Stephen Kinzer wrote in the Boston Globe even before the killing of al-Kaseasbeh: ‘By cleverly using grotesque theatrics, the Islamic State seems to be achieving its goal of luring the US back into war. It knows that the presence of American soldiers in the Middle East will attract more radicals and misguided idealists to its cause. For many of these young men and women, fighting Kurds or Shiite militias may not seem especially glorious. To face the mighty US on Middle Eastern soil, and if possible to kill an American or die at American hands, is their dream. We are giving them a chance to realize it. Through its impressive mastery of social media, the Islamic State is already using our escalation as a recruiting tool.’
It is not possible to generalize with any accuracy what individual ISIS fighters, supporters, or allies – reluctant or otherwise – think or believe. Many of those who support or even join ISIS appear to be motivated as much by diverse combinations of political, personal, or economic reasons as they are by adherence to any specific theological framework. For some, the humiliation of foreign occupation, the indignity of repressive rulers and the sense of disenfranchisement from one’s own country play key motivating roles. We may never know exactly what each of those supporters believes. But the views of the leadership and the official positions of the organization are important for understanding who they are and why they act as they do – not to justify or apologize for its actions but precisely to figure out strategies that could actually work to stop its brutality, undermine its influence, and win its supporters away.
One way of defining what ISIS believes is to examine what distinguishes the group from its closest spiritual cousin and forebear, al-Qaeda, and the jihadi organizations still tied to al-Qaeda. Those distinctions include the nature of the ‘caliphate’ that al-Qaeda supports and ISIS has declared, the role and legitimacy of government, and – crucial to understand given the horrific brutality that characterizes ISIS – the role and purpose of violence.
When ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself the caliph, or leader, of his just-announced Islamic state, or caliphate, in June 2014, he was claiming a direct linkage to a much older religious/political position of power. The last caliphate was dissolved by the newly secular Turkish Republic in 1924 following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. Like earlier Islamist organizations, including al-Qaeda, ISIS had already been advocating the idea of rebuilding the original caliphate, a term for the territory ruled by an Islamic leader, which came into use following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. But, unlike al-Qaeda, ISIS actually went ahead and acted to create a caliphate. The Islamic State declared by ISIS would be built in an undefined swath of the Arab world and perhaps beyond, beginning with the territory ISIS already controlled across Syria and Iraq. But its call for all Muslims and Islamist organizations to pledge fealty to al-Baghdadi as the new caliph was seen as a direct challenge, especially to al-Qaeda, which had already been feuding with ISIS over both political and religious differences.
A major point of divergence was precisely on the question of whether the caliphate could be declared now, today, as ISIS claimed, or whether it was a goal to be sought in the future, as al-Qaeda’s leaders had long asserted. Part of that question has to do with whether the legitimacy of a caliphate requires its collective approval by Muslim scholars, or even the umma, or Muslim community as a whole, or whether an individual Muslim leader can simply proclaim a caliphate as his own.
As the New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick described the two sides: ‘Al-Qaeda’s ideologues have been more vehement. All insist that the promised caliphate requires a broad consensus, on behalf of Muslim scholars if not all Muslims, and not merely one man’s proclamation after a military victory. “Will this caliphate be a sanctuary for all the oppressed and a refuge for every Muslim?” Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a senior jihadist scholar, recently asked in a statement on the internet. “Or will this creation take a sword against all the Muslims who oppose it” and “nullify all the groups that do jihad in the name of God?”’
Another point of disagreement between al-Qaeda and ISIS has to do with government. When the original caliphate, which held both religious and governing power, was dismantled in 1924, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was the first Islamist organization to emerge in that new period. Its goal was to contend for political power with the new secular forces rising in the Islamic world.
The Muslim Brotherhood became the model for generations of Islamist organizations that followed, engaging in political struggles – sometimes armed, often not – to win political power. But supporters of the most literal Wahhabi traditions refused to support any secular government; they recognized only the caliphate itself as holding legitimate power. All others, anyone who supported a secular or even religious government, would be considered a traitor, often sentenced to death. This shapes the antagonism of ISIS to organizations like today’s Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the democratic Islamist Ennahda Party in Tunisia, Hamas in Palestine, and others, and it forms much of the basis of the split between ISIS and al-Qaeda itself.
Al-Qaeda, of course, never attempted to govern on its own. Its goals had to do with overthrowing governments, particularly the Saudi monarchy, which it deemed insufficiently pious and too corrupt to be worthy of support. But it didn’t try to create a replacement government. When al-Qaeda took refuge in Afghanistan in the 1990s, it did nothing to challenge the Taliban government, nor to attempt any efforts to rule anywhere in the country.
But ISIS – having swept through and captured huge swaths of territory in both Iraq and Syria, including large cities with a population estimated at five to six million people – now has to figure out how to govern in the modern world. However medieval its ideology, this urgency explains the group’s efforts to recruit doctors, engineers, teachers and other professionals, and to bribe and threaten local experts into remaining on the job. ISIS officials need to find people able to keep the electricity on and the water clean and flowing, to keep hospitals open and medicine accessible. That means money, which means increasing efforts to sell oil, mostly though not entirely on the black market, from oil-producing areas under its control, and to raise other funds through taxes on businesses under its authority, along with extortion and kidnappings for ransom.
Al-Qaeda could concentrate on carrying out acts of violence aimed at destroying ungodly governments; ISIS needs to govern. And it may be that over time, the inability to provide ordinary people caught in ISIS-controlled territory with the ordinary requirements of life – jobs, electricity, schools, water, food, doctors – may lead to its collapse.
Finally there is a significant divide regarding the use of violence. It’s not quite accurate to claim, as many in the media did, that al-Qaeda broke with ISIS because it was ‘too violent’. The conflict is less over the amount or nature of the violence than it is about the purpose and the chosen victims. The essential al-Qaeda critique, in a sense, is not that ISIS was ‘too violent’ but that it used violence for the wrong reasons against too many Muslims.
For al-Qaeda, violence was primarily understood as necessary to overthrow heretical, or insufficiently devout governments – starting with Saudi Arabia because the monarchy there has power over the holiest shrines of Islam – and those governments that keep them in power, most notably the US. ISIS looked back to an earlier tradition. Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel describes ISIS as relying on ‘a kind of untamed Wahhabism’ that saw violence as having a much more privileged position.
As the New York Times describes it, ‘al-Qaeda grew out of a radical tradition that viewed Muslim states and societies as having fallen into sinful unbelief, and embraced violence as a tool to redeem them. But the Wahhabi tradition embraced the killing of those deemed unbelievers as essential to purifying the community of the faithful.’ That is the ISIS approach. Haykel described how ‘violence is part of their ideology. For al-Qaeda, violence is a means to an end; for ISIS, it is an end in itself.’
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