. He hates seeing the violence, even
though supporters of the Islamic State are required to endorse it. (He
speaks out, controversially among jihadists, against suicide bombing,
on the grounds that God forbids suicide; he differs from the Islamic
State on a few other points as well.) He has the kind of unkempt
facial hair one sees on certain overgrown fans of The Lord of the
Rings, and his obsession with Islamic apocalypticism felt familiar. He
seemed to be living out a drama that looks, from an outsider's
perspective, like a medieval fantasy novel, only with real blood.

Last June, Cerantonio and his wife tried to emigrate—he wouldn't say
to where ("It's illegal to go to Syria," he said cagily)—but they were
caught en route, in the Philippines, and he was deported back to
Australia for overstaying his visa. Australia has criminalized
attempts to join or travel to the Islamic State, and has confiscated
Cerantonio's passport. He is stuck in Melbourne, where he is well
known to the local constabulary. If Cerantonio were caught
facilitating the movement of individuals to the Islamic State, he
would be imprisoned. So far, though, he is free—a technically
unaffiliated ideologue who nonetheless speaks with what other
jihadists have taken to be a reliable voice on matters of the Islamic
State's doctrine.

We met for lunch in Footscray, a dense, multicultural Melbourne suburb
that's home to Lonely Planet, the travel-guide publisher. Cerantonio
grew up there in a half-Irish, half-Calabrian family. On a typical
street one can find African restaurants, Vietnamese shops, and young
Arabs walking around in the Salafi uniform of scraggly beard, long
shirt, and trousers ending halfway down the calves.

Cerantonio explained the joy he felt when Baghdadi was declared the
caliph on June 29—and the sudden, magnetic attraction that Mesopotamia
began to exert on him and his friends. "I was in a hotel [in the
Philippines], and I saw the declaration on television," he told me.
"And I was just amazed, and I'm like, Why am I stuck here in this
bloody room?"

The last caliphate was the Ottoman empire, which reached its peak in
the 16th century and then experienced a long decline, until the
founder of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, euthanized
it in 1924. But Cerantonio, like many supporters of the Islamic State,
doesn't acknowledge that caliphate as legitimate, because it didn't
fully enforce Islamic law, which requires stonings and slavery and
amputations, and because its caliphs were not descended from the tribe
of the Prophet, the Quraysh.

Baghdadi spoke at length of the importance of the caliphate in his
Mosul sermon. He said that to revive the institution of the
caliphate—which had not functioned except in name for about 1,000
years—was a communal obligation. He and his loyalists had "hastened to
declare the caliphate and place an imam" at its head, he said. "This
is a duty upon the Muslims—a duty that has been lost for centuries …
The Muslims sin by losing it, and they must always seek to establish
it." Like bin Laden before him, Baghdadi spoke floridly, with frequent
scriptural allusion and command of classical rhetoric. Unlike bin
Laden, and unlike those false caliphs of the Ottoman empire, he is
Qurayshi.

The caliphate, Cerantonio told me, is not just a political entity but
also a vehicle for salvation. Islamic State propaganda regularly
reports the pledges of baya'a (allegiance) rolling in from jihadist
groups across the Muslim world. Cerantonio quoted a Prophetic saying,
that to die without pledging allegiance is to die jahil (ignorant) and
therefore die a "death of disbelief." Consider how Muslims (or, for
that matter, Christians) imagine God deals with the souls of people
who die without learning about the one true religion. They are neither
obviously saved nor definitively condemned. Similarly, Cerantonio
said, the Muslim who acknowledges one omnipotent god and prays, but
who dies without pledging himself to a valid caliph and incurring the
obligations of that oath, has failed to live a fully Islamic life. I
pointed out that this means the vast majority of Muslims in history,
and all who passed away between 1924 and 2014, died a death of
disbelief. Cerantonio nodded gravely. "I would go so far as to say
that Islam has been reestablished" by the caliphate.

I asked him about his own baya'a, and he quickly corrected me: "I
didn't say that I'd pledged allegiance." Under Australian law, he
reminded me, giving baya'a to the Islamic State was illegal. "But I
agree that [Baghdadi] fulfills the requirements," he continued. "I'm
just going to wink at you, and you take that to mean whatever you
want."

To be the caliph, one must meet conditions outlined in Sunni law—being
a Muslim adult man of Quraysh descent; exhibiting moral probity and
physical and mental integrity; and having 'amr, or authority. This
last criterion, Cerantonio said, is the hardest to fulfill, and
requires that the caliph have territory in which he can enforce
Islamic law. Baghdadi's Islamic State achieved that long before June
29, Cerantonio said, and as soon as it did, a Western convert within
the group's ranks—Cerantonio described him as "something of a
leader"—began murmuring about the religious obligation to declare a
caliphate. He and others spoke quietly to those in power and told them
that further delay would be sinful.

Social-media posts from the Islamic State suggest that executions
happen more or less continually.

Cerantonio said a faction arose that was prepared to make war on
Baghdadi's group if it delayed any further. They prepared a letter to
various powerful members of ISIS, airing their displeasure at the
failure to appoint a caliph, but were pacified by Adnani, the
spokesman, who let them in on a secret—that a caliphate had already
been declared, long before the public announcement. They had their
legitimate caliph, and at that point there was only one option. "If
he's legitimate," Cerantonio said, "you must give him the baya'a."

After Baghdadi's July sermon, a stream of jihadists began flowing
daily into Syria with renewed motivation. Jürgen Todenhöfer, a German
author and former politician who visited the Islamic State in
December, reported the arrival of 100 fighters at one Turkish-border
recruitment station in just two days. His report, among others,
suggests a still-steady inflow of foreigners, ready to give up
everything at home for a shot at paradise in the worst place on Earth.

Bernard Haykel, the foremost secular authority on the Islamic State's
ideology, believes the group is trying to re-create the earliest days
of Islam and is faithfully reproducing its norms of war. "There is an
assiduous, obsessive seriousness" about the group's dedication to the
text of the Koran, he says. (Peter Murphy)

In London, a week before my meal with Cerantonio, I met with three
ex-members of a banned Islamist group called Al Muhajiroun (The
Emigrants): Anjem Choudary, Abu Baraa, and Abdul Muhid. They all
expressed desire to emigrate to the Islamic State, as many of their
colleagues already had, but the authorities had confiscated their
passports. Like Cerantonio, they regarded the caliphate as the only
righteous government on Earth, though none would confess having
pledged allegiance. Their principal goal in meeting me was to explain
what the Islamic State stands for, and how its policies reflect God's
law.

Choudary, 48, is the group's former leader. He frequently appears on
cable news, as one of the few people producers can book who will
defend the Islamic State vociferously, until his mike is cut. He has a
reputation in the United Kingdom as a loathsome blowhard, but he and
his disciples sincerely believe in the Islamic State and, on matters
of doctrine, speak in its voice. Choudary and the others feature
prominently in the Twitter feeds of Islamic State residents, and Abu
Baraa maintains a YouTube channel to answer questions about Sharia.

Since September, authorities have been investigating the three men on
suspicion of supporting terrorism. Because of this investigation, they
had to meet me separately: communication among them would have
violated the terms of their bail. But speaking with them felt like
speaking with the same person wearing different masks. Choudary met me
in a candy shop in the East London suburb of Ilford. He was dressed
smartly, in a crisp blue tunic reaching nearly to his ankles, and
sipped a Red Bull while we talked.

Before the caliphate, "maybe 85 percent of the Sharia was absent from
our lives," Choudary told me. "These laws are in abeyance until we
havekhilafa"—a caliphate—"and now we have one." Without a caliphate,
for example, individual vigilantes are not obliged to amputate the
hands of thieves they catch in the act. But create a caliphate, and
this law, along with a huge body of other jurisprudence, suddenly
awakens. In theory, all Muslims are obliged to immigrate to the
territory where the caliph is applying these laws. One of Choudary's
prize students, a convert from Hinduism named Abu Rumaysah, evaded
police to bring his family of five from London to Syria in November.
On the day I met Choudary, Abu Rumaysah tweeted out a picture of
himself with a Kalashnikov in one arm and his newborn son in the
other. Hashtag: #GenerationKhilafah.

The caliph is required to implement Sharia. Any deviation will compel
those who have pledged allegiance to inform the caliph in private of
his error and, in extreme cases, to excommunicate and replace him if
he persists. ("I have been plagued with this great matter, plagued
with this responsibility, and it is a heavy responsibility," Baghdadi
said in his sermon.) In return, the caliph commands obedience—and
those who persist in supporting non-Muslim governments, after being
duly warned and educated about their sin, are considered apostates.

Choudary said Sharia has been misunderstood because of its incomplete
application by regimes such as Saudi Arabia, which does behead
murderers and cut off thieves' hands. "The problem," he explained, "is
that when places like Saudi Arabia just implement the penal code, and
don't provide the social and economic justice of the Sharia—the whole
package—they simply engender hatred toward the Sharia." That whole
package, he said, would include free housing, food, and clothing for
all, though of course anyone who wished to enrich himself with work
could do so.

Abdul Muhid, 32, continued along these lines. He was dressed in
mujahideen chic when I met him at a local restaurant: scruffy beard,
Afghan cap, and a wallet outside of his clothes, attached with what
looked like a shoulder holster. When we sat down, he was eager to
discuss welfare. The Islamic State may have medieval-style punishments
for moral crimes (lashes for boozing or fornication, stoning for
adultery), but its social-welfare program is, at least in some
aspects, progressive to a degree that would please an MSNBC pundit.
Health care, he said, is free. ("Isn't it free in Britain, too?," I
asked. "Not really," he said. "Some procedures aren't covered, such as
vision.") This provision of social welfare was not, he said, a policy
choice of the Islamic State, but a policy obligation inherent in God's
law.

Anjem Choudary, London's most notorious defender of the Islamic State,
says crucifixion and beheading are sacred requirements. (Tal
Cohen/Reuters)

III. The Apocalypse

All Muslims acknowledge that God is the only one who knows the future.
But they also agree that he has offered us a peek at it, in the Koran
and in narrations of the Prophet. The Islamic State differs from
nearly every other current jihadist movement in believing that it is
written into God's script as a central character. It is in this
casting that the Islamic State is most boldly distinctive from its
predecessors, and clearest in the religious nature of its mission.

In broad strokes, al-Qaeda acts like an underground political
movement, with worldly goals in sight at all times—the expulsion of
non-Muslims from the Arabian peninsula, the abolishment of the state
of Israel, the end of support for dictatorships in Muslim lands. The
Islamic State has its share of worldly concerns (including, in the
places it controls, collecting garbage and keeping the water running),
but the End of Days is a leitmotif of its propaganda. Bin Laden rarely
mentioned the apocalypse, and when he did, he seemed to presume that
he would be long dead when the glorious moment of divine comeuppance
finally arrived. "Bin Laden and Zawahiri are from elite Sunni families
who look down on this kind of speculation and think it's something the
masses engage in," says Will McCants of the Brookings Institution, who
is writing a book about the Islamic State's apocalyptic thought.

During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic
State's immediate founding fathers, by contrast, saw signs of the end
times everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival
of the Mahdi—a messianic figure destined to lead the Muslims to
victory before the end of the world. McCants says a prominent Islamist
in Iraq approached bin Laden in 2008 to warn him that the group was
being led by millenarians who were "talking all the time about the
Mahdi and making strategic decisions" based on when they thought the
Mahdi was going to arrive. "Al-Qaeda had to write to [these leaders]
to say 'Cut it out.' "

For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil
battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological
need. Of the Islamic State supporters I met, Musa Cerantonio, the
Australian, expressed the deepest interest in the apocalypse and how
the remaining days of the Islamic State—and the world—might look.
Parts of that prediction are original to him, and do not yet have the
status of doctrine. But other parts are based on mainstream Sunni
sources and appear all over the Islamic State's propaganda. These
include the belief that there will be only 12 legitimate caliphs, and
Baghdadi is the eighth; that the armies of Rome will mass to meet the
armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam's final showdown
with an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed
Islamic conquest.

The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of
Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town,
and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq's
strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly
said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of
Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome's Waterloo or its
Antietam.

"Dabiq is basically all farmland," one Islamic State supporter
recently tweeted. "You could imagine large battles taking place
there." The Islamic State's propagandists drool with anticipation of
this event, and constantly imply that it will come soon. The state's
magazine quotes Zarqawi as saying, "The spark has been lit here in
Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify … until it burns the
crusader armies in Dabiq." A recent propaganda video shows clips from
Hollywood war movies set in medieval times—perhaps because many of the
prophecies specify that the armies will be on horseback or carrying
ancient weapons.

Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of
an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the
apocalypse. Western media frequently miss references to Dabiq in the
Islamic State's videos, and focus instead on lurid scenes of
beheading. "Here we are, burying the first American crusader in Dabiq,
eagerly waiting for the remainder of your armies to arrive," said a
masked executioner in a November video, showing the severed head of
Peter (Abdul Rahman) Kassig, the aid worker who'd been held captive
for more than a year. During fighting in Iraq in December, after
mujahideen (perhaps inaccurately) reported having seen American
soldiers in battle, Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms
of pleasure, like overenthusiastic hosts or hostesses upon the arrival
of the first guests at a party.

The Prophetic narration that foretells the Dabiq battle refers to the
enemy as Rome. Who "Rome" is, now that the pope has no army, remains a
matter of debate. But Cerantonio makes a case that Rome meant the
Eastern Roman empire, which had its capital in what is now Istanbul.
We should think of Rome as the Republic of Turkey—the same republic
that ended the last self-identified caliphate, 90 years ago. Other
Islamic State sources suggest that Rome might mean any infidel army,
and the Americans will do nicely.

After mujahideen reported having seen American soldiers in battle,
Islamic State Twitter accounts erupted in spasms of pleasure, like
overenthusiastic hosts upon the arrival of the first guests at a
party.

After its battle in Dabiq, Cerantonio said, the caliphate will expand
and sack Istanbul. Some believe it will then cover the entire Earth,
but Cerantonio suggested its tide may never reach beyond the Bosporus.
An anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal,
will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast
number of the caliphate's fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered
in Jerusalem. Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the
second-most-revered prophet in Islam—will return to Earth, spear
Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.

"Only God knows" whether the Islamic State's armies are the ones
foretold, Cerantonio said. But he is hopeful. "The Prophet said that
one sign of the imminent arrival of the End of Days is that people
will for a long while stop talking about the End of Days," he said.
"If you go to the mosques now, you'll find the preachers are silent
about this subject." On this theory, even setbacks dealt to the
Islamic State mean nothing, since God has preordained the
near-destruction of his people anyway. The Islamic State has its best
and worst days ahead of it.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was declared caliph by his followers last summer.
The establishment of a caliphate awakened large sections of Koranic
law that had lain dormant, and required those Muslims who recognized
the caliphate to immigrate. (Associated Press)

IV. The Fight

The ideological purity of the Islamic State has one compensating
virtue: it allows us to predict some of the group's actions. Osama bin
Laden was seldom predictable. He ended his first television interview
cryptically. CNN's Peter Arnett asked him, "What are your future
plans?" Bin Laden replied, "You'll see them and hear about them in the
media, God willing." By contrast, the Islamic State boasts openly
about its plans—not all of them, but enough so that by listening
carefully, we can deduce how it intends to govern and expand.

In London, Choudary and his students provided detailed descriptions of
how the Islamic State must conduct its foreign policy, now that it is
a caliphate. It has already taken up what Islamic law refers to as
"offensive jihad," the forcible expansion into countries that are
ruled by non-Muslims. "Hitherto, we were just defending ourselves,"
Choudary said; without a caliphate, offensive jihad is an inapplicable
concept. But the waging of war to expand the caliphate is an essential
duty of the caliph.

Choudary took pains to present the laws of war under which the Islamic
State operates as policies of mercy rather than of brutality. He told
me the state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies—a holy order
to scare the shit out of them with beheadings and crucifixions and
enslavement of women and children, because doing so hastens victory
and avoids prolonged conflict.

Choudary's colleague Abu Baraa explained that Islamic law permits only
temporary peace treaties, lasting no longer than a decade. Similarly,
accepting any border is anathema, as stated by the Prophet and echoed
in the Islamic State's propaganda videos. If the caliph consents to a
longer-term peace or permanent border, he will be in error. Temporary
peace treaties are renewable, but may not be applied to all enemies at
once: the caliph must wage jihad at least once a year. He may not
rest, or he will fall into a state of sin.

One comparison to the Islamic State is the Khmer Rouge, which killed
about a third of the population of Cambodia. But the Khmer Rouge
occupied Cambodia's seat at the United Nations. "This is not
permitted," Abu Baraa said. "To send an ambassador to the UN is to
recognize an authority other than God's." This form of diplomacy is
shirk, or polytheism, he argued, and would be immediate cause to
hereticize and replace Baghdadi. Even to hasten the arrival of a
caliphate by democratic means—for example by voting for political
candidates who favor a caliphate—is shirk.

It's hard to overstate how hamstrung the Islamic State will be by its
radicalism. The modern international system, born of the 1648 Peace of
Westphalia, relies on each state's willingness to recognize borders,
however grudgingly. For the Islamic State, that recognition is
ideological suicide. Other Islamist groups, such as the Muslim
Brotherhood and Hamas, have succumbed to the blandishments of
democracy and the potential for an invitation to the community of
nations, complete with a UN seat. Negotiation and accommodation have
worked, at times, for the Taliban as well. (Under Taliban rule,
Afghanistan exchanged ambassadors with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the
United Arab Emirates, an act that invalidated the Taliban's authority
in the Islamic State's eyes.) To the Islamic State these are not
options, but acts of apostasy.

The United States and its allies have reacted to the Islamic State
belatedly and in an apparent daze. The group's ambitions and rough
strategic blueprints were evident in its pronouncements and in
social-media chatter as far back as 2011, when it was just one of many
terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq and hadn't yet committed mass
atrocities. Adnani, the spokesman, told followers then that the
group's ambition was to "restore the Islamic caliphate," and he evoked
the apocalypse, saying, "There are but a few days left." Baghdadi had
already styled himself "commander of the faithful," a title ordinarily
reserved for caliphs, in 2011. In April 2013, Adnani declared the
movement "ready to redraw the world upon the Prophetic methodology of
the caliphate." In August 2013, he said, "Our goal is to establish an
Islamic state that doesn't recognize borders, on the Prophetic
methodology." By then, the group had taken Raqqa, a Syrian provincial
capital of perhaps 500,000 people, and was drawing in substantial
numbers of foreign fighters who'd heard its message.

If we had identified the Islamic State's intentions early, and
realized that the vacuum in Syria and Iraq would give it ample space
to carry them out, we might, at a minimum, have pushed Iraq to harden
its border with Syria and preemptively make deals with its Sunnis.
That would at least have avoided the electrifying propaganda effect
created by the declaration of a caliphate just after the conquest of
Iraq's third-largest city. Yet, just over a year ago, Obama told The
New Yorker that he considered ISIS to be al-Qaeda's weaker partner.
"If a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn't make them Kobe
Bryant," the president said.

Our failure to appreciate the split between the Islamic State and
al-Qaeda, and the essential differences between the two, has led to
dangerous decisions. Last fall, to take one example, the U.S.
government consented to a desperate plan to save Peter Kassig's life.
The plan facilitated—indeed, required—the interaction of some of the
founding figures of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and could hardly
have looked more hastily improvised.

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly
bleed it appears the best of bad military options.

It entailed the enlistment of Abu Muhammad al Maqdisi, the Zarqawi
mentor and al-Qaeda grandee, to approach Turki al-Binali, the Islamic
State's chief ideologue and a former student of Maqdisi's, even though
the two men had fallen out due to Maqdisi's criticism of the Islamic
State. Maqdisi had already called for the state to extend mercy to
Alan Henning, the British cabbie who had entered Syria to deliver aid
to children. In December, The Guardian reported that the U.S.
government, through an intermediary, had asked Maqdisi to intercede
with the Islamic State on Kassig's behalf.

Maqdisi was living freely in Jordan, but had been banned from
communicating with terrorists abroad, and was being monitored closely.
After Jordan granted the United States permission to reintroduce
Maqdisi to Binali, Maqdisi bought a phone with American money and was
allowed to correspond merrily with his former student for a few days,
before the Jordanian government stopped the chats and used them as a
pretext to jail Maqdisi. Kassig's severed head appeared in the Dabiq
video a few days later.

Maqdisi gets mocked roundly on Twitter by the Islamic State's fans,
and al‑Qaeda is held in great contempt for refusing to acknowledge the
caliphate. Cole Bunzel, a scholar who studies Islamic State ideology,
read Maqdisi's opinion on Henning's status and thought it would hasten
his and other captives' death. "If I were held captive by the Islamic
State and Maqdisi said I shouldn't be killed," he told me, "I'd kiss
my ass goodbye."

Kassig's death was a tragedy, but the plan's success would have been a
bigger one. A reconciliation between Maqdisi and Binali would have
begun to heal the main rift between the world's two largest jihadist
organizations. It's possible that the government wanted only to draw
out Binali for intelligence purposes or assassination. (Multiple
attempts to elicit comment from the FBI were unsuccessful.)
Regardless, the decision to play matchmaker for America's two main
terrorist antagonists reveals astonishingly poor judgment.

Chastened by our earlier indifference, we are now meeting the Islamic
State via Kurdish and Iraqi proxy on the battlefield, and with regular
air assaults. Those strategies haven't dislodged the Islamic State
from any of its major territorial possessions, although they've kept
it from directly assaulting Baghdad and Erbil and slaughtering Shia
and Kurds there.

Some observers have called for escalation, including several
predictable voices from the interventionist right (Max Boot, Frederick
Kagan), who have urged the deployment of tens of thousands of American
soldiers. These calls should not be dismissed too quickly: an avowedly
genocidal organization is on its potential victims' front lawn, and it
is committing daily atrocities in the territory it already controls.

One way to un-cast the Islamic State's spell over its adherents would
be to overpower it militarily and occupy the parts of Syria and Iraq
now under caliphate rule. Al‑Qaeda is ineradicable because it can
survive, cockroach-like, by going underground. The Islamic State
cannot. If it loses its grip on its territory in Syria and Iraq, it
will cease to be a caliphate. Caliphates cannot exist as underground
movements, because territorial authority is a requirement: take away
its command of territory, and all those oaths of allegiance are no
longer binding. Former pledges could of course continue to attack the
West and behead their enemies, as freelancers. But the propaganda
value of the caliphate would disappear, and with it the supposed
religious duty to immigrate and serve it. If the United States were to
invade, the Islamic State's obsession with battle at Dabiq suggests
that it might send vast resources there, as if in a conventional
battle. If the state musters at Dabiq in full force, only to be
routed, it might never recover.

Abu Baraa, who maintains a YouTube channel about Islamic law, says the
caliph, Baghdadi, cannot negotiate or recognize borders, and must
continually make war, or he will remove himself from Islam.

And yet the risks of escalation are enormous. The biggest proponent of
an American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative
videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama
by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion
would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide:
irrespective of whether they have givenbaya'a to the caliph, they all
believe that the United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade
and kill Muslims. Yet another invasion and occupation would confirm
that suspicion, and bolster recruitment. Add the incompetence of our
previous efforts as occupiers, and we have reason for reluctance. The
rise of ISIS, after all, happened only because our previous occupation
created space for Zarqawi and his followers. Who knows the
consequences of another botched job?

Given everything we know about the Islamic State, continuing to slowly
bleed it, through air strikes and proxy warfare, appears the best of
bad military options. Neither the Kurds nor the Shia will ever subdue
and control the whole Sunni heartland of Syria and Iraq—they are hated
there, and have no appetite for such an adventure anyway. But they can
keep the Islamic State from fulfilling its duty to expand. And with
every month that it fails to expand, it resembles less the conquering
state of the Prophet Muhammad than yet another Middle Eastern
government failing to bring prosperity to its people.

The humanitarian cost of the Islamic State's existence is high. But
its threat to the United States is smaller than its all too frequent
conflation with al-Qaeda would suggest. Al-Qaeda's core is rare among
jihadist groups for its focus on the "far enemy" (the West); most
jihadist groups' main concerns lie closer to home. That's especially
true of the Islamic State, precisely because of its ideology. It sees
enemies everywhere around it, and while its leadership wishes ill on
the United States, the application of Sharia in the caliphate and the
expansion to contiguous lands are paramount. Baghdadi has said as much
directly: in November he told his Saudi agents to "deal with the
rafida [Shia] first … then al-Sulul [Sunni supporters of the Saudi
monarchy] … before the crusaders and their bases."

Musa Cerantonio and Anjem Choudary could mentally shift from
contemplating mass death to discussing the virtues of Vietnamese
coffee, with apparent delight in each.

The foreign fighters (and their wives and children) have been
traveling to the caliphate on one-way tickets: they want to live under
true Sharia, and many want martyrdom. Doctrine, recall, requires
believers to reside in the caliphate if it is at all possible for them
to do so. One of the Islamic State's less bloody videos shows a group
of jihadists burning their French, British, and Australian passports.
This would be an eccentric act for someone intending to return to blow
himself up in line at the Louvre or to hold another chocolate shop
hostage in Sydney.

A few "lone wolf" supporters of the Islamic State have attacked
Western targets, and more attacks will come. But most of the attackers
have been frustrated amateurs, unable to immigrate to the caliphate
because of confiscated passports or other problems. Even if the
Islamic State cheers these attacks—and it does in its propaganda—it
hasn't yet planned and financed one. (The Charlie Hebdo attack in
Paris in January was principally an al‑Qaeda operation.) During his
visit to Mosul in December, Jürgen Todenhöfer interviewed a portly
German jihadist and asked whether any of his comrades had returned to
Europe to carry out attacks. The jihadist seemed to regard returnees
not as soldiers but as dropouts. "The fact is that the returnees from
the Islamic State should repent from their return," he said. "I hope
they review their religion."

Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing.
No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain
the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited
and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the
engine of God's will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and
fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it
leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No
one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is
what it looks like.

Even so, the death of the Islamic State is unlikely to be quick, and
things could still go badly wrong: if the Islamic State obtained the
allegiance of al‑Qaeda—increasing, in one swoop, the unity of its
base—it could wax into a worse foe than we've yet seen. The rift
between the Islamic State and al-Qaeda has, if anything, grown in the
past few months; the December issue of Dabiq featured a long account
of an al‑Qaeda defector who described his old group as corrupt and
ineffectual, and Zawahiri as a distant and unfit leader. But we should
watch carefully for a rapprochement.

Without a catastrophe such as this, however, or perhaps the threat of
the Islamic State's storming Erbil, a vast ground invasion would
certainly make the situation worse.

V. Dissuasion

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.

Non-muslims cannot tell Muslims how to practice their religion
properly. But Muslims have long since begun this debate within their
own ranks. "You have to have standards," Anjem Choudary told me.
"Somebody could claim to be a Muslim, but if he believes in
homosexuality or drinking alcohol, then he is not a Muslim. There is
no such thing as a nonpracticing vegetarian."

There is, however, another strand of Islam that offers a hard-line
alternative to the Islamic State—just as uncompromising, but with
opposite conclusions. This strand has proved appealing to many Muslims
cursed or blessed with a psychological longing to see every jot and
tittle of the holy texts implemented as they were in the earliest days
of Islam. Islamic State supporters know how to react to Muslims who
ignore parts of the Koran: with takfir and ridicule. But they also
know that some other Muslims read the Koran as assiduously as they do,
and pose a real ideological threat.

Baghdadi is Salafi. The term Salafi has been villainized, in part
because authentic villains have ridden into battle waving the Salafi
banner. But most Salafis are not jihadists, and most adhere to sects
that reject the Islamic State. They are, as Haykel notes, committed to
expanding Dar al-Islam, the land of Islam, even, perhaps, with the
implementation of monstrous practices such as slavery and
amputation—but at some future point. Their first priority is personal
purification and religious observance, and they believe anything that
thwarts those goals—such as causing war or unrest that would disrupt
lives and prayer and scholarship—is forbidden.

They live among us. Last fall, I visited the Philadelphia mosque of
Breton Pocius, 28, a Salafi imam who goes by the name Abdullah. His
mosque is on the border between the crime-ridden Northern Liberties
neighborhood and a gentrifying area that one might call Dar
al-Hipster; his beard allows him to pass in the latter zone almost
unnoticed.

A theological alternative to the Islamic State exists—just as
uncompromising, but with opposite conclusions.

Pocius converted 15 years ago after a Polish Catholic upbringing in
Chicago. Like Cerantonio, he talks like an old soul, exhibiting deep
familiarity with ancient texts, and a commitment to them motivated by
curiosity and scholarship, and by a conviction that they are the only
way to escape hellfire. When I met him at a local coffee shop, he
carried a work of Koranic scholarship in Arabic and a book for
teaching himself Japanese. He was preparing a sermon on the
obligations of fatherhood for the 150 or so worshipers in his Friday
congregation.

Pocius said his main goal is to encourage a halal life for worshipers
in his mosque. But the rise of the Islamic State has forced him to
consider political questions that are usually very far from the minds
of Salafis. "Most of what they'll say about how to pray and how to
dress is exactly what I'll say in my masjid [mosque]. But when they
get to questions about social upheaval, they sound like Che Guevara."

When Baghdadi showed up, Pocius adopted the slogan "Not my khalifa."
"The times of the Prophet were a time of great bloodshed," he told me,
"and he knew that the worst possible condition for all people was
chaos, especially within the umma [Muslim community]." Accordingly,
Pocius said, the correct attitude for Salafis is not to sow discord by
factionalizing and declaring fellow Muslims apostates.

Instead, Pocius—like a majority of Salafis—believes that Muslims
should remove themselves from politics. These quietist Salafis, as
they are known, agree with the Islamic State that God's law is the
only law, and they eschew practices like voting and the creation of
political parties. But they interpret the Koran's hatred of discord
and chaos as requiring them to fall into line with just about any
leader, including some manifestly sinful ones. "The Prophet said: as
long as the ruler does not enter into clear kufr[disbelief], give him
general obedience," Pocius told me, and the classic "books of creed"
all warn against causing social upheaval. Quietist Salafis are
strictly forbidden from dividing Muslims from one another—for example,
by mass excommunication. Living without baya'a, Pocius said, does
indeed make one ignorant, or benighted. But baya'a need not mean
direct allegiance to a caliph, and certainly not to Abu Bakr
al‑Baghdadi. It can mean, more broadly, allegiance to a religious
social contract and commitment to a society of Muslims, whether ruled
by a caliph or not.

Quietist Salafis believe that Muslims should direct their energies
toward perfecting their personal life, including prayer, ritual, and
hygiene. Much in the same way ultra-Orthodox Jews debate whether it's
kosher to tear off squares of toilet paper on the Sabbath (does that
count as "rending cloth"?), they spend an inordinate amount of time
ensuring that their trousers are not too long, that their beards are
trimmed in some areas and shaggy in others. Through this fastidious
observance, they believe, God will favor them with strength and
numbers, and perhaps a caliphate will arise. At that moment, Muslims
will take vengeance and, yes, achieve glorious victory at Dabiq. But
Pocius cites a slew of modern Salafi theologians who argue that a
caliphate cannot come into being in a righteous way except through the
unmistakable will of God.

The Islamic State, of course, would agree, and say that God has
anointed Baghdadi. Pocius's retort amounts to a call to humility. He
cites Abdullah Ibn Abbas, one of the Prophet's companions, who sat
down with dissenters and asked them how they had the gall, as a
minority, to tell the majority that it was wrong. Dissent itself, to
the point of bloodshed or splitting theumma, was forbidden. Even the
manner of the establishment of Baghdadi's caliphate runs contrary to
expectation, he said. "The khilafa is something that Allah is going to
establish," he told me, "and it will involve a consensus of scholars
from Mecca and Medina. That is not what happened. ISIS came out of
nowhere."

The Islamic State loathes this talk, and its fanboys tweet derisively
about quietist Salafis. They mock them as "Salafis of menstruation,"
for their obscure judgments about when women are and aren't clean, and
other low-priority aspects of life. "What we need now is fatwa about
how it's haram [forbidden] to ride a bike on Jupiter," one tweeted
drily. "That's what scholars should focus on. More pressing than state
of Ummah." Anjem Choudary, for his part, says that no sin merits more
vigorous opposition than the usurpation of God's law, and that
extremism in defense of monotheism is no vice.

Pocius doesn't court any kind of official support from the United
States, as a counterweight to jihadism. Indeed, official support would
tend to discredit him, and in any case he is bitter toward America for
treating him, in his words, as "less than a citizen." (He alleges that
the government paid spies to infiltrate his mosque and harassed his
mother at work with questions about his being a potential terrorist.)

Still, his quietist Salafism offers an Islamic antidote to
Baghdadi-style jihadism. The people who arrive at the faith spoiling
for a fight cannot all be stopped from jihadism, but those whose main
motivation is to find an ultraconservative, uncompromising version of
Islam have an alternative here. It is not moderate Islam; most Muslims
would consider it extreme. It is, however, a form of Islam that the
literal-minded would not instantly find hypocritical, or blasphemously
purged of its inconveniences. Hypocrisy is not a sin that
ideologically minded young men tolerate well.

Western officials would probably do best to refrain from weighing in
on matters of Islamic theological debate altogether. Barack Obama
himself drifted into takfiri waters when he claimed that the Islamic
State was "not Islamic"—the irony being that he, as the non-Muslim son
of a Muslim, may himself be classified as an apostate, and yet is now
practicing takfiragainst Muslims. Non-Muslims' practicing takfir
elicits chuckles from jihadists ("Like a pig covered in feces giving
hygiene advice to others," one tweeted).

I suspect that most Muslims appreciated Obama's sentiment: the
president was standing with them against both Baghdadi and non-Muslim
chauvinists trying to implicate them in crimes. But most Muslims
aren'tsusceptible to joining jihad. The ones who are susceptible will
only have had their suspicions confirmed: the United States lies about
religion to serve its purposes.

Within the narrow bounds of its theology, the Islamic State hums with
energy, even creativity. Outside those bounds, it could hardly be more
arid and silent: a vision of life as obedience, order, and destiny.
Musa Cerantonio and Anjem Choudary could mentally shift from
contemplating mass death and eternal torture to discussing the virtues
of Vietnamese coffee or treacly pastry, with apparent delight in each,
yet to me it seemed that to embrace their views would be to see all
the flavors of this world grow insipid compared with the vivid
grotesqueries of the hereafter.

I could enjoy their company, as a guilty intellectual exercise, up to
a point. In reviewing Mein Kampf in March 1940, George Orwell
confessed that he had "never been able to dislike Hitler"; something
about the man projected an underdog quality, even when his goals were
cowardly or loathsome. "If he were killing a mouse he would know how
to make it seem like a dragon." The Islamic State's partisans have
much the same allure. They believe that they are personally involved
in struggles beyond their own lives, and that merely to be swept up in
the drama, on the side of righteousness, is a privilege and a
pleasure—especially when it is also a burden.

Fascism, Orwell continued, is

psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life …
Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have
said to people "I offer you a good time," Hitler has said to them, "I
offer you struggle, danger, and death," and as a result a whole nation
flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional
appeal.

Nor, in the case of the Islamic State, its religious or intellectual
appeal. That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfillment of
prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our
opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to
remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine
succor if it stays true to the Prophetic model. Ideological tools may
convince some potential converts that the group's message is false,
and military tools can limit its horrors. But for an organization as
impervious to persuasion as the Islamic State, few measures short of
these will matter, and the war may be a long one, even if it doesn't
last until the end of time.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/