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The Roots of the Islamic State'sAppealBy Shadi Hamid

In a long, rambling statement in September, ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani expoundedon his groups inherent advantage: Being killed is a victory, he said. You fight a people who cannever be defeated. They either gain victory or are killed. In this most basic sense, religionrather thanwhat one might call ideologymatters. ISIS fighters are not only willing to die in a blaze of religiousecstasy; they welcome it, believing that they will be granted direct entry into heaven. It doesntparticularly matter if this sounds absurd to most people. Its what they believe.

Political scientists, including myself, have tended to see religion, ideology, and identity asepiphenomenalproducts of a given set of material factors. We are trained to believe in the primacy ofpolitics. This isnt necessarily incorrect, but it can sometimes obscure the independent power of ideasthat seem, to much of the Western world, quaint and archaic. As Robert Kagan recently wrote, For aquarter-century, Americans have been told that at the end of history lies boredom rather than greatconflict. The rise of ISIS is only the most extreme example of the way in which liberaldeterminismthe notion that history moves with intent toward a more reasonable, secular futurehasfailed to explain the realities of the Middle East. It should by now go without saying that theoverwhelming majority of Muslims do not share ISISs view of religion, but thats not really the mostinteresting or relevant question. ISISs rise to prominence has something to do with Islam, but what isthat something?

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ISIS draws on, and draws strength from, ideas that have broad resonance among Muslim-majoritypopulations. They may not agree with ISISs interpretation of the caliphate, but the notion of a

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caliphatethe historical political entity governed by Islamic law and traditionis a powerful one, evenamong more secular-minded Muslims. The caliphate, something that hasnt existed since 1924, is areminder of how one of the worlds great civilizations endured one of the more precipitous declines inhuman history. The gap between what Muslims once were and where they now find themselves is atthe center of the anger and humiliation that drive political violence in the Middle East. But there is alsoa sense of loss and longing for an organic legal and political order that succeeded for centuries beforeits slow but decisive dismantling. Ever since, Muslims, and particularly Arab Muslims, have beenstruggling to define the contours of an appropriate post-caliphate political model.

In contrast, the early Christian community, as Princeton historian Michael Cook notes, lacked aconception of an intrinsically Christian state and was willing to coexist with and even recognizeRoman law. For this reason, among others, the equivalent of ISIS simply couldnt exist in Christian-majority societies. Neither would the pragmatic, mainstream Islamist movements that oppose ISIS andits idiosyncratic, totalitarian take on the Islamic polity. While they have little in common with Islamistextremists, in both means and ends, the Muslim Brotherhood and its many descendants and affiliatesdo have a particular vision for society that puts Islam and Islamic law at the center of public life. Thevast majority of Western Christiansincluding committed conservativescannot conceive of acomprehensive legal-social order anchored by religion. However, the vast majority of, say, Egyptiansand Jordanians can and do.

This is why the well-intentioned discourse of they bleed just like us; they want to eat sandwiches andraise their children just like we do is a red herring. After all, one can like sandwiches and want peace,or whatever else, while also supporting the death penalty for apostasy, as 88 percent of EgyptianMuslims and 83 percent of Jordanian Muslims did in a 2011 Pew poll. (In the same survey, 80 percentof Egyptian respondents said they favored stoning adulterers while 70 percent supported cutting offthe hands of thieves). Polling in the Arab world is an inexact science. But even assuming that theseresults significantly overstate support for religiously derived criminal punishmentslets say supportwas closer to 65 or 45 percent insteadthat would still probably give us pause (I discuss these andother polling results in greater detail in my new book on Islamist movements).

Its worth noting that mainstream Islamist movements in the Arab world no longer include the hududpunishments for theft, adultery, and apostasy in their political platforms and rarely discuss them inpublic (South and Southeast Asian Islamists haven't been as circumspect). In this sense, the medianEgyptian or Jordanian voter is to the right of the main Islamist parties in their respective countries.(Many Muslims say they believe in the hudud because the punishments are in the Quran; whether theywould actually be comfortable with the statea state they may opposecutting of someones hand forstealing is a rather different question.)

These are, in any case, only the most extreme examples, and it would be problematic to take the hududas somehow emblematic of modern Islamism or, for that matter, pre-modern Islamic law. The morerelevant consideration is how Arabs view the relevance of Islamic law, including on issues like genderequality, minority rights, and the role of clerics in drafting national legislation. Why, for example, doonly 24 percent of Egyptian women, according to an April 2011 YouGov poll, say they would support afemale president? What some might call culture, and not necessarily Islam, is a major factor, but itwould be difficult to pretend that religion has nothing to do with these attitudes. And, presumably,


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Islam has at least something to do with why 51 percent of Jordanians, according to the 2010 ArabBarometer, say a parliamentary system that allows for free competition, but only between Islamicparties is somewhat appropriate, appropriate, or very appropriate.

Islam is distinctive in how it relates to politics. This isnt necessarily bad or good. It just is. Comparingit with other religions helps illuminate what makes it so. For example, Indian Prime Minister NarendraModi and his ruling BJP may be Hindu nationalists, but the ideological distance between them and thesecular Congress Party isnt as great as it may seem. In part, this is because traditional Hindukingshipwith its fiercely inegalitarian vision of a caste-based social orderis simply less relevant tomodern, mass politics and largely incompatible with democratic decision-making. As Cook writes inhis new book Ancient Religions, Modern Politics, Christians have no law to restore while Hindus dohave one but show little interest in restoring it. Muslims, on the other hand, not only have a law butalso one that is taken seriously by large majorities throughout the Middle East.

* * *

Muslims are not bound to Islams founding moment, but neither can they fully escape it. The ProphetMuhammad was a theologian, a head of state, a warrior, a preacher, and a merchant, all at once. Somereligious thinkersincluding Sudans Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and, later, his student AbdullahiAn-Naimhave tried to separate these different prophetic legacies, arguing that the Quran containstwo messages. The first message, based on the verses revealed while the prophet was establishing anew political community in Medina, include particulars of Islamic law that may have been appropriatefor seventh-century Arabia but are not necessarily applicable outside that context. The secondmessage of Islam, found in the so-called Meccan verses, encompasses the eternal principles of Islam,which are meant to be updated according to the demands of time and context. Taha was executed bythe Gaafar al-Nimeiry regime in 1985 and his theories failed to gain many adherents. But the basic ideaof extracting general principles while emphasizing the historicity of their application has, in lessexplicit form, been advocated by a growing number of progressive Muslim scholars, many of whomlive in the West.


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Abdulmecid II, the last Ottoman caliph, in 1923 (Wikimedia Commons)

Can these ideas gain traction? And, if they do, could it lead to an Islamic reformation? Perhaps, butthere is one slight complication. Islam has already experienced a reformation of sorts. In the late 19thcentury, the Islamic modernism of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Mohammed Abduthe precursor toIslamismattempted to make Islam, and pre-modern Islamic law, safe for modernity (or was it theother way around?). This movement was a response to many thingssecularism, colonialism, the riseof Europebut it was also, importantly, a response to the creeping authoritarianism of the lateOttoman era. The legal scholar Mohammad Fadel notes that Rashid Rida, a student of Abdus,proposed a new legal system that would be consistent with popular sovereignty and whose method oflaw-making would rely on independent reasoning exercised collectively through deliberativeinstitutions. Such a legal system required codifying Islamic law, making it more uniform to preventarbitrary abuses, and, in effect, nationalizing its implementation. A written, codified law would providea check on the excesses of executive power. The arbitrary whims of corrupt rulers would give way tosomething resembling the rule of law. As Noah Feldman argues in The Fall and Rise of the IslamicState, historically it was a self-regulating clerical class that, as keepers of God-given law, ensured thatthe caliph was bound by something beyond himself. To see the [sharia-based system] as containingthe balance of powers so necessary for a functioning, sustainable legal state is to emphasize not why itfailed, Feldman writes, but why it succeeded so spectacularly for as long as it did. The Islamic


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modernists had little interest in returning religious scholars to a place of prominence. Instead, theyhoped to introduce consultative mechanisms and institutions to balance the burgeoning power of theexecutive.

The other contribution of Islamic modernism was to recognize the state, and state power, as a politicalfact. Since the state had more responsibilitiesproviding education and healthcare, regulating massmedia, and concerning itself with family planningit needed to have more discretion in publicpolicymaking. Islamic modernists and mainstream Islamists alike made an effective distinctionbetween matters of faith and creed, which were unchangeable, and matters of policy, which were not. Ifsomething was in the public interest, or maslaha, then it could (probably) be justified. If prohibitionson usury stood in the way of, say, an IMF loan, then there would have to be a way around it. Islamistsneeded to build in this flexibility. As Fadel writes, The fundamental goal of modernist Islamic politicalthought was to define what good governance in accordance with the sharia meant in the modern age.Pre-modern Islamic law, by definition, was incompatible with the modern nation-state, so there had tobe a way to square the circle, even if that meant going well beyond what textual literalists werecomfortable with. This opened Islamists, particularly in recent decades as they modernized theirpositions on political pluralism and womens rights, to accusations of excessive pragmatism or, worse,outright insincerity. Indeed, ultraconservative Salafis, themselves a rather diverse bunch, regularlycastigate the Muslim Brotherhood and its fellow travelers for putting the demands of politics over therequirements of faith.

The Brotherhood, in this respect, is a heterodox and reformist intellectual and political movement. Ofcourse, it is also inherently illiberal. But there is no particular reason why Islamic reform should leadto liberalism in the way that the Protestant Reformation led, eventually, to modern liberalism. TheReformation was a response to the Catholic Churchs clerical stranglehold over Christianity. Whatwould become Protestantism was inextricably linked to the advent of mass literacy, as a growingnumber of believers were no longer dependent on the intercession of clerics. With the New Testamenttranslated for the first time into German and other European languages, the faithful could directlyaccess the text on their own.

The Muslim world, by comparison, has already experienced a weakening of the clerics, who, in beingco-opted by newly independent states, fell into disrepute. In Europe, the decline of the clerical classand mass literacy laid the groundwork for secularization. In the modern Middle East, these same forcescoincided with political Islams ascendancy. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood disproportionatelydrew its leadership from the professional sectors of medicine, engineering, and law. The movement,founded in 1928, was decidedly non-clerical and, in some ways, anti-clerical. In the 1950s, Cairosal-Azhar, the Arab worlds preeminent center of Islamic thought, was co-opted and politicized byGamal Abdel Nassers regime, the Brotherhoods chief antagonist.

The much more literalist Salafis also had little time for the religious establishment. The premise ofSalafism was that centuries of intricate and technical Islamic scholarship had obscured the power andpurity of Islam, as embodied by the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. Salafi leaders told theirfollowers that the Qurans meaning could be accessed by simply reading it and following the example ofthe Prophet. Salafismand for that matter groups like al-Qaeda and ISISwould be inconceivablewithout the weakening of the clerics and the democratization of religion interpretation.


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* * *

In pre-Enlightenment Europe, clerical despotism was the major problem. The nation-state systemoffered an alternative, one that could put an end to the seemingly endless religious wars that haddevastated the continent. This Westphalian peace, as Henry Kissinger writes in World Order, reservedjudgment on the absolute in favor of the practical and the ecumenical.

The Islamic modernists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had to contend with a different set ofproblemsprimarily Western colonialism and the invariably autocratic rulers that the West insisted onsupporting. Independence from Britain and France gave way to secular nationalistic states that solvedone problem only to exacerbate others. In theory, Kissinger notes, the concept of raison detatrepresent[ed] not an exaltation of power but an attempt to rationalize and limit its use. But in theArab context, the supremacy of the national interest meant empowering the state all too often at theexpense of good governance, democracy, pluralism, and freedom of expression.

Salafis demonstrate for sharia law in Cairo's Tahrir Square Mohamed (Abd El Ghany/Reuters)

The Arab world clearly suffers from weak, failed, and failing states. But it also suffers from strong orover-developed states, to use Yezid Sayighs apt description (the line between weak and failing andover-developed but brittle is a blurry one). But, more than that, the Arab regional order suffers fromthe exaltation of the statesomething most obvious, and frightening, in the case of Egypt, wherePresident Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has enthusiastically promoted the sacralization of state power. This isthe democrats dilemma: Security and stability would seem to depend on strong states, particularly inthe short-term, but the demands of pluralism and at least a semblance of democracy require ultimatelyconstraining, and even weakening, those same states.

Whether the Islamic modernist projectreconciling the pre-modern Islamic tradition with the moderntradition of the nation-statecan succeed remains an open question. Wael Hallaq, a leading scholar ofIslamic law, takes issue with Islamists for precisely this reason, arguing in his 2013 book TheImpossible State that they have become obsessed with the modern state, to the extent of taking [it] for


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granted and, in effect, as a timeless phenomenon.

Remarkably, a growing number of foreign-policy hands, including most recently Kissinger and formerObama aide Dennis Ross, have made the opposite case, arguing that Islamism, in all of its diversity, isessentially incompatible with the Westphalian order. Ross, for example, writes that what the Islamistsall have in common is that they subordinate national identities to an Islamic identity. To say thatEgyptian national identity and Islamic identity, whatever that is, can somehow be separated would benews, for one, to President Sisi, whose regime Ross lauds. Sisi, for instance, wrote in his U.S. ArmyWar College thesis that democracy cannot be understood in the Middle East without anunderstanding of the concept of [the ideal state of the caliphate] and, during his recent campaign,claimed that the presidents job included presenting God [correctly]. Meanwhile, other moderateU.S. allies, such as the Moroccan and Jordanian monarchies, are constitutionally endowed withreligious legitimacy (the Moroccan king is amir al-mumineen, or leader of the faithful).

More problematically, though, Ross and Kissinger, appear unaware of, or perhaps indifferent to, thestate-centrism of mainstream Islamists. (This can sometimes lead to broad and sometimes bizarrebrush strokes, as when Kissinger, in World Order, manages to lump together al-Qaeda, Hamas,Hezbollah, the Taliban, Iran, ISIS, and Hizb al-Tahrir, all in the same sentence.) Islamism, of themainstream rather than extremist variety, has attempted to make peace with the state, hoping toreform it, rather than to erase it in favor of some pan-Islamic caliphal fantasy. The Brotherhooddoesnt do revolution well for precisely this reason; It does slow, prodding gradualism. Under EgyptianPresident Hosni Mubaraks rule, the Brotherhood, despite being harshly critical of government policiesand eventually of Mubarak himself, showed deference toward the military, judiciary, and al-Azhar. Theorganization took issue with people and policies, not state institutions as such. The incrementalreformism of the Muslim Brotherhood made the group anathema to ISIS and other extremistorganizations. In one of his early public statements, al-Adnani, the ISIS spokesman, dismissed theBrotherhood as an idol that has fallen, accusing the group of holding to a secular project supportedby the religions of un-belief.

These considerations make the movement to cast all Islamists as the problem and to argue forconstraining their political participation or even excluding them altogetherparticularly dangerous.The demonization and marginalization of Islamists who have attempted to work within existing statestructures threatens to radicalize them not so much toward violence or terror but, rather, towardrevolution against the state. With their ill-considered policy prescriptions, Ross and Kissinger areeffectively helping to create the very problem they claim to be solving.

The July 3, 2013 military coup in Egypt and the governments subsequent,brutal crackdown on its Islamist opponents has led to the thorough, unceasingpoliticization of state institutions, which have become partisans in a civilconflict in which hundreds of Egyptians have been killed. It is unclear if thestate, in the eyes of Egypts young, angry Islamist activists, can be salvaged.They see the state, at least in its current iteration, as an enemy to be undermined, if not destroyed.

If ISIS and what will surely be a growing number of imitators are to be defeated, then statehoodand,more importantly, states that are inclusive and accountable to their own peopleare essential. The


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state-centric order in the Arab world, for all its artificiality and arbitrariness, is preferable toungoverned chaos and permanently contested borders. But for the Westphalian system to survive inthe region, Islam, or even Islamism, may be needed to legitimate it. To drive even the more pragmatic,participatory variants of Islamism out of the state system would be to doom weak, failing states andstrong, brittle ones alike to a long, destructive cycle of civil conflict and political violence.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/10/the-roots-of-the-islamic-states-appeal/382175/

Copyright 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.


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