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.’
Another aspect of the ISIS belief system has to do with an apocalyptic vision of the end time, which they believe is coming very soon. The ISIS countdown to Armageddon is shaped by a Manichean notion (based on some early Islamic theology) of a battle between Muslims and crusaders. In its particular version, ISIS will lead the Muslims to victory in or near the small Syrian town of Dabiq, near the Turkish border, which ISIS occupied in the summer of 2014.
As Graeme Wood described in his widely read Atlantic article examining the group’s theology and beliefs: ‘ISIS 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… The [ISIS] 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.”’
There is historical significance to Dabiq. In 1516 the town was the site of a major defeat of the Mamluk Sultan by the early Ottomans. But, for ISIS, what is most important is the belief that Islam – in this case ISIS itself – will defeat the armies of Rome, or the crusaders, in Dabiq. For the ISIS leadership, the importance of conquering this militarily insignificant town seems to have been based on the idea that ISIS can wait there for the arrival of an enemy army which it will then conquer.
The willingness of ISIS to wait for the crusader army to show up explains a great deal about the goal of its most gruesome atrocities. ISIS wants to provoke an attack by its enemies – the US, the West, the crusaders – on its own turf, just as the Qur’an predicts. The ISIS propaganda strategy is based on the understanding that the odds of Western armies coming across the world to attack ISIS in its own territory rise dramatically if ISIS can outrage Western public opinion. And the strategy has worked. The US and its allies decided to attack ISIS directly, rather than through proxies, only after public outrage at the horrors of ISIS treatment of prisoners and captured civilians.
In sending US planes to bomb ISIS in Syria and US troops and special forces to fight against ISIS in Iraq, in supporting US allies like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, and the UAE to attack ISIS throughout the region, the US and its allies are giving ISIS exactly what it wants.
What is Wahhabism? Why is it relevant to understanding ISIS?
For the leaders of ISIS, and despite the intensity of official Saudi opposition to it, the group’s roots lie directly in the Wahhabi branch of Sunni Islam, which officially governs Saudi Arabia.
At its core