10/1/17

Journalists, politicians, and scholars in the west have been engaged in what has sometimes been a very impassioned debate over the degree to which ISIS (The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) is truly “Islamic.” Some say that jihadi groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda have hijacked a peaceful religion in order to further their own ambitions for power and influence, while others say that jihadi groups are simply following what they believe to be the straight path of Islam or the “prophetic method,” and that politics and external factors have little to do with jihadi ambitions.

I believe that, as with most complex issues, ISIS’s status as “Islamic” is not so black and white (no flag puns intended). The answer to the question of ISIS’s Islamic legitimacy likely lies somewhere in the middle of the juxtapositions above.

Many in the west like to paint the Islamic State as un-Islamic. While this is an understandable response designed to protect peaceful Muslims, it also has the propensity to confuse the West's understanding of ISIS, its goals, its appeal, and its strengths and weaknesses.

Rather than being completely un-Islamic, ISIS (and al-Qaeda) subscribe to a very radical version of a small movement in Sunni Islam called Salafism. Salafists consider their version of Islam, which involves emulation of the early followers of the prophet Muhammed, to be the one and only pure, uncorrupted way of observing the faith. Salafism manifests itself in many ways. Most Salafists are peaceful and agree that only Allah can declare a Muslim to be an unbeliever through a process called takfir. Some Salafists, however, fall into a group called jihadi Salafists. Jihadi Salafists believe that a man’s actions alone are enough to justify a declaration of takfir, and that a declaration of takfir spells not only excommunication from Islam, but also a death sentence. This fringe interpretation justifies the killing of any non-Salafis, and is the core of jihadi-Salafist belief.

Salafists and, by extension, jihadi Salafists are typically very strict about Islamic doctrine and feel that religious justification must be present for anything that they do. The two main ways that respected Islamic scholars obtain religious justification are through the Quran and hadith. Hadith are stories of the prophet Muhammed and his early followers that have been passed down through many generations. The problem with hadith it is incredibly hard to determine the factual accuracy of these stories. Many hadiths appear to be contradictory, as well, which leaves Islam and Islamic law up to a good deal of scholarly interpretation. In a manner of speaking, ISIS has taken advantage of this ambiguity in order to cherry-pick religious justification for what most Muslims see as unspeakable crimes against humanity and even gross religious infractions. This being said, the fact that jihadi Salafists are able to provide religious justification for their brutality through the use of hadith and scholarly interpretation, and the fact that ISIS refuses to do anything that lacks religious justification (like sending an ambassador to the UN or recognizing permanent borders), means that—in my opinion at least—ISIS cannot be regarded as completely un-Islamic.

While jihadi Salafism is rooted in Islamic hadith and therefore can be deemed Islamic, the main factors for this ideology’s explosion in popularity arguably have nothing to do with Islam at all. In my view, jihadi Salafism and ISIS in particular has gained popularity mainly due to external factors. It is well known that the middle east has been war-torn for a long time, with on-and-off conflict ever since the soviet occupation of Afghanistan. This conflict, combined with poor leadership and corrupt governments like the Assad regime in Syria have effectively stopped economic growth. According to Business Insider and a 2016 BMI economic analysis, “the Syrian economy will contract by an average of 3.9% annually from 2016 to 2019.” These economic conditions are common in the middle east and make finding a job nearly impossible. This leaves many Sunnis trapped in warzones, without jobs or even at times reliable methods of finding food.

It seems to me that these and many other environmental elements have contributed to the appeal of ISIS much more than following religious obligation has. Sunnis that have felt marginalized and oppressed for years probably feel that they have an opportunity to fight back with the Islamic State and establish a place where Sunnis can be free from the corrupt governments that have oppressed them. ISIS’s call to return to a time when Muslims were prosperous strikes a chord with disaffected Sunnis and ISIS’s signalings of the apocalypse (a massive war against unbelievers in a town called Dabiq prophesized to take place at the end of days) make sense to Sunnis whose lives have been torn apart and whose homes have been destroyed. This is something I feel that many other arguments regarding the degree that ISIS is truly “Islamic” have glossed over: current conditions in the middle east, and not doctrine, are the main driving force for ISIS recruitment. So, even though ISIS claims to be a group of devout Muslims who are fighting for the sole reason of carrying out the will of Allah, my analysis is that the main reason that they are fighting is not for Allah, but for themselves—because Sunnis are sick and tired of living in poverty and being marginalized by their governments.

In this sense, ISIS is not as Islamic as it claims to be, and this is where we enter the grey area that I mentioned earlier. While ISIS certainly operates under what it considers to be Sharia law and is able to justify its actions accordingly, the reason for its existence and much of its appeal really have nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with the wars that were the backdrop to its rise. All of this means that ISIS should certainly not be called fully un-Islamic, but neither should it be called fully Islamic. Again, the old saying rings true that the reality is always somewhere in the middle. Until the west understands the paradoxical nature of ISIS’s status as “Islamic,” we will not be able to understand what the group wants or how to combat their growth.