Many apologists for Islamic extremist violence blame the U.S. for Islamic extremism. However all through the Center East, sub-Saharan Africa, and North Africa, extremist teams cite particular non secular texts immediately of their founding and operational paperwork. This offers them with scriptural justification for killing and even frames killing as an adherent’s responsibility.
Al-Qaeda’s 1998 fatwa, the “World Islamic Front Statement” printed below bin Laden’s title, opens by invoking Quran 9:5, the “sword verse.”
It closes its central ruling by citing two additional verses: “battle the pagans all collectively as they battle you all collectively,” and “battle them till there is no such thing as a extra tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and religion in Allah.”
From these citations, bin Laden derived the ruling that killing Individuals, civilian and navy, was “a person responsibility for each Muslim.”
The fatwa’s theological lineage runs by means of Ibn Taymiyyah, the 14th-century jurist whose ruling that Mongol rulers weren’t true Muslims as a result of they didn’t govern by sharia grew to become the reference level for contemporary takfir, and extra immediately by means of Twentieth-century Salafi-jihadist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb.
Qutb’s writings body the fashionable world, together with nominally Muslim governments, as having reverted to jahiliyyah, pre-Islamic ignorance. That framing obligates jihad to revive true Islamic rule.
A decade after the 1998 fatwa, Ayman al-Zawahiri issued his personal ruling, specified by a piece referred to as “Exoneration.” It went additional than bin Laden’s, pre-justifying a future mass-casualty assault on the USA. It cited fellow jihadist ideologue al-Fahd on the non secular responsibility of waging jihad past any single battlefield.
Zawahiri backed the ruling with a printed checklist of radical clerics who endorsed it, an attraction to non secular authority meant to reply doubts about his personal standing to concern a fatwa.
A quantitative tutorial examine of all 28 problems with Islamic State’s Dabiq and Rumiyah, its English-language propaganda magazines, discovered an analogous sample at an industrial scale.
The names are drawn from Islamic apocalyptic prophecy. Dabiq, a city in northern Syria, is foretold as the location of a closing battle in opposition to “Roman” forces earlier than the top of instances. After ISIS was driven out of the city in 2016, the journal was renamed Rumiyah, Arabic for Rome, the following prophesied goal.
Solely about 9% of the Quran was quoted in any respect. The passages used had been persistently stripped to their most violent fragments. They had been remoted from surrounding verses that present historic and authorized context. Terrorism researchers describe this sample as cherry-picked slightly than consultant of mainstream Quranic exegesis.
A separate corpus examine of Dabiq’s first 14 points discovered three-quarters of the 624 verses quoted or referenced had been cited only once or twice.
That’s in step with selective mining of scripture for particular rulings slightly than systematic exegesis. Tutorial evaluation of the 5 most-cited verses throughout all 28 Dabiq and Rumiyah points discovered they serve two capabilities: establishing al-wala wal-bara, loyalty to fellow jihadists and disavowal of everybody else, together with different Muslims, and justifying violence in opposition to these so disavowed.
Hamas’s 1988 founding charter is probably the most specific in citing scripture towards a particular end result.
Article Seven quotes a hadith, attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and recorded within the collections of Bukhari and Muslim, stating that “the Hour of Judgment shall not come till the Muslims battle the Jews and kill them, in order that the Jews disguise behind timber and stones, and every tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there’s a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’ apart from the Gharqad tree.”
The identical constitution cites Quran 2:120 to border reconciliation with non-Muslims as a betrayal of religion. It declares in its preamble that “Allah is its aim, the Prophet its mannequin, the Quran its Structure, Jihad its path.”
Boko Haram’s theological justification attracts on the identical Ibn Taymiyyah lineage cited within the Al-Qaeda part above. Ibn Taymiyyah’s rulings supplied a foundation that later extremists used to justify declaring self-identified Muslims apostates, a observe often known as takfir. Founder Mohammed Yusuf constructed the group’s authentic mosque, the Ibn Taimiyyah Masjid, round this framework.
His successor, Abubakar Shekau, expanded it right into a doctrine below which Muslims who voted, held authorities IDs, or despatched their kids to secular faculties might be branded unbelievers and killed as such. That is the theological foundation for the group’s title, which interprets roughly to “Western education is forbidden.”
Shekau’s model of the doctrine traces again to an 18th-century idea from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, “nawaqid al-Islam,” or nullifiers of Islam. It additionally attracts on the work of the fashionable radical ideologue Diya al-Din al-Qudsi, whom Shekau is reported to have quoted verbatim in his sermons.
The broad software of the doctrine grew to become the fault line that break up the motion. In 2016, ISIS’s central management formally eliminated Shekau particularly over his “Takfir al-Umum,” takfir applied broadly to the final Muslim inhabitants slightly than particular enemies. ISIS put in Abu Musab al-Barnawi because the chief of its ISWAP faction in his place.
ISWAP’s personal doctrinal place was specified by a e-book by Barnawi. It explicitly rejects Shekau’s application of takfir to justify killing strange civilians, Muslims, and even fellow commanders. The inner dispute is over how far to increase a shared premise, not whether or not takfir itself is professional.
The Islamic State’s 2014 caliphate declaration drew on an analogous takfiri lineage however utilized it with an added declare of restored Islamic sovereignty: the “convert, pay jizya, or die” ultimatum ISIS issued to Iraq’s Christians in June 2014.
In opposition to Yazidis particularly, a 2014 Dabiq essay titled “The Revival of Slavery Earlier than the Hour” (Dabiq, Subject 4, pp. 14–17) cited classical jurisprudence to argue Yazidis had been pagans whose enslavement was religiously sanctioned. Lawfare’s analysis paperwork that ISIS handled this ruling as settled regulation. ISIS accounts for extra minority deaths on this survey than some other single group.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) adheres to Twelver Shia Islam, which holds Muhammad as the ultimate prophet of Islam, the identical place held by Sunni Islam.
What separates them is a governance doctrine: wilayat al-faqih, “guardianship of the Islamic jurist,” formulated by Ayatollah Khomeini and put in because the constitutional foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran after 1979.
The doctrine holds that within the absence of the Twelfth Imam, whom Twelver Shia perception holds to be in occultation slightly than lifeless, supreme non secular and political authority passes to a professional cleric, presently Iran’s Supreme Chief.
The IRGC’s hostility towards Israel is tied directly to Mahdism, the doctrine that eradicating obstacles to the Twelfth Imam’s return is a non secular obligation. Middle East Forum reports the IRGC regards Israel’s existence because the “biggest barrier” to that reappearance, making its destruction a non secular prerequisite slightly than a strategic goal.
Hezbollah’s founding 1985 Open Letter explicitly pledges obedience to the faqih as its final non secular and political authority.
The identical doc manufacturers Israel “the hated enemy that have to be fought till the hated ones get what they deserve.” The group was fashioned in 1982 with direct organizational and doctrinal assist from an IRGC delegation despatched to Lebanon for that function.
Hezbollah frames armed wrestle in opposition to Israel as jihad. Particularly, it frames the wrestle as fard ayn, a person non secular responsibility slightly than a collective choice, as soon as Muslim land is deemed below occupation.
Martyrdom in that wrestle is introduced as a path to everlasting reward. Hezbollah has used this doctrine to religiously sanction its fighters’ operations in opposition to Israel for the reason that group’s founding.
Islamic extremism has been blamed on the U.S., economics, geopolitics, and numerous different alleged causes. However a lot of the Islamist violence is justified by the non secular ideology of the terrorist organizations themselves.
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