A Brief History of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

I recently read a piece by an English gentleman named Alistair Crooke.  Crooke is a former high ranking member of Britain’s MI6.  He is a diplomat and an advisor to the European Union on Islam and the Middle East.  He has written extensively on this subject.  I have excerpted a recent piece of his that purports to explain the origins of ISIS, The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.  There is also reference to an Egyptian scholar, Amira Nowaira,  who writes of many overlapping topics.  There is a link, further along in this entry to a book of hers, “Islam, Gender and Modernity” which answers many FAQ’s about Islam.  One might call it “Islam for Dummies” as it is written in a very accessible style.  I have also delved into that invaluable resource, WikiPedia for further elucidation.

        Amira Nowaira; Egyptian scholar and Islamic expert

      Alastair Crooke, whose writings form the basis for this blog          entry.                                                                    

This recent blooming of zealous Islamic fundamentalism in large portions of Syria and Iraq (which may soon encompass parts of Jordan) should be of interest to all educated individuals as our leaders in Washington have already taken actions against ISIS.  The following is one interpretation of the origins of ISIS.  I would be interested to know your thoughts.  Feel free to comment in my blog or e-mail me directly.  

The Origins of ISIS

One dominant strand to the Saudi identity pertains directly to Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (the founder of Wahhabism), and the use to which his radical, exclusionist puritanism was put by Ibn Saud, a minor leader of Bedouin tribes noted mostly for their constant inter-tribal warring.

                                                               Abd al-Wahhab

The second strand relates to King Abd-al Aziz's shift towards statehood in the 1920s: his curbing of Wahhabi violence (in order to have diplomatic standing as a nation-state with Britain and America); his institutionalization of the original Wahhabist impulse -- and the subsequent seizing of the opportunely surging petrodollar spigot in the 1970s, to channel this volatile Wahhabist impulse current away from home towards export -- by diffusing a cultural revolution, rather than violent revolution throughout the Muslim world.

                                         King Abd-al Aziz

But this "cultural revolution" was no docile reformism. It was a revolution based on Abd al-Wahhab's hatred for the putrescence and deviationism that he perceived all about him -- hence his call to purge Islam of all its heresies and idolatries.

As a censorious disciple of the 14th century scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, Abd al-Wahhab despised "the decorous, arty, tobacco smoking, hashish imbibing, drum pounding Egyptian and Ottoman nobility who travelled across Arabia to pray at Mecca."

In Abd al-Wahhab's view, these were not Muslims; they were imposters masquerading as Muslims. Nor, indeed, did he find the behavior of local Bedouin Arabs much better. They aggravated Abd al-Wahhab by their honoring of saints, by their erecting of tombstones, and their "superstition" (e.g. revering graves or places that were deemed particularly imbued with the divine).

All this behavior, Abd al-Wahhab denounced as bida -- forbidden by God.  Like Taymiyyah before him, Abd al-Wahhab believed that the period of the Prophet Muhammad's stay in Medina was the ideal of Muslim society (the "best of times"), to which all Muslims should aspire to emulate. 

Taymiyyah had declared war on Shi'ism, Sufism and Greek philosophy. He spoke out, too against visiting the grave of the prophet and the celebration of his birthday, declaring that all such behavior represented mere imitation of the Christian worship of Jesus as God (i.e. idolatry). Abd al-Wahhab assimilated all this earlier teaching, stating that "any doubt or hesitation" on the part of a believer should "deprive a man of immunity of his property and his life."  (The prior link will lead to a book written by an Egyptian scholar who has expertise in the various tenants of Islam.  Her name is Amira Nowaira and the excerpts in the link are derived from one of the books she has written which goes into more depth about ISIS and Wahhibism, etc.  The book is called “Islam, Gender and Modernity.)  One of the main tenets of Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine has become the key idea of takfir. Under the takfiri doctrine, Abd al-Wahhab and his followers could deem fellow Muslims infidels should they engage in activities that in any way could be said to encroach on the sovereignty of the absolute Authority (that is, the King). Abd al-Wahhab denounced all Muslims who honored the dead, saints, or angels. He held that such sentiments detracted from the complete subservience one must feel towards God, and only God. Wahhabi Islam thus bans any prayer to saints and dead loved ones, pilgrimages to tombs and special mosques, religious festivals celebrating saints, the honoring of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad's birthday, and even prohibits the use of gravestones when burying the dead.

Abd al-Wahhab demanded conformity -- a conformity that was to be demonstrated in physical and tangible ways. He argued that all Muslims must individually pledge their allegiance to a single Muslim leader, a Caliph.  Those who would not conform to this view should be killed, their wives and daughters violated, and their possessions confiscated, he wrote. The list of apostates meriting death included the Shiite, Sufis and other Muslim denominations, whom Abd al-Wahhab did not consider to be Muslim at all. 

There is nothing here that separates Wahhabism from ISIS. The rift would emerge only later: from the subsequent institutionalization of Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab's doctrine of "One Ruler, One Authority, One Mosque" -- these three pillars being taken respectively to refer to the Saudi king, the absolute authority of official Wahhabism, and its control of "the word" (i.e. the mosque). 

It is this rift -- the ISIS denial of these three pillars on which the whole of Sunni authority presently rests -- makes ISIS, which in all other respects conforms to Wahhabism, a deep threat to Saudi Arabia. 

Abd al-Wahhab's advocacy of these ultra radical views inevitably led to his expulsion from his own town -- and in 1741, after some wanderings, he found refuge under the protection of Ibn Saud and his tribe. What Ibn Saud perceived in Abd al-Wahhab's novel teaching was the means to overturn Arab tradition and convention. It was a path to seizing power. 

Ibn Saud's clan, seizing on Abd al-Wahhab's doctrine, now could do what they always did, which was raiding neighboring villages and robbing them of their possessions. Only now they were doing it not within the ambit of Arab tradition, but rather under the banner of jihad. Ibn Saud and Abd al-Wahhab also reintroduced the idea of martyrdom in the name of jihad, as it granted those martyred immediate entry into paradise. 

The conquered inhabitants were given a limited choice: conversion to Wahhabism or death.  This is the same choice today’s ISIS is using in the towns they capture.  By 1790, this alliance controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula and repeatedly raided Medina, Syria and Iraq. 

Their strategy -- like that of ISIS today -- was to bring the peoples whom they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear. In 1801, the alliance attacked the Holy City of Karbala in Iraq. They massacred thousands of Shiites, including women and children. Many Shiite shrines were destroyed, including the shrine of Imam Hussein, the murdered grandson of Prophet Muhammad. 

In 1803, Abdul Aziz then entered the Holy City of Mecca, which surrendered under the impact of terror and panic (the same fate was to befall Medina, too). Abd al-Wahhab's followers demolished historical monuments and all the tombs and shrines in their midst. By the end, they had destroyed centuries of Islamic architecture near the Grand Mosque.  This was the same belief that led the Taliban to destroy the Buddhist monuments in Bamiyan.

A Shiite assassin killed King Abdul Aziz (taking revenge for the massacre at Karbala). His son, Saud bin Abd al Aziz, succeeded him and continued the conquest of Arabia. Ottoman rulers, however, could no longer just sit back and watch as their empire was devoured piece by piece. In 1812, the Ottoman army, composed of Egyptians, pushed the Alliance out from Medina, Jeddah and Mecca. In 1814, Saud bin Abd al Aziz died of fever. His unfortunate son Abdullah bin Saud, however, was taken by the Ottomans to Istanbul, where he was gruesomely executed (a visitor to Istanbul reported seeing him having been humiliated in the streets of Istanbul for three days, then hanged and beheaded, his severed head fired from a canon, and his heart cut out and impaled on his body). 

Abdullah bin Saud, the unfortunate monarch whose severed head was shot out of a canon in Istanbul.  (If they ever make the movie, I say Johnny Depp is a shoe-in for the part...)

In 1815, Wahhabi forces were crushed by the Egyptians (acting on the Ottoman's behalf) in a decisive battle. In 1818, the Ottomans captured and destroyed the Wahhabi capital of Dariyah. The first Saudi state was no more. The few remaining Wahhabis withdrew into the desert to regroup, and there they remained, quiescent for most of the 19th century.

               Istanbul at the height of the Ottoman Empire.

Wahhabism did not just wither in Nejd, but it roared back into life when the Ottoman Empire collapsed amongst the chaos of World War I.   Abd-al Aziz, who, on uniting the fractious Bedouin tribes, launched the Saudi "Ikhwan" in the spirit of Abd-al Wahhab's and Ibn Saud's earlier fighting proselytisers. 

The Ikhwan was a reincarnation of the early, fierce, semi-independent vanguard movement of committed armed Wahhabist "moralists" who almost had succeeded in seizing Arabia by the early 1800s. In the same manner as earlier, the Ikhwan again succeeded in capturing Mecca, Medina and Jeddah between 1914 and 1926. Abd-al Aziz, however, began to feel his wider interests to be threatened by the revolutionary  Ikhwan. The Ikhwan revolted -- leading to a civil war that lasted until the 1930s, when the King had them put down: he machine-gunned them. 

For this king, (Abd-al Aziz), the simple verities of previous decades were eroding. Oil was being discovered in the Saudi peninsula.  Britain and America were courting Abd-al Aziz, but still were inclined to support Sharif Husain as the only legitimate ruler of Arabia. The Saudis needed to develop a more sophisticated diplomatic posture. 

So Wahhabism was forcefully changed from a movement of revolutionary jihad and theological purification, to a movement of conservative social, political, theological, and religious doctrines and to justifying the institution that upholds loyalty to the royal Saudi family and the King's absolute power.

With the advent of the oil bonanza -- as the French scholar, Giles Kepel writes, Saudi goals were to "reach out and spread Wahhabism across the Muslim world ... to "Wahhabise" Islam, thereby reducing the "multitude of voices within the religion" to a "single creed" -- a movement which would transcend national divisions. Billions of dollars were -- and continue to be -- invested in this manifestation of soft power. 

It was this heady mix of billion dollar soft power projection -- and the Saudi willingness to manage Sunni Islam both to further America's interests, as it concomitantly embedded Wahhabism educationally, socially and culturally throughout the lands of Islam -- that brought into being a western policy dependency on Saudi Arabia, a dependency that has endured since Abd-al Aziz's meeting with Roosevelt on a U.S. warship (returning the president from the Yalta Conference) until today. 

Westerners looked at the Kingdom and their gaze was taken by the wealth; by the apparent modernization; by the professed leadership of the Islamic world. They chose to presume that the Kingdom was bending to the imperatives of modern life -- and that the management of Sunni Islam would bend the Kingdom, too, to modern life.

This new form of “civilized Wahhabism” made it tenable for Western powers to do business with Saudi Arabia and allow it to extract its enormous oil wealth.  To the Wahhabi purists this new Wahhabism was  seen as a corrupt sell-out to the West.  ISIS is meant as a corrective movement to contemporary Wahhabism. 

ISIS looks to the actions of the first two Caliphs, rather than the Prophet Muhammad himself, as a source of emulation, and it forcefully denies the Saudis' claim of authority to rule.

As the Saudi monarchy blossomed in the oil age into an ever more inflated institution, the appeal of the Ikhwan message gained ground (despite King Faisal's modernization campaign). The "Ikhwan approach" enjoyed -- and still enjoys -- the support of many prominent men and women and sheikhs. In a sense, Osama bin Laden was precisely the representative of a late flowering of this Ikhwani approach.

Today, ISIS' undermining of the King's legitimacy is not seen to be problematic, but rather a return to the true origins of the Saudi-Wahhab project.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is a Sunni jihadist group in the Middle East. In its self-proclaimed status as a caliphate it claims religious authority over all Muslims across the world and aspires to bring much of the Muslim-inhabited regions of the world under its political control, beginning with Iraq, Syria and other territories which include Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus and an area in southern Turkey

          ISIS militants with captured Iraqi security forces.

ISIS is the successor to Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn—more commonly known as Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)—formed by Abu Musab Al Zarqawi in 2004, which took part in the Iraqi insurgency against American-led forces and their Iraqi allies following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  It’s current leader is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a scholar of Islam with a PhD in Islamic studies and a former cleric in Iraq at the time of the US invasion.  al-Baghdadi considers himself the caliph or supreme religious leader of all true  Muslims (Sunnis).  al-Baghdadi and ISIS have received private financing from citizens in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and enlisted fighters through recruitment drives in Saudi Arabia in particular. 

                       A 'before' picture of al-Baghdadi

Despite ISIS's ferocious rejection of all things decadent and western, here's a picture of al-Baghdadi in his "Caliph" mode sporting a Mickey Mouse watch.

The ease with which ISIS overran the territory they now control shows that the Iraqi security forces, as trained by the US military, are no match for the zealotry of these “true believers”.  

These people saw the Afghan mujahadeen rout the Russian army.  Many believe it led to the implosion of the Soviet empire.  They saw how nineteen true believers armed with only box cutters could commandeer American airplanes and terrorize the American populace with the destruction of The World Trade Center.  It appears that they want nothing less than to recapitulate the victories of Ibn Saud and Abdul Waziz back in the early 1800’s when they captured the holy cities and unified the Saudi peninsula under the doctrine of Wahhabism.

They believe that the period of the Prophet Muhammad's stay in Medina was the ideal of Muslim society (the "best of times"), to which all Muslims should aspire to emulate.  This event took place in the year 622, the beginning of the Muslim calendar.  Thus is reborn the Wahhabi philosophy and  its violent rejection of all things western and  pertaining to the “infidel”.  Their current goal is to create a true caliphate comprised of a large swath of Syria and Iraq where mainly Sunnis now dwell.  Their next goal is to incorporate all lands where Sunnis live and to liberate them from the Shiia and other impure influences.

I doubt if the Bush II administration was anticipating such unintended consequences when we invaded Iraq.  That's one thing about the iron fisted reign of a ruthless dictator.  He can keep such uprisings in check, for better or worse.  

It will be interesting to see how things progress in this nascent "Caliphate of ISIS" and what roll other nations will play in determining its future.  

Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres