The Way of the Strangers REVIEW
“When someone says something too evil to believe,” writes Graeme Wood,
“one response is not to doubt their sincerity but to expand one’s capacity to imagine what otherwise decent people can desire. That, I have concluded, is the proper response to the Islamic State.”
Many of the Muslims that he interviews as background to his argument believe that it is permissible to murder him. In the Way of the Strangers is an intelligent and well-researched attempt to know who the theologians and propagandists behind ISIS recruitment efforts are. Who actually thinks it is a good idea to have a calif? And why? “The cognitive dissonance still jars me,” Wood writes,
“These are intelligent people with the most wicked beliefs. It’s tempting to try to resolve that tension by doubting their sincerity. Surely they don’t want genocide, surely they don’t want me dead. But I have looked for signs of a con, and if there is one, they are its victims and not its perpetrators.”
Letters between ISIS members, he says, “combine quiet dignity with complete moral insanity.” “The most monstrous squad of historical reenactors of all time” he calls them, referring to their desire to bring the seventh century back into style. And yet his book is based on years of thoughtful curiosity, making acquaintances and even friendships with those who support the idea of a Syrian Caliph.
This book did its work well as far as I am concerned. I came away from it feeling much more confident that I could teach about this small, but influential and destructive, pocket of the Islamic world. Perhaps it would help to simply list some of the questions that I was asking that it answers.
One: Why should we bother understanding the theology behind the Caliphate movement when these people are obviously just crazy psychopaths, right?
I gather that one of the reasons it is important to understand any enemy is to determine if enmity could be ended with conversation and diplomacy or, if, in reality, the animosity is based on something fundamental to what they believe. It is also important to be able to distinguish between Muslims who might be friends and Muslims who have no wish to be so we do not “snap-to-grid” with our judgements about all of them. “This version of Islam bears only passing resemblance to the Islam practiced or espoused by most Muslims,” Graeme Wood explains.
“Mainstream Muslims resent that the Islamic State claims exclusive access to the truth about their religion, and in solidarity with their revulsion, many non-Muslims have averted their eyes and willfully ignored the particulars of the Islamic State’s religious claims. This studied ignorance has been a costly mistake. Our enemy has invited us to know more about it, and we have been so repulsed that we have declined the offer.”
Two: What do so many thousands of Muslims living in Europe find attractive about the establishment of a Caliphate in Syria?
The author explains that many Muslims find it difficult to live a Muslim life in secular Western societies. They fear the influence of western media and culture on their kids, much like the Pilgrims feared the influence of England and Holland on their kids. Muslims in England or France or Belgium or even secular Turkey or affluent Saudi Arabia are attracted to the idea of a place devoid of any non-Muslim influence. It is not altogether unlike the reasoning of some parents who take their kids out of public schools and put them in parochial schools (only to find that parochial schools are not perfect either). Wood calls it a “caliphate of the imagination.”
“In addition to the physical caliphate, with its territory and war and economy to run, there was a caliphate of the imagination to which all these people had already emigrated long before they slipped across the Turkish border. They believed the state that awaited them would purify their lives by forbidding vice and promoting virtue. Its leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, would unify the world’s Muslims, restore their honor, and allow them to reside in the only truly just society. Its Muslim citizens would enjoy perfect equality, free of the iniquities they had suffered due to differences of race, wealth, or nationality in the countries of their birth.”
Three: What theological differences create the division between pro-Caliphate Salafi’s and the wider Islamic community?
In some respects, the Salafis resemble some Protestant communities who reject all theological and cultural innovations that have attached themselves like barnacles to their vision of the “golden age” of the first century church as described in Acts. Their suspicion of “heresification” grows with every year subsequent to the prophet’s death. “Salafis take the Koran, the example of the Prophet, and the actions and beliefs of [the original Muslims of Mecca and Medina] as their primary sources of religious authority,” Wood writes, “and they reject the opinions of many Muslims who came later.” They “do not follow the prophet’s followers.”
Theologians of the Caliphate are “originalists.” When al-Baghdadi gave his “inaugural sermon” he took it almost word for word from the speech that his namesake, the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, gave after Muhammad died. This form of Islam wants to go back before there were any “denominations” in the Islamic world – before the Shiites, before the Sufis, before Ataturk, before the Wahabi’s or the brotherhood or the founding of Syria. They would prefer to have an Islamic world devoid of Muslim political or theological sub-units. “Among the special challenges for Salafi recruiters is the danger of accidentally recruiting someone for another form of Islam instead,” Graeme Wood explains,
“They need to welcome the recruit into the religion without exposing him to deviant traditions like Sufism, scholasticism [kalam] or Neoplatonism [falsafa] and much else that Salafis deride as reprehensible innovation. What most Muslims perceive as progress, Salafis consider disbelief. Hesham [one of Wood’s interviewees] had to usher me past these attractions like a parent trying to drag a kid past candy at a supermarket checkout. The siren song of Sufism, some Salafis say, is so seductive that Sufi shrines should be dynamited or bulldozed at the earliest opportunity. Tolerance is a danger to men’s souls.”
Obviously, millions of Muslims around the world are attached to their historical interpretive schemas, just as many Christians today practice Christianity as Catholics, Baptists, Episcopalians, or Pentecostals. They resent the claim of the jihadists that all innovations are heresies.
“Salafis offer three key replies. The first is contained in a hadith [tradition of the prophet not contained in the Qur’an] that Hesham quoted to me several times: ‘This community [ummah] will divide into seventy-three sects, all of which save one will go to Hell: the one that followed what I and my Companions are doing.’ Salafis take themselves to be the chosen sect [alfirqah al najiyyah], and they do not mind that their putative coreligionists detest their eccentricities.” Those who are fighting for the existence and expansion of the caliphate feel no embarrassment about condemning all but their strict construction of the pure faith.
“This practice of declaring self-described Muslims to be infidels is called takfïr [excommunication], and historically Muslims have refrained from it,” says Wood, “Those who leave Islam are theoretically subject to the death penalty. It is therefore a serious accusation.”
I suspect that the reader can see where this is heading. ISIS is neither bashful about declaring other Muslims outside the fold nor squeamish about going to war with them. “The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,” one of Wood’s interviewees tells him, “said that not one in a thousand of his followers would join him in paradise.” “Only the authority of the Koran and Sunna of the Prophet matter; precedent and prior interpretation count for little. An analogy to U.S. law will unavoidably fail in its particulars but may be useful as illustration: imagine if a bright man happened upon the U.S. Constitution as it existed in 1791 and tried to construct a legal system on that basis, without a jot of consideration for any of the Supreme Court opinions and pieces of legislation that followed in the two subsequent centuries. Bin’ali has undertaken a task of comparable boldness for Islam.”
“Every Muslim scholar to whom I have shown Bin’ali’s sermons has ended up exasperated—by his brashness, his violence, his rhetorical style. ‘Murakallaf,’ said one. (In plain English: “What a poseur.”) Some react with pained expressions. as if unexpectedly in the presence of loud bagpipe music, or a malodorous fellow passenger on public transit. How does an Islamic scholar argue with someone who denies that the last millennium of Islamic scholarship ever happened? At the same time, though, some will acknowledge his creativity and nerve. Bin’ali is citing scripture in a learned and brilliant way—just without obeisance to previous scholars.”
Four: What makes Muslims in some countries so vulnerable to recruitment efforts?
According to Wood, the problem is that defenders of the Caliphate are neither illiterate nor incoherent. Once they have won the argument that a thousand years of scholarship can and should be discarded, they are often on the rhetorical high ground. Imagine an argument in the Jewish community today that said that the work of centuries of rabbis can and should be ignored as they attempted to argue that Jews should deal with Palestinians like the Jews of the book of Joshua dealt with Canaanites. Imagine Christian theologians arguing that King David’s treatment of the men of Moab should define how a Christian leader deals out justice rather than appeals to the Sermon on the Mount (David lined Moabites on the ground and killed every third one). What makes a modern Muslim vulnerable is his or her exposure to knowledge without understanding of it. “Still less capable of confronting Salafi counterarguments are secular-minded non-Salafi Muslim laymen,” Wood tells us,
“The average lay Muslim is like the average layman of any faith: largely ignorant and prone to believe a sanitized version of it. The Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel has called this a ‘cotton-candy view of the religion,’ and notes that the view dissolves, with occasionally catastrophic psychological consequences, upon contact with the moral ambiguity of reality. Part of the task of Salafis who proselytize to fellow Muslims is to reach them at this stage of cognitive dissonance—torn between modern sensibilities and realization that slavery is part of the history and present of Islam—and convince them that the modem sensibilities must go. Some Salafis even go so far as to say they must cultivate love of slavery and other antique practices to remain Muslim.”
What makes young people vulnerable is the traits of the internet itself. One does not need missionaries when they have youtube and it is entirely possible to speak to the idealism of youth through that medium, luring people into involvement in something that cannot be seen for what it is at a distance. “Mass illiteracy once protected religion from amateurism,” writes Wood, “But now the gates to the nuclear facility have been breached, and hobbyists and high school students are playing with the fissile material. . . . They have youtube for a Sheikh.”
Five: What makes ISIL a threat to be taken seriously?
Back in the 1920’s and 1930’s, Winston Churchill warned his government and country about the fundamental threat of Nazism. Many called him a warmonger. He insisted that the logical conclusion to be drawn from reading Mein Kompf was legitimate fear. I think something similar could be said of the theology of the Caliphate. It is not so much that al-Baghdadi wants to unify Islam. That is understandable. It is the type of Islam that he aspires to make the unifier. Bin-ali’s manifesto of the Islamic state, “This is Our Creed. This is Our Methodology” makes it an imperative to take the movement seriously. The Caliphate, says Wood, has “weaponized shame by declaring their jihad the only absolution.” They insist that the only way to be a Muslim of any kind, is to be their kind of Muslim. And that kind, is an incessantly militant one.
“The Islamic State suggests backtracking to the fork in the path of history and taking the other route. It aspires to be a more religiously muscular Saudi Arabia, under less merciful management.”
“Accepting any fixed border—conceding that Islam's authority can be finite—is anathema. 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 war to expand the domain of Islam, or remove obstacles to its practice at least once a year. He may not rest or he will fall into a state of sin.”
“Consider how Muslims (or, for that matter, Christians) believe that God deals with those who die without hearing about the one true religion. Their souls are neither obviously saved nor definitively condemned. Similarly, Musa said, the Muslim who acknowledges one omnipotent God and prays, but who dies without pledging himself to a caliph, has placed himself in a middle space between Islam and disbelief. He has failed to live a fully Islamic life and dies in a state of sin.”
“On the topic of slavery, too, he conceded the facts—the Islamic State practices slavery, and slavery (including sex slavery) has a scriptural and historical basis in Islam—without conceding the interpretation. What the Islamic State was doing, he said, is slavery. ‘It's getting someone who was free and forcing him to not be free. But Musa viewed this as a mercy. He used an argument (associated in U.S. jurisprudence with Oliver Wendell Holmes) that "the greater includes the lesser.” If it's permissible to do something, then it's permissible to do lesser versions of the same thing. To the Islamic State, killing infidels is patently permissible. So what's wrong with keeping them alive to do chores around the house?”
It is not difficult to argue that ISIL is our present generation’s version of Fascism. It cannot be appeased into extinction. Some ideas may not be held by many people but they can have an influence far greater than the numbers of the original group of believers. Graeme Wood has done us all a service by spending so much time and effort talking to the people who can explain something difficult to understand. I highly recommend his book.
Question for Comment: If left alone, would a society that intentionally replicated 7th century Mecca collapse under the unsustainable weight of its own ideas?
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