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An Isis propaganda video purporting to show the execution of 21 Egyptian Christians in Libya. Photo: Rex Features
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Mehdi Hasan: How Islamic is Islamic State?

The conventional wisdom suggests a violent reading of the Quran is at the heart of Islamic State's political violence – but it's wrong.

It is difficult to forget the names, or the images, of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, David Haines, Alan Henning and Peter Kassig. The barbaric beheadings between August and November 2014, in cold blood and on camera, of these five jumpsuit-clad western hostages by the self-styled Islamic State, or Isis, provoked widespread outrage and condemnation.

However, we should also remember the name of Didier François, a French journalist who was held by Isis in Syria for ten months before being released in April 2014. François has since given us a rare insight into life inside what the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood, in a recent report for the magazine, has called the “hermit kingdom” of Isis, where “few have gone . . . and returned”. And it is an insight that threatens to turn the conventional wisdom about the world’s most fearsome terrorist organisation on its head.

“There was never really discussion about texts,” the French journalist told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last month, referring to his captors. “It was not a religious discussion. It was a political discussion.”

According to François, “It was more hammering what they were believing than teaching us about the Quran. Because it has nothing to do with the Quran.” And the former hostage revealed to a startled Amanpour: “We didn’t even have the Quran. They didn’t want even to give us a Quran.”

The rise of Isis in Iraq and Syria has been a disaster for the public image of Islam – and a boon for the Islamophobia industry. Here, after all, is a group that calls itself Islamic State; that claims the support of Islamic texts to justify its medieval punishments, from the stoning of adulterers to the amputation of the hands of thieves; and that has a leader with a PhD in Islamic studies who declares himself to be a “caliph”, or ruler over all Muslims, and has even renamed himself in honour of the first Muslim caliph, Abu Bakr.

The consequences are, perhaps, as expected. In September 2014, a Zogby poll found that only 27 per cent of Americans had a favourable view of Islam – down from 35 per cent in 2010. By February 2015, more than a quarter of Americans (27 per cent) were telling the pollsters LifeWay Research that they believed that life under Isis rule “gives a true indication of what an Islamic society looks like”.

Yet what is much more worrying is that it isn’t just ill-informed, ignorant or bigoted members of the public who take such a view. “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,” wrote Wood in his widely read 10,000-word cover report (“What Isis really wants”) in the March issue of Atlantic, in which he argued, “The religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”

Bernard Haykel of Princeton University, the only scholar of Islam whom Wood bothered to interview, described Muslims who considered Isis to be un-Islamic, or anti-Islamic, as “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion”, and declared that the hand-choppers and throat-slitters of Isis “have just as much legitimacy” as any other Muslims, because Islam is “what Muslims do and how they interpret their texts”.

Many other analysts across the political spectrum agree and have denounced the Obama administration for refusing, in the words of the journalist-turned-terrorism-expert Peter Bergen, to make “the connection between Islamist terrorism and ultra-fundamentalist forms of Islam”. Writing on the CNN website in February, Bergen declared, “Isis may be a perversion of Islam, but Islamic it is.”

“Will it take the end of the world for Obama to recognise Isis as ‘Islamic’?” screamed a headline on the Daily Beast website in the same month. “Which will come first, flying cars and vacations to Mars, or a simple acknowledgment that beliefs guide behaviour and that certain religious ideas – jihad, martyrdom, blasphemy, apostasy – reliably lead to oppression and murder?” asked Sam Harris, the neuroscientist and high priest of the “New Atheism” movement.

So, is Isis a recognisably “Islamic” movement? Are Isis recruits motivated by religious fervour and faith?

 

The Analyst

“Our exploration of the intuitive psychologist’s shortcomings must start with his general tendency to overestimate the importance of personal or dispositional factors relative to environmental influences,” wrote the American social anthropologist Lee Ross in 1977.

It was Ross who coined the phrase “fundamental attribution error”, which refers to the phenomenon in which we place excessive emphasis on internal motivations to explain the behaviour of others, in any given situation, rather than considering the relevant external factors.

Nowhere is the fundamental attribution error more prevalent, suggests the forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman, than in our navel-gazing analysis of wannabe terrorists and what does or doesn’t motivate them. “You attribute other people’s behaviour to internal motivations but your own to circumstances. ‘They’re attacking us and therefore we have to attack them.’” Yet, he tells me, we rarely do the reverse.

Few experts have done more to try to understand the mindset of the young men and women who aspire to join the blood-drenched ranks of groups such as Isis and al-Qaeda than Sageman. And few can match his qualifications, credentials or background. The 61-year-old, Polish-born psychiatrist and academic is a former CIA operations officer who was based in Pakistan in the late 1980s. There he worked closely with the Afghan mujahedin. He has since advised the New York City Police Department on counterterrorism issues, testified in front of the 9/11 Commission in Washington, DC, and, in his acclaimed works Understanding Terror Networks and Leaderless Jihad, closely analysed the biographies of several hundred terrorists.

Does he see religion as a useful analytical prism through which to view the rise of Isis and the process by which thousands of young people arrive in Syria and Iraq, ready to fight and die for the group?

“Religion has a role but it is a role of justification,” he tells me. “It’s not why they do this [or] why young people go there.”

Isis members, he says, are using religion to advance a political vision, rather than using politics to advance a religious vision. “To give themselves a bit more legitimacy, they use Islam as their justification. It’s not about religion, it’s about identity . . . You identify with the victims, [with] the guys being killed by your enemies.”

For converts to Islam in particular, he adds, “Identity is important to them. They have . . . invested a lot of their own efforts and identity to become this ‘Muslim’ and, because of this, identity is so important to them. They see other Muslims being slaughtered [and say], ‘I need to protect my community.’” (A recent study found that converts to Islam were involved in 31 per cent of Muslim terrorism convictions in the UK between 2001 and 2010.)

Sageman believes that it isn’t religious faith but, rather, a “sense of emotional and moral outrage” at what they see on their television screens or on YouTube that propels people from Portsmouth to Peshawar, from Berlin to Beirut, to head for war zones and to sign up for the so-called jihad. Today, he notes archly, “Orwell would be [considered as foreign fighter like] a jihadi,” referring to the writer’s involvement in the anti-fascist campaign during the Spanish civil war.

Religion, according to this view, plays a role not as a driver of behaviour but as a vehicle for outrage and, crucially, a marker of identity. Religion is important in the sense that it happens to “define your identity”, Sageman says, and not because you are “more pious than anybody else”. He invokes the political scientist Benedict Anderson’s conception of a nation state as an “imagined political community”, arguing that the “imagined community of Muslims” is what drives the terrorists, the allure of being members of – and defenders of – the ultimate “in-group”.

“You don’t have the most religious folks going there,” he points out. Isis fighters from the west, in particular, “tend to have rediscovered Islam as teenagers, or as converts”; they are angry, or even bored, young men in search of a call to arms and a thrilling cause. The Isis executioner Mohammed Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi John” – who was raised and educated in the UK – was described, for instance, by two British medics who met him at a Syrian hospital as “quiet but a bit of an adrenalin junkie”.

Sageman’s viewpoint should not really surprise us. Writing in his 2011 book The Black Banners: the Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, the Lebanese-American former FBI agent Ali H Soufan, who led the bureau’s pre-9/11 investigation into al-Qaeda, observed: “When I first began interrogating al-Qaeda members, I found that while they could quote Bin Laden’s sayings by heart, I knew far more of the Quran than they did – and in fact some barely knew classical Arabic, the language of both the hadith and the Quran. An understanding of their thought process and the limits of their knowledge enabled me and my colleagues to use their claimed piousness against them.”

Three years earlier, in 2008, a classified briefing note on radicalisation, prepared by MI5’s behavioural science unit, was obtained by the Guardian. It revealed: “Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could . . . be regarded as religious novices.” The MI5 analysts noted the disproportionate number of converts and the high propensity for “drug-taking, drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes”. The newspaper claimed they concluded, “A well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalisation.”

As I have pointed out on these pages before, Mohammed Ahmed and Yusuf Sarwar, the two young British Muslim men from Birmingham who were convicted on terrorism charges in 2014 after travelling to fight in Syria, bought copies of Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies from Amazon prior to their departure. Religious novices, indeed.

Sageman, the former CIA officer, says we have to locate terrorism and extremism in local conflicts rather than in grand or sweeping ideological narratives – the grievances and the anger come first, he argues, followed by the convenient and self-serving ideological justifications. For example, he says, the origins of Isis as a terror group lie not in this or that Islamic book or school of thought, but in the “slaughter of Sunnis in Iraq”. He reminds me how, in April 2013, when there was a peaceful Sunni demonstration asking the Shia-led Maliki government in Baghdad to reapportion to the various provinces what the government was getting in oil revenues, Iraqi security forces shot into the crowds. “That was the start of this [current] insurrection.”

A pro-Isis demonstration in Mosul, Iraq, in June 2014. Photo: Associated Press

Before that, it was the brutal, US-led occupation, under which Iraq became ground zero for suicide bombers from across the region and spurred the creation of new terrorist organisations, such as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

Isis is the “remnant” of AQI, Sageman adds. He believes that any analysis of the group and of the ongoing violence and chaos in Iraq that doesn’t take into account the long period of war, torture, occupation and sectarian cleansing is inadequate – and a convenient way of exonerating the west
of any responsibility. “Without the invasion of Iraq, [Isis] would not exist. We created it by our presence there.”

 

The Spy

Like Marc Sageman, Richard Barrett has devoted his professional life to understanding terrorism, extremism and radicalisation. The silver-haired 65-year-old was the director of global counterterrorism operations for MI6, both before and after the 11 September 2001 attacks, and he subsequently led the al-Qaeda and Taliban monitoring team at the United Nations between 2004 and 2013.

Unlike Sageman, however, Barrett partly sympathises with Graeme Wood’s and Bernard Haykel’s thesis that “the Islamic State is Islamic”. He tells me that some Isis followers “are clearly convinced they are following Allah’s will” and he insists: “We should not underestimate the extent of their belief.” However, Barrett concedes that such beliefs and views “will not be the only thing that drew them to the Islamic State”.

The former MI6 officer, who recently published a report on foreign fighters in Syria, agrees with the ex-CIA man on the key issue of what motivates young men to join – and fight for – groups such as Isis in the first place. Rather than religious faith, it has “mostly to do with the search for identity . . . coupled with a search for belonging and purpose. The Islamic State offers all that and empowers the individual within a collective. It does not judge and accepts all with no concern about their past. This can be very appealing for people who think that they washed up on the wrong shore.”

Whether they are unemployed losers or well-educated professionals, joining Isis offers new recruits the chance to “believe that they are special . . . that they are part of something that is new, secret and powerful”.

While Barrett doesn’t dismiss the theological angle in the way that Sageman does, he nevertheless acknowledges, “Acting in the name of Islam means that, for the ignorant at least, the groups have some legitimacy for their actions . . . They can pretend it is not just about power and money.”

This irreligious lust for power and money is a significant and often overlooked part of the Isis equation. The group – often described as messianic and uncompromising – had no qualms about demanding a $200m ransom for the lives of two Japanese hostages in January; nor has it desisted from smuggling pornography into and out of Iraq, according to Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Centre at George Mason University in Virginia. (Shelley has referred to Isis as a “diversified criminal operation”.)

Then there is the often-ignored alliance at the heart of Isis between the so-called violent Islamists, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s secular Ba’athist regime – an alliance that Barrett has referred to as a “marriage of convenience”. If Isis is the apocalyptic religious cult that Wood and others believe it is, why was Baghdadi’s deputy in Iraq Abu Muslim al-Afari al-Turkmani, a former senior special forces officer in Hussein’s army? Why is Baghdadi’s number two in Syria Abu Ali al-Anbari, a former major general under Hussein?

“The Ba’athist element was certainly very important . . . as it gave the Islamic State military and administrative capability,” Barrett says. “It also made it possible [for Isis to] take Mosul so quickly and cause defections and surrenders from the Iraqi army. There was and continues to be a coincidence of interest between Islamic State and other anti-government Sunni groups.”

Here again, it seems, is the fundamental attribution error in play. We neglect to focus on the “interests” of groups such as Isis and obsess over their supposedly messianic and apocalyptic “beliefs”. The “end of times” strain may be very strong in Isis, Barrett warns, but: “The Ba’athist elements are still key in Iraq and without them the Islamic State would probably not be able to hold on to the city of Mosul.”

Baghdadi’s appointment as leader of Isis in 2010 was orchestrated by a former Ba’athist colonel in Hussein’s army, Haji Bakr, according to another recent study produced by Barrett, in which he noted how Bakr had “initially attracted criticism from fellow members of the group for his lack of a proper beard and lax observance of other dictates of their religious practice”. Nevertheless, pragmatism trumped ideology as Bakr’s “organisational skills . . . and network of fellow ex-Ba’athists made him a valuable resource” for Isis.

Apparently, Baghdadi’s supposed caliphate in Iraq and Syria was less the will of God and more the will of Saddam.

 

The Theologian

Perhaps the most astonishing achievement of Isis has been not the sheer size of the territory it has captured, but the way in which it has united the world’s disparate (and often divided) 1.6 billion Muslims against it.

Whether Sunni or Shia, Salafi or Sufi, conservative or liberal, Muslims – and Muslim leaders – have almost unanimously condemned and denounced Isis not merely as un-Islamic but actively anti-Islamic.

Consider the various statements of Muslim groups such as the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, representing 57 countries (Isis has “nothing to do with Islam”); the Islamic Society of North America (Isis’s actions are “in no way representative of what Islam actually teaches”); al-Azhar University in Cairo, the most prestigious seat of learning in the Sunni Muslim world (Isis is acting “under the guise of this holy religion . . . in an attempt to export their false Islam”); and even Saudi Arabia’s Salafist Grand Mufti, Abdul Aziz al ash-Sheikh (Isis is “the number-one enemy of Islam”).

In September 2014, more than 120 Islamic scholars co-signed an 18-page open letter to Baghdadi, written in Arabic, containing what the Slate website’s Filipa Ioannou described as a “technical point-by-point criticism of Isis’s actions and ideology based on the Quran and classical religious texts”.

Yet buffoonish right-wingers such as the Fox News host Sean Hannity continue to refer to the alleged “silence of Muslims” over the actions of Isis and ask, “Where are the Muslim leaders?” Meanwhile, academics who should know better, such as Princeton’s Bernard Haykel, insist that the leaders of Isis “have just as much legitimacy as anyone else”.

Legitimacy, however, “comes through endorsement by religious leaders. If Sunni Islam’s leaders consider Isis inauthentic, then that is what it is,” says Abdal Hakim Murad, who teaches Islamic studies at Cambridge University and serves as the dean of the Cambridge Muslim College, which trains imams for British mosques. The blond-haired, 54-year-old Murad is a convert and is also known as Timothy Winter (his brother is the Telegraph football writer Henry). Murad has been described by the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre in Jordan as “one of the most well-respected western theologians”, whose “accomplishments place him amongst the most significant Muslims in the world”.

The religious world, whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian, is “packed with fringe and fundamentalist groups that claim the mantle of total authenticity”, Murad tells me. To accept those groups’ assertions at face value is “either naive or tendentious”.

He continues: “Just as Christianity in Bosnia 20 years ago was not properly represented by the churchgoing militias of Radovan Karadzic and just as Judaism is not
represented by West Bank settlers who burn mosques, so, too, Islam is not represented by Isis.”

Contrary to a lazy conventional wisdom which suggests that a 1,400-year-old faith with more than a billion adherents has no hierarchy, “Islam has its leadership, its universities, its muftis and its academies, which unanimously repudiate Isis,” Murad explains. For the likes of Haykel to claim that the Isis interpretation of Islam has “just as much legitimacy” as the mainstream view, he adds, is “unscholarly”, “incendiary” and likely to “raise prejudice and comfort the far-right political formations”.

As for Isis’s obsession with beheadings, crucifixions, hand-chopping and the rest, Murad argues: “With regard to classical sharia punishments, the religion’s teachings in every age are determined by scholarly consensus on the meaning of the complex scriptural texts” – rather than by self-appointed “sharia councils” in the midst of conflict zones.

Many analysts have laid the blame for violent extremism among Muslims at the ideological door of Salafism, a regressive and ultra-conservative brand of Islam, which owes a great deal to the controversial teachings of an 18th-century preacher named Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and which today tends to be behind much of the misogyny and sectarianism in the Muslim-majority world. Yet, as even Wood concedes in his Atlantic report, “Most Salafis are not jihadists and most adhere to sects that reject the Islamic State.”

Salafists tend to be apolitical, whereas groups such as Isis are intensely political. Even the traditionalist Murad, who has little time for what he has deemed the “cult-like universe of the Salafist mindset”, agrees that the rise of extremism within the movement is a consequence, rather than a cause, of violence and conflict.

“The roots of Isis have been located in rage against . . . the 2003 occupation of Iraq. Before that event, Salafist extremism was hardly heard of in Syria and Iraq, even though the mosques were full in those countries,” Murad says. “Angry men, often having suffered in US detention, have reached for the narrowest and most violent interpretation of their religion they can find. This is a psychological reaction, not a faithful adherence to classical Muslim norms of jurisprudence.”

In the view of this particular Muslim theologian, Isis owes a “debt to European far-right thinking”. The group’s “imposition of a monolithic reading of the huge and hugely complex founding literature of the religion is something very new in Islamic civilisation, representing a totalitarian impulse that seems closer to European fascism than to classical Islamic norms”.

 

The Radical

Raised in Toronto, the son of Indian immigrant parents, Mubin Shaikh went from enjoying a hedonistic teenage lifestyle involving drugs, girls and parties to embracing a militant and “jihadist” view of the world, full of hate and anger.

He felt as though he “had become a stranger in my own land, my own home”, Shaikh told PBS in 2007, referring to an identity crisis that helped spark his “jihadi bug”. After 11 September 2001, he wanted to fight in Afghanistan or Chechnya because: “It felt like the right thing to do.”

It is a familiar path, trodden by the likes of Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the brothers accused of bombing the Boston Marathon, as well as Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, the Charlie Hebdo attackers in Paris. (A former friend of Chérif said that the younger, pot-smoking Kouachi “couldn’t differentiate between Islam and Catholicism” before he became radicalised by “images of American soldiers humiliating Muslims at the Abu Ghraib prison”, as the New York Times put it.)

Yet Shaikh eventually relinquished his violent views after studying Sufi Islam in the Middle East and then boldly volunteered with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to infiltrate several radical groups in Toronto.

The bald and bearded Shaikh, now aged 39 and an adviser to Canadian officials, tells me it is “preposterous” to claim that the killing of Christians and Yazidis by Isis is rooted in Islamic scripture or doctrine. If it was, “Muslims would have been doing those sorts of things for the past 50-plus years. Yet we find no such thing.”

He offers three distinct explanations for why Isis should not be considered or treated as an “Islamic” phenomenon. First, Shaikh argues, “The claim that Isis is ‘Islamic’ because it superficially uses Islamic sources is ridiculous, because the Islamic sources themselves say that those who do so [manifest Islam superficially] are specifically un-Islamic.”

He points to an order issued by the first and original Muslim caliph, Abu Bakr, which declared: “Neither kill a child, women [nor] the elderly . . . When you come upon those who have taken to live in monasteries, leave them alone.”

Takfiris are those who declare other Muslims to be apostates and, for Shaikh, “It is the height of incredulity to suggest that they [members of Isis] are in fact ‘Islamic’ – an opinion shared only by Isis and [Islamophobes] who echo their claims.”

As for Baghdadi’s supposed scholarly credentials, Shaikh jokes, “Even the devil can quote scripture.”

Second, he argues, it is dangerous to grant Isis any kind of theological legitimacy amid efforts to formulate a coherent “countering violent extremism” (CVE) strategy in the west. “It is quite possibly a fatal blow in that regard because, essentially, it is telling Muslims to condemn that which is Islamic.” It is, he says, a “schizophrenic approach to CVE which will never succeed”.

Third, Shaikh reminds me how the former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld often included verses from the Bible at the top of the intelligence briefings that he presented to President George W Bush. “Could we say [Iraq] was a ‘Christianity-motivated war’? How about verses of the Bible [reportedly] engraved on to rifles for use in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars?”

The former radical points out that highlighting only the role of religion in the radicalisation process to the exclusion of, or above, other factors is short-sighted. “Fear, money . . . adventure, alienation and, most certainly, anger at the west for what happened in Iraq . . . [also] explain why people join [Isis],” he tells me.

Shaikh therefore wants a counterterrorism approach focused not merely on faith or theology, but on “political, social and psychological” factors.

 

The Pollster

What Dalia Mogahed doesn’t know about Muslim public opinion probably isn’t worth knowing. And the former Gallup pollster and co-author, with the US academic John L Esposito, of Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, based on six years of research and 50,000 interviews with Muslims in more than 35 countries, says that the survey evidence is clear: the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims reject Isis-style violence.

Gallup polling conducted for Mogahed’s book found, for instance, that 93 per cent of Muslims condemned the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. The 40-year-old Egyptian-American scholar tells me, “In follow-up questions, Gallup found that not a single respondent of the nearly 50,000 interviewed cited a verse from the Quran in defence of terrorism but, rather, religion was only mentioned to explain why 9/11 was immoral.”

The 7 per cent of Muslims who sympathised with the attacks on the twin towers “defended this position entirely with secular political justifications or distorted concepts of ‘reciprocity’, as in: ‘They kill our civilians. We can kill theirs.’”

It is thus empirically unsound to conflate heightened religious belief with greater support for violence. Mogahed, who became the first hijab-wearing Muslim woman to hold a position at the White House when she served on Barack Obama’s advisory council on “faith-based and neighbourhood partnerships”, says that she was “surprised” by the results, as they “flew in the face of everything we were being told and every assumption we were making in our counterterrorism strategy”.

As for Haykel’s claim that Islam is merely “what Muslims do and how they interpret their texts”, Mogahed is scathingly dismissive. “If Islam is indeed ‘what Muslims do’, then certainly numbers should be a powerful factor dictating which Muslims we see as representing it,” she says. “Isis is a tiny minority whose victims are, in fact, mostly other Muslims.

“By what logic would this gang of killers, which has been universally condemned and brutalises Muslims more than anyone else, get to represent the global [Muslim] community?”

The former White House adviser continues: “Any philosophy or ideology, from Christianity to capitalism, has normative principles and authorities that speak to those norms. Each also has deviants who distort it to meet political or other goals. If I deny the existence of Christ but call myself a Christian, I’d be wrong. If I say the state should usurp all private property and redistribute it equally among citizens but call myself a capitalist, I would be wrong. Islam is no different.”

Echoing Murad, Mogahed points out, “Islam’s authorities have loudly and unanimously declared Isis un-Islamic.” Because of this, “Making a claim that violates normative principles of a philosophy, as defined by those with the authority to decide, is illegitimate.”

What about Haykel’s claim that Isis fighters are constantly quoting Quranic verses and the hadith, or traditions from the life of the Prophet, and that they “mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion and they do it all the time”? Why do they do that if they don’t believe this stuff – if it isn’t sincere?

“The Quran [and] hadith according to whom?” she responds. “As interpreted by whom? As understood by whom?”

Mogahed, who served as the executive director of the Gallup Centre for Muslim Studies until 2012 and who now works for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) and runs her own consulting firm based in Washington DC, argues that Isis uses Islamic language and symbols today for the same reason as Palestinian militant groups used the language of secular Arab nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Any organisation uses the dominant social medium of its society,” she says. “Today, the dominant social currency in the Arab world is Islam. More than 90 per cent of Arab Muslims say religion is an important part of their daily life, according to Gallup research. Everyone, not just Isis, speaks in Islamic language, from pro-democracy advocates to civil society groups fighting illiteracy.”

For Mogahed, therefore, “a violent reading of the Quran is not leading to political violence. Political violence is leading to a violent reading of the Quran.”

***

In a recent despatch from Zarqa in Jordan, birthplace of the late AQI leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and “one of the country’s most notorious hotbeds of Islamic radicalism”, Foreign Policy magazine’s David Kenner sat down with a group of young, male Isis supporters.

“None of them appeared to be particularly religious,” Kenner noted. “Not once did the conversation turn to matters of faith, and none budged from their seats when the call to prayer sounded. They appeared driven by anger at humiliations big and small – from the police officers who treated them like criminals outside their homes to the massacres of Sunnis in Syria and Iraq – rather than by a detailed exegesis of religious texts.”

It cannot be said often enough: it isn’t the most pious or devout of Muslims who embrace terrorism, or join groups such as Isis. Nor has a raft of studies and surveys uncovered any evidence of a “conveyor belt” that turns people of firm faith into purveyors of violence.

Religion plays little, if any, role in the radicalisation process, as Sageman and countless experts testify. It is an excuse, rather than a reason. Isis is as much the product of political repression, organised crime and a marriage of convenience with secular, power-hungry Ba’athists as it is the result of a perversion of Islamic beliefs and practices. As for Islamic scholars, they “unanimously repudiate” Isis, to quote Murad, while ordinary Muslims “universally condemn” Baghdadi and his bloodthirsty followers, in the words of Mogahed.

The so-called Islamic State is, therefore, “Islamic” in the way the British National Party is “British” or the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) is “democratic”. No serious analyst considers the latter two entities to be representative of either Britishness or democracy; few commentators claim that those who join the BNP do so out of a sense of patriotism and nor do they demand that all democrats publicly denounce the DPRK as undemocratic. So why the double standard in relation to the self-styled Islamic State and the religion of Islam? Why the willingness to believe the hype and rhetoric from the spin doctors and propagandists of Isis?

We must be wary of the trap set for us by Baghdadi’s group – a trap that far too many people who should know better have frustratingly fallen for. A former US state department official who has worked on counterterrorism issues tells me how worried he is that the arguments of the Atlantic’s Wood, Haykel, Bergen and others have been gaining traction in policymaking circles in recent months. “It was disconcerting to be at [President Obama’s Countering Violent Extremism summit in February] and hear so many people discussing the [Atlantic] article while the president and others were trying to marginalise extremist claims to Islamic legitimacy.”

Mogahed is full-square behind her former boss’s decision to delink violent extremism from the Islamic faith in his public pronouncements. “As [Obama] recently remarked, giving groups like Isis religious legitimacy is handing them the ideological victory they desperately desire,” she says. This may be the most significant point of all to understand, as politicians, policymakers and security officials try (and fail) to formulate a coherent response to violent extremism in general and Isis in particular.

To claim that Isis is Islamic is egregiously inaccurate and empirically unsustainable, not to mention insulting to the 1.6 billion non-violent adherents of Islam across the planet. Above all else, it is dangerous and self-defeating, as it provides Baghdadi and his minions with the propaganda prize and recruiting tool that they most crave.

Mehdi Hasan is a presenter for al-Jazeera English and an NS contributing writer. Read Tom Holland’s reply to this essay.

Mehdi Hasan is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and the co-author of Ed: The Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader. He was the New Statesman's senior editor (politics) from 2009-12.

This article first appeared in the 06 March 2015 issue of the New Statesman, How Islamic is Islamic State?

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The Silk Roads rise again

The ancient network across central Asia shaped trade and culture for centuries. Now, as its economy slows, China is building a new bridge from east to west.

On 6 September 2013, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, left the G20 summit of major economies in St Petersburg and began a tour of central Asia. His first stop was Astana, in Kazakhstan. On arrival, he told his counterpart, Nursultan Nazar­bayev, that both countries had benefited from good friendship – they were “as close as lips and teeth” – and that he looked forward to discussing “major international and regional issues of mutual interest”.

What these issues were, and their geo­political significance, became clear the following day in a speech at Nazarbayev University. The time had arrived, Xi announced, for China and the nations of central Asia to reflect on their long, shared past and to formulate plans to intensify economic co-operation, facilitate trade and remove barriers. It was time, he said, to build a “New Silk Road”.

With that statement of intent – soon backed by action – from the leader of the world’s second-biggest economy, it was evident that the axis on which the globe spins was slowly turning back to where it lay for millennia. Scholars, artists and merchants once flocked to cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand (in modern Uzbekistan), to cosmopolitan centres such as Baghdad and Basra (modern Iraq), Tabriz and Isfahan (Iran), or to Merv, a city in what is now Turkmenistan and which in the 10th century Arab and Persian geographers described as “the mother of the world”.

This network of countries, stretching from the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean to the mountain ranges of the Himalaya, Tian Shan and Pamir, is rich is commodities that help power and feed the world: oil and gas, rare-earth minerals, wheat and corn. Yet it remains a region we pay scant attention to and know little about. If we are to make sense of the past, the present and the future, we should be looking less to the West and the East and much more to the bridge that links the two. The Silk Roads once dominated global trade and cultural exchange. Now they are rising again.

***

The term “Silk Roads”, or Seidenstraßen, was coined in 1877 by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen. It denoted the mesh of cities, oases and routes criss-crossing Asia, linking the Pacific with the Mediterranean, and the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean with Russia, Scandinavia and Europe. Along these networks the world’s great religions rose and spread. Competition was intense, requiring architectural statements to support claims of divine connection – as with the now destroyed statues of the Buddha at Bamiyan in Afghanistan, or the 40 Buddhist monasteries that ringed Kabul, one of which had pavements made of onyx, marble walls, golden doors and floors of solid silver, “while in the hallway there was a golden idol as beautiful as the moon, seated on a magnificent bejewelled throne”, as one observer wrote.

Joining the evangelists on these routes across Asia were military leaders, merchants and learned men. Modern Chinese words derived from Persian and Arabic, such as bosi, meaning a precious object (literally “from Persia”), are evidence of the booming markets and wealth in the Muslim world in the early Middle Ages, as vast tax revenues flowed towards Baghdad and the great cities of Mesopotamia and central Asia. Scholars were drawn by systems of patronage that gathered the best minds to work on pure and applied mathematics, science, optics and medicine, while great craftsmen found an insatiable demand for their wares. A place such as Rayy, not far from modern Tehran, was so glorious as to be considered “the bridegroom of the earth”. Cities, strung like pearls across the spine of Asia, flourished long after the discovery of the Americas: the moment usually presumed to have marked the true start of the ascent of the West.

In fact, the expeditions that crossed the Atlantic from the end of the 15th century, coupled with the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama at roughly the same time, served to strengthen rather than weaken the Silk Roads. Precious metals taken from the Aztecs and Incas were moved through Europe and then on to trading stations such as Manila, in the Philippines, to pay for luxuries of all kinds – from ceramics and textiles to pearls and curios, such as the capes that were brought back from the East for the Medici dukes in Florence.

Europe’s golden age was mirrored, initially, by a flourishing across the Silk Roads, as China, India, Persia and central Asia reaped the benefits of trade. Descendants of the great central Asian warlord Tamberlane became empire-builders, expanding south from the Ferghana Valley (at the crossroads of modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan) through Afghanistan and into India. Monuments were constructed by the new central Asian “Mughal” overlords in the  classic central Asian style, such as Humayun’s  tomb in Delhi and the Taj Mahal at Agra.

Europe’s efforts to take control of the Silk Roads networks led to a change in attitudes to those in the East, who went from being trading partners to people who could be divided, exploited and dominated. The likes of the East India Company established and expanded their trading positions jealously and ruthlessly, making obscene fortunes for their officers. The interests of those who ran and owned the business were everything; those who got in the way were of no consequence. In the early 1770s famine ravaged Bengal, killing millions after the East India Company sharply raised land taxes and cleared fields to make way for the cultivation of opium poppies. When Robert Clive, a leading figure in the East India Company, was called to answer questions in parliament, he spoke like the chief executive of a distressed bank: his priorities had been to protect the interests of shareholders, not those of the local population; surely he deserved no criticism for doing his job.

That the European traders had thought only of enriching themselves as the local population starved to death made a strong impression on those living in colonies elsewhere, above all in North America. Leaflets distributed in Pennsylvania described the East India Company as an institution “well versed in Tyranny, Plunder, Oppression, and Bloodshed”, a symbol of all that was wrong with Britain itself. If Bengalis could starve to death, why not those living in the colonies? It was not hard for the Founding Fathers to conclude that it was time to go it alone. Events on one side of the globe had an effect on the other.

Anxieties about control of the Silk Road region helped shape the geopolitics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Keeping India secure and protecting the strong trading position that had been built up in China became central strands of British foreign policy. In the hundred years after 1815 and the Battle of Waterloo, it was Russian ambitions in Asia that London feared most. The tsar’s frontiers rolled ever further southwards and eastwards, swallowing up territory that threatened the Persian Gulf and advancing deep into central Asia. This set nerves on edge in London and Delhi. Suddenly Russia was at the gates of India, with the protective buffer of independent khanates reduced to what Lord Curzon called “the thinness of a wafer”.

The answer was to divert Russian attention to its western flank, where relations with a strident and ambitious Germany were sacrificed. Any improvement in relations with the kaiser were out of the question, noted the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, in 1910, if they came at the expense of Russia. The consequences of a hostile Russia, another senior British official noted, were far worse than an unfriendly Germany. As Europe drifted to war in 1914, it was the fear of what would happen in the East that haunted British diplomats. If we fail to stand by Russia, Sir George Clerk cabled from Constantinople, as the tsar’s troops began to mobilise on the border with Austria-Hungary, “our very existence as an Empire will be at stake”.

It was not just India that was at risk; so was trade with China, four-fifths of which was carried on British ships at the turn of the 20th century. The importance of Persia, too, as a central point along the Silk Roads networks was magnified by the discovery of oil in 1908 by a British firm, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which eventually became BP. Historical attention usually focuses on the war in Europe, but the British authorities at the time kept close tabs on events thousands of miles away. According to the cabinet secretary, gaining control of Persia’s oil, and the suspected abundant supply in neighbouring Mesopotamia, was nothing less than “a first-class war aim”.

Thus began a century of astonishing short-sightedness as countries of Europe, and then the US and the USSR, pursued economic interests and geopolitical ideals at the expense of local populations. Reactions to heavy-handed interference became increasingly aggressive and violent, with anti-western rhetoric a consistent theme: from the furious rejection of the West by Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors to the anger of the former Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who now talks of the western intervention in Afghanistan as “a betrayal”, and on to the grotesque violence of Islamic State and al-Qaeda. The defiance of Vladimir Putin, too, whether regarding the deployment of troops in Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea or in the recent military intervention in Syria; likewise, the point-blank refusal of China as well as many of the states in central Asia to engage in dialogue about human rights stands as a rejection of the “enlightened” western way of doing things. Across the Silk Roads, from east to west, north to south, the message is the same: the West should disengage from ill-thought-through attempts to spread views that it treats as objective truths; it should forget its mantra of liberation and democratisation – and mind its own business.

***

While governments in North America and Europe attempt to respond to events as they happen, from the Arab spring to the refugee crises, China has been thinking about the long game. In a series of important public statements, backed by action on the ground, the Chinese leadership has begun to build friendships, cement alliances and secure resources that will be crucial for its growth, which has slowed in recent years from 10 per cent to less than 7 per cent. This marks an important change of attitudes, following a century characterised by upheaval, introspection and long periods of self-imposed isolation. As Xi Jingping signalled in Kazakhstan two years ago, China is becoming intensely keen on emphasising the historical, economic and cultural links with its neighbours, evoking a common heritage in central as well as south-east Asia.

Speaking in Astana, Xi Jinping noted that the peoples who live in the region that connects east and west have co-operated, coexisted and flourished despite “differences in race, belief and cultural background” for 2,000 years. It is a “foreign policy priority”, he said, “for China to develop friendly co-operative relations with the central Asian countries”.

To do that, China is committing formidable resources to infrastructure investments in a web that resembles the Silk Roads of old and is known in China as “One Road, One Belt”. With Chinese energy demands alone forecast to triple by 2030, signing large contracts to buy oil from Russian producers has been a priority, as has been winning the rights to develop wells in Afghanistan and in the Afghan-Tajik basin, believed to contain 1.8 billion barrels of crude. Chinese miners have been pursuing concessions for copper, bauxite and rare-earth mines across the heart of Asia. Networks of pipelines, railways and deep-water ports – as at Bandar Abbas in Pakistan – designed to transport these resources have been built or are under construction.

To secure deals, the Chinese have used a soft touch, committing to share profits and fund educational projects. Companies such as ZTE and Huawei have set up telecommunication networks, bringing 3G to the steppes and superfast broadband to the cities of the Silk Roads – at prices that western corporations decry as being commercially uncompetitive, but which win goodwill in the region.

As minerals, fossil fuels and other commodities flow in one direction, so hard currency flows in the other. This brings challenges in a region of autocratic, often repressive regimes where power and assets are in the hands of the few. In Turkmenistan gleaming new tourist facilities at Avaza, on the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea, built at a reported cost of $2bn, stand almost empty, while new airports, presidential palaces and winter sports arenas that are part of a construction programme worth ten times as much bring little benefit to the 60 per cent of the population that is unemployed.

Yet something profound is happening. China’s own centre of gravity has begun to swing westwards, to Xinjiang, a large autonomous region in the north-west that borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. Economic growth there has recently outstripped the rest of China, and tourism to cities such as Zhangye, in Gansu Province, has risen elevenfold in the past four years alone.

One reason for this is the huge investment into railway lines fanning out along the Silk Roads to connect to the Indian subcontinent, the Caspian, the heart of Russia, and on to a rail freight terminal at Duisburg in Germany. A recent report in the New York Times noted that although only 2,500 containers were shipped by rail from China to Europe in 2012, 7.5 million are expected to travel along that route by 2020. The speed and cost of getting Chinese-made goods to market has convinced companies such as Foxconn, an electronics manufacturer that is a crucial part of Apple’s supply chain, and Hewlett-Packard to move from the Pacific coast of China to Chengdu and Chongqing, which are closer to China’s western border and to the Silk Roads.

It was no accident that George Osborne visited Xinjiang on his recent trade mission, nor that he was congratulated by Chinese state media for his “diplomatic etiquette” for not “raising the human rights issue”. As Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who coined the term “Brics” and who now advises George Osborne, told the Financial Times: “We shouldn’t go round the world saying, ‘Oi, you should do exactly what we think.’ Because it might not be right and, guess what, if you do that you won’t be very successful in your commercial objectives.”

***

To many people, the Silk Roads countries, especially those of central Asia, are perceived as a sort of “Wild East”, full of sinister characters. In Turkmenistan, a giant golden statue of the former president Saparmurat Niyazov revolves to face the direction of the sun. In Kazakhstan, President Nazarbayev was re-elected in 2011 after winning nearly 96 per cent of the vote. The family of his counterpart in Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, was privately compared by US diplomats with “the Corleones of Godfather fame” in leaked diplomatic cables.

And yet, there are good reasons why we must engage with these nations. For one thing, the energy resources of countries across central Asia are large enough to affect global oil and gas prices (it is estimated that there is more oil under the Caspian Sea than off the North American continental shelf). Then there are the rare-earth minerals that are essential for components in satellites, iPhones, laptops and cancer screening machines. Even the wheat fields that run across southern Russia, Ukraine and the steppes from the Black Sea as far as Mongolia have an importance far beyond the region: during the crisis in Ukraine in 2014, the global price of wheat shot up.

Luxury hotel groups have opened up all over the region, from Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan to Baku in Azerbaijan and Urumqi in China, where Hilton Hotels & Resorts has just opened its first property. As the ink was drying on a putative agreement between Tehran and Washington on nuclear issues (energy and weapons), McDonald’s advertised for potential franchisees in Iran. British private schools, too, have set up satellite operations in the Gulf, China and Kazakhstan, where there is a choice of two campuses of Haileybury College alone. Tony Blair has been offering advice and public words of support there (in return for a reported fee of £8m a year).

In this new era, the West’s influence is waning, as is its credibility. The disastrous military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with the confused and ineffective response to the civil war in Syria, are bad enough. Barriers being erected – in some cases literally – at the frontiers of Europe provide a powerful indication of the passing of an age, one in which foreigners and outsiders are less welcome, in which tolerance and compassion are replaced by fear, anxiety and seclusion.

Yet, to the East, the world is slowly opening up again, as it did in the glory days of the old Silk Roads.

Peter Frankopan’s book “The Silk Roads: a New History of the World”, is published by Bloomsbury

This article first appeared in the 22 October 2015 issue of the New Statesman, The 18th-century Prime Minister