An estimated 20,000 Muslims, eager to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State, have streamed into the territory in Iraq and Syria where the group has proclaimed what it calls a “caliphate” ruled by its often-brutal version of Islamic law.
But how rooted in Islam is the ideology embraced by this group that has inspired so many to fight and die?
President Barack Obama has insisted the militants behind a brutal campaign of beheadings, kidnappings and enslavement are “not Islamic” and use only a veneer of Islam for their own ends. Obama’s critics argue the extremists are intrinsically linked to Islam. Others insist their ideology has little connection to religion.
The group has assumed the mantle of Islam’s earliest years, purporting to re-create the conquests and rule of the prophet Muhammad and his successors. But in reality its ideology is a virulent vision all its own, one that its adherents have created by plucking selections from centuries of traditions.
The vast majority of Muslim clerics say the group picks what it wants from Islam’s holy book, the Koran, and from accounts of Muhammad’s actions and sayings, known as the Hadith. It then misinterprets many of these, while ignoring everything in the texts that contradicts those hand-picked selections, these experts say.
The group’s claim to adhere to the prophecy and example of Muhammad helps explain its appeal among young Muslim radicals eager to join its ranks. Much like Nazi Germany evoked a Teutonic past to inspire its followers, Islamic State propaganda almost romantically depicts its holy warriors as re-establishing the caliphate, contending that ideal of Islamic rule can come only through blood and warfare.
It maintains its worst brutalities — beheading captives, taking women and girls as sex slaves and burning to death a captured Jordanian pilot — only prove its purity in following what it contends is the prophet’s example, a claim that appalls the majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims.
Writings by the group’s clerics and ideologues and its English-language online magazine, Dabiq, are full of citations from Koranic verses, the Hadith and centuries of interpreters, mostly hard-liners.
But these are often taken far out of context, said Ahmed al-Dawoody, an assistant professor at the Institute for Islamic World Studies at Zayed University in Dubai.
The phenomenon of reading religious sources out of context “has existed throughout the ages,” he said. “We should not grant any legitimacy to those who violate Islam then hijack it and speak on its behalf.”
“This is not Islamic terror; this is terror committed by Muslims,” he said.
