They are barbarous, loathsome, bloodthirsty, and very scary—yet, according to their own lights, they are doing exactly what their deity has ordered them to do, and great will be their reward in heaven. That is the burden of Graeme Wood’s thought-provoking article on the Islamic State formerly known as ISIS, in direct contradiction to the views of other Muslims and President Obama, who all deny the new Caliphate and its atrocities have anything to do with Islam.
Apparently the self-proclaimed Caliph and his minions are doing their best to bring about the apocalyptic end of the world, in line with the requirements of Islamic prophecies. The Caliph must control some physical territory, in order to have a venue where he can impose a hardline version of sharia law. He must wage war and enforce sharia in the same way as the Prophet Mohammed did, complete with beheadings, crucifixions, stoning, and enslavement; anything less vicious would constitute a de facto criticism of the Prophet. He must prepare the way for a climactic battle between good and evil, to be fought on horseback at a town not far from Aleppo. And after a period of dire apocalyptic woes and the near destruction of the faithful, he can look forward to Jesus swooping in to save the day.
If you think this sounds familiar, you’re right. If you think it sounds like a skewed variant of the standard Armageddon-apocalypse envisioned by Christianity’s own rapture-ready fundamentalists, you’d be right again. Moreover, it’s an idiosyncratic and remarkably strained interpretation of select morsels from the Koran and hadiths, just as the fundie Rapture depends on a few cherry-picked verses from the New Testament. A critical difference is that the caliph and his followers have set up an actual theocracy for their dark playground, whereas the Christian fundies, fortunately for the rest of us, are constrained by the separation of church and state.
The parallels do not end there. Just as mainstream Muslims disown the Islamic State, proclaiming that it is not truly Muslim, moderate Christians write off the apocalyptic fundamentalists as a lunatic fringe. In both cases, their problem is that religion, by their definition, is the ultimate source of morality, reason, and all things good—therefore, the barbarities and lunacies of the extremists cannot be religion. To those of us outside the belief system, however, the extremes are clearly part of the religious continuum. How can it be otherwise, when they depend on the same revelations, the same tribalistic “othering” of people who hold to different revelations, and the same conviction that God’s ends will justify any means?
When extremist groups follow that thinking to its logical consequences—torture, murder, enslavement, rape—they are being truer, if anything, to their barbaric Bronze Age and medieval roots than are any moderate people of faith.
