The Islamic State:The Manifestation of a Violently Intimate Utopian Imaginary

Jessica Gold

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of theRequirements for Graduation with Distinction

Program in Asian & Middle Eastern StudiesTrinity College of Arts and Sciences

Duke UniversityDurham, North Carolina

2016

Contents

Abstract 3

Acknowledgements 4

Introduction: Imagining the Islamic State 6

My Project: Re-Imagining the Islamic State 8

Literature Review 10

The Project in Detail 14

Chapter One: The Making of the Islamic State 20

Features of the Islamic State 23

Rise and Development of the Islamic State 28

The Territorial Construction of the Islamic State 51

The Declaration of the Caliphate 54

Chapter Two: The Ideological Composition of the Islamic State

58

Ideology of the Islamic State: Religious and Socio-Political Discourses 61

Interpreting the Jihadi Treatises 83

Chapter Three: The Islamic State’s Virtual Reality 89

Media Analysis of the Islamic State 93

The Islamic State’s Use of Violence 97

The Islamic State’s Imagined Community 112

Chapter Four: Conclusions: Imaginings Beyond the Nation-State Order 121

Toward Understanding the Islamic State 123

The Public Stage 131

Limitations: Under Construction 135

Works Cited 139

Appendix 149

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Abstract

This thesis seeks a complex understanding of the Islamic State through a multi-layered

analysis of its territorial construction and physical form, its ideology, and its virtuality. By

analyzing the way each of these aspects is constructed, influences, and in turn is influenced by

the other aspects, I offer an integrative perspective on the Islamic State. Specific elements under

consideration include the organizational structure, membership, tactics, and factors driving the

territorial construction of the Islamic State, the religious concepts and socio-political narratives

assimilated into its Salafi-jihadist ideology, and its use of violence and virtual networks. My

research combines primary source analysis with theoretical analysis. Sources consulted include

media output of the Islamic State itself, personal correspondence and writings of key IS and

other Salafi-jihadist thinkers, and existing expert analysis of the Islamic State.

My own analysis leads me to propose that the Islamic State, as seen through its physical

and ideological forms, is actually the manifestation of an imagined utopic vision animated and

spread through virtual networks and the threat and seduction of intimate violence. Thus, this

thesis complicates existing understandings of the Islamic State, which tend to see it as a

fundamentally physical threat, a combination of a pseudo-state and terrorist organization acting

according to an extreme Salafi-jihadist ideology, which employs sophisticated virtual methods.

While valuable in some regards, such an understanding misses the scope and power of the

Islamic State as a virtual entity. Ultimately, static, rationalist frameworks, many of which

developed out of the Cold War context and are tied to the nation-state system, are insufficient to

provide a complete understanding of the Islamic State. New frameworks must be developed that

can account for continual change, transformation, and the manifestation of the virtual forces of

individual and collective imaginaries.

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Acknowledgements

I want to begin by thanking everyone who has supported and encouraged me in my

chosen field of study. Although I first arrived at Duke intending to major in International

Comparative Studies with a focus in the Middle East, I will be eternally grateful to all the

teachers, fellow students, and other individuals who, through their passion for the subject and

personal support, encouraged me to add a major in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies as well.

Without them, I would not have imagined this thesis in the first place, let alone the possibility of

writing it.

Additionally, I would never have completed this thesis without the valuable suggestions,

patient editing, and constant support of many people at Duke. In particular, thank you to Dwayne

Dixon for challenging me and constantly pushing my ideas further; without you, this thesis

would have taken a very different shape. I greatly appreciate all the time and effort you have put

into helping me produce my best work. Also thank you to my committee for their time and

thoughtful input.

To my advisor, Professor Mbaye Lo, my thanks are many-fold. You have been part of

this journey from the beginning, ever since my first semester in Arabic, when you encouraged

me to add it as a major. Who could have predicted how far we would come? Your constant

support and wise advice, both over the years in and outside the classroom and throughout the

writing of this thesis, will always be an inspiration.

To Professors David Schanzer, Maha Houssami, Ellen McLarney, and Sattar Jawad,

though you may not know it, you have each been a valuable contributor to this process. I have

been privileged to take classes with each of you, and your perspectives on Middle Eastern issues

broadly and the Islamic State specifically are part of what inspired this project in the first place.

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Finally, thank you to my family—my amazing parents who were just a phone call away

through the process and my sister, who was there for me even while writing a thesis of her own

—and to my friends, who put up with constant complaints and long absences as I immersed

myself in my work. Without your support and insistence that I take the occasional break, both

my thesis and myself would be a lot worse for the wear.

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Introduction:

Imagining the Islamic State

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Introduction

During a four month period in late 2014, shortly after its declaration of a new Islamic

‘caliphate,’ the militant extremist Islamist group now known as the Islamic State released a

series of graphic execution videos that both horrified and enthralled audiences around the world.

The concept of an execution video was not new, nor was this the first time the organization itself

had published such a video. Already common in Chechnya, beheading videos had been

popularized in Iraq by one of the Islamic State’s early predecessors, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). In

2004, AQI published a video featuring the beheading of American businessman Nicholas Berg as

a response to the revelation of atrocities taking place at Abu Ghraib. The video immediately went

viral, but it was just the first of many (Stern 4).

While they have become more sophisticated over time, the basic premise of these

beheading videos remains the same. A prisoner (identifiably a foreigner) kneels beside a black-

clad, masked jihadi. He gives a speech denouncing his homeland, blaming American and

Western policies, and those of their allies, for his own predicament. The jihadi warns those

watching that more deaths will follow. And then, in an act of visceral, unbearably visible

violence, he beheads the prisoner.

The beheading is not shocking because it is unexpected or unheard of. Rather, it is

shocking because the very staging of the scene suggests the end as inevitable and invites the

viewer to watch anyways. It is shocking because it is not a scene out of an action or horror

movie; it is not the violence audiences are used to watching through the medium of silver

screens. It is the ritualized, contained, staged, slow-motion dematerialization of a human life.

Thus, beheading videos terrify the ‘enemies’ of IS and seduce prospective recruits by

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highlighting the intimate materiality of the human body and placing dominion over life and death

in the hands of the jihadi1.

The camera frames the scene from the middle distance so that all the viewer can see is the

ghostly, boxed tableau of victim and executioner. However, it is in the periphery that the

imagination flourishes and where the beheading works. As the video circulates, made portable by

the camera’s frame and spreading along media pathways, it also enters the pathways of the

human mind. The moment it contains, the seduction of intimate dominion and the threat of

dematerialization, is intentionally staged and yet vague enough that the viewer cannot help but

re-imagine it within his own context, overlaying the initial scene with his own fears and desires.

During those few months in 2014 and ever since then, the videos have spread like

wildfire. First uploaded to the dark web and open source data storage sites, they gained traction

and attention as members of jihadi forums linked to them and were then picked up and spread by

mainstream media and news organizations. With every share and every new viewer, the sense of

panic and horror spread. Yet the overall effect was more than a gut reaction of aversion, a

gathering buzz, or a desire for revenge at any cost. No, the effect was this: the unimaginable had

become imaginable. Not only that, but it was being imagined, over and over again, daily, by

people around the world. And that imagining, the powerful transformative capacity of desire and

of fear, is what created and continues to define and shape the Islamic State.

My Project: Re-Imagining the Islamic State

Generally, my thesis will attempt to re-read the Islamic State as an entity that has been

imagined into existence, or exists as an imaginary with very real impacts, and elucidate the

1 For an extended analysis of beheading videos and the function of Islamic State violence, see Chapter 3.

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consequences of that reading. While a huge amount of work has been and continues to be done

on the Islamic State, it tends to operate according to paradigmatic analytical tools or focus on

conceptions of the Islamic State that arise from particular points of view. Although these

conceptions are useful and to some extent necessary for understanding the Islamic State, which is

problematically complex for traditional state and systemic structures to address, they also limit

and influence that understanding. Thus, although it is impossible to describe the Islamic State

without resorting to some key or shared (typically Western, rationalist) conceptual paradigms,

this thesis will attempt to do so while also challenging the paradigms and the contexts from

which they emerge and pointing out the limitations and implications of their application.

The paper is separated into three sections analyzing the Islamic State’s territorial,

ideological, and virtual existences respectively. The analysis is conducted by identifying the

major aspects of each component, including the organizational structure of the Islamic State, its

makeup, its typical tactics, and the factors driving its territorial development (Chapter 1), the

religious and sociopolitical concepts out of which its ideology has been constructed (Chapter 2),

and the Islamic State’s use of violence and virtual networks to create its ideal subjects (Chapter

3) respectively. For each, I attempt to move beyond a typical descriptive analysis by elucidating

the ways in which the identified characteristics are constructed rather than naturally emergent.

By drawing out the way imagining plays an integral role in the key components of each aspect, I

attempt to turn the usual conception of the Islamic State as just another terrorist group or

insurgent state on its head.

Ultimately, the Islamic State as seen through its physical and ideological forms is actually

the manifestation of an imagined utopic vision animated and spread through virtual networks and

the threat and seduction of violence. Furthermore, what began as an imagined alternative to the

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modern, globalized, largely neoliberal and nation-state focused order, the Islamic State, has

begun to influence that order.

Literature Review

The Islamic State is commonly conceptualized as a violent Islamist organization that uses

terrorism as a tactic. Thus, attempts to discuss the Islamic State typically rely on existing

extremism and terrorism theory, which commonly centers on mechanisms, including questions

of why individuals join extremist groups or commit violent action in the name of such groups or

their ideas, why the specific group is successful or not, and how terrorism ‘ends,’ either by

accomplishing its goals or being defeated (Hoffman; Miller; Richardson; Sageman

Understanding Terrorism). Although this theory does use specific groups, most commonly al

Qaeda, as examples, it is mostly focused on a generalized understanding of the processes

involved in terrorism and violent extremism (McCauley and Moskalenko Friction; Sageman

Leaderless Jihad). This is accompanied by studies of specific groups, which tend to apply the

existing theory to their subject of choice and explain how the theory applies or does not apply,

i.e. how their subject is an innovation on or evolution from the generalized model (Ryan;

Quggin). Thus, extremist studies literature on the Islamic State focuses on how it is both an

extension of and a divergence from existing groups such as al Qaeda, specifically in terms of its

recruitment strategy, overall mission, and specific tactics.

In most other theoretical literary work, the Islamic State is still an addendum, or else a

reference in a few paragraphs, but it is rarely central to the larger claims. The exception to this,

of course, is the expanding body of new books, articles, and reports focusing on the Islamic State

specifically. Understandably, most of this critical work is pragmatic and utilitarian insofar as it

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imagines ways to combat the Islamic State; at the same time, it imagines the Islamic State to be a

bounded object, which both simplifies but also limits understandings of it. It also focuses largely

on the physical and ideological components of the Islamic State. For example, one body of books

attempts to explain the rise and present situation of the Islamic State. These works include ISIS:

Inside the Army of Terror, by Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, Jean-Pierre Filiu’s From Deep

State to Islamic State, which discusses the ways in which the Arab autocracies’ attempts to crush

the Arab Spring led to the rise of the Islamic State, and Cockburn’s The Rise of the Islamic State:

ISIS and The New Sunni Revolution, which instead emphasizes the complicit role played by the

West, suggesting that Western countries and their allies created the conditions for ISIS’s

explosive success by stoking the war in Syria and failed to act until it was too late.

Other authors have devoted themselves to analyzing the ideology and vision of the

Islamic State. For example, William McCants’ new book, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History,

Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State, focuses on the unconventional vision of the

Islamic State, the contradictory yet uniquely appealing combination of the return of the Islamic

Empire and the end of the world as a mission to recruit and inspire fighters from around the

world. Bunzel’s report “From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State” sets

forth the main lines of the ideology of the Islamic State and carefully follows its historical

trajectory using sources mainly from IS itself.

However, by analyzing the Islamic State as a bounded and fixed object, current scholarly

works cannot fully address the ways in which it innovates upon but also defies typical

conceptions of terrorist organizations, insurgent states, or other similar entities that it is imagined

to resemble. New studies focusing on the Islamic State’s use of propaganda and the Internet tend

to come closest to addressing the transformative and virtual elements of the Islamic State,

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although these understandings are also unavoidably shaped by current understandings of social

media and media theory. Though their book is not specifically devoted to the digital or virtual

aspects of the Islamic State, Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger allocate several chapters to these

topics, postulating in ISIS: State of Terror that the Islamic State is a “smart mob” using social

media both to organize and disseminate its message and that it operates via psychological

warfare aimed at both its potential victims and those it seeks to control. In Islamic State: The

Digital Caliphate, Atwan conducts the typical analysis of IS’ leadership structure, strategies,

tactics, and diverse methods of recruitment and traces its ideological roots and historical

development. However, he supplements this material by proposing that the group’s digital

existence has facilitated its territorial gains. Specifically, Atwan suggests that the Islamic State’s

rapid growth has been facilitated by its command of social media platforms, the 'dark web,'

Hollywood 'blockbuster'-style videos, and even jihadi computer games, producing a powerful

paradox where thousand year old ambitions have re-emerged in cyber-space.

Finally, focused media analyses of the Islamic State highlight its deployment of carefully

selected narrative concepts through a ‘centralized decentralized structure;’ while most of the

content is disseminated by a huge number of both real and automated supporters outside of IS-

controlled territory, the original content is initially shared by a select number of designated

“feeder” accounts controlled by individuals inside IS territory who are taking active part in the

jihad (Berger and Morgan; Klausmen; Farwell; Winters; Zelin). While particular categorizations

of the content vary, media analyses tend to concur that key themes include military victory,

governance, religious doctrine, and the utopic vision of the caliphate. The propaganda content is

deployed, both physically within IS territory and virtually on the Internet, to what can be called

the Islamic State’s virtual community. Though this has not yet been formally explored, the

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author will suggest that the Islamic State’s purposeful deployment of propaganda and violence

along media networks and its consolidation of a virtual community bears striking parallels to

Benedict Anderson’s conception of the nation as an imagined community (Anderson 6).

Limitations in the Existing Literature

While varying in its emphases, the emerging canon on the Islamic State shares a

particular point of departure. It analyzes IS as an organization rooted in certain religious and

sociopolitical histories that took advantage of specific conditions to gain territorial presence and

authority and has ambitions to bring about a particular utopic world for the umma of true

believers. These texts do emphasize the Islamic State’s use of social media and its psychological

manipulation of both its victims and its ‘citizens’ as things that set it apart. Yet in the end, they

label these as innovations, extras that give the Islamic State its unique character and support its

growth, spread, and success, yet have little to do with its fundamental existence and how it came

about.

Thus, while the existing canon is invaluable for making the Islamic State comprehensible

to policy and military experts, other scholars, and even the general public, I believe that it largely

misses a crucial point, which is how absolutely integral the virtual, the non-real, and the

imagined aspects are for the Islamic State’s existence in the first place. It is my proposal that

continued imaginings give the Islamic State its form and longevity and continue to shape its

effects. What we see as the Islamic State today is less a physical state, organization, or even

collection of people than a vision that has been actualized by many interconnected yet distinct,

individual imaginings of it.

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The Project in Detail

This thesis is an attempt to show how various imaginings of the Islamic State have

shaped its complex reality. My project is to elucidate the ways in which the imagined, and

imagining, is a crucial factor in the formulation and continued existence of the Islamic State. It is

not merely secondary, but rather shapes the very physical and ideological components that so

many authors have already elucidated. This is not to say that their work is passé; on the contrary,

it is still extremely valuable, and will underpin my own work. Their conclusions are no less true

just because they have been shaped first by a virtual or imaginary component; indeed, the whole

point is that they have been imagined into truth, constructed at both communal levels and,

increasingly, at the level of the individual.

Sources

For my sources, I will use primary source material from the Islamic State itself, including

recruitment videos, official speeches and statements, correspondence, and its official English

language magazine, Dabiq, to supplement existing expert academic analyses of the Islamic State.

The combination of sources will allow me to discuss both how policy experts and academics

from various perspectives and the entities they represent imagine the Islamic State as well as

how the Islamic State imagines itself as seen through the image it projects to its viewership.

Thus, my analysis will seek to address not only the main claims or content of my sources, but

also how that content is presented, to whom, what the medium is, the method of dissemination,

and, if identifiable, the goals or position of the author. All of these factors are important because

they suggest how the Islamic State is imagined by the author or itself. Ultimately, the interaction

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of various imaginings of the Islamic State is what shapes its actual reality, its manifestation into

the physical world and existing hegemonic order.

Goals

Frequently, the Islamic State is described by its physical metrics: the number of fighters it

boasts and where they are from, the territory it holds, the number of casualties it inflicted and

received to win and defend that territory, the resources it can deploy, and the money it can spend.

More than that, media depictions focus on the physical impacts of the Islamic State, such as its

campaign in 2014 to eliminate the Yazidis, a Christian ethnic group in Iraq. Islamic State fighters

drove thousands of Iraqi Yazidis up a mountain where they were besieged for weeks, sustained

eventually by air-dropped US aid, until a joint Kurdish peshmerga and Iraqi military and militia

force rescued them (Hassan and Weiss 145). The impact of this imposition of violence and

terror, the physical movement of people in fear for their lives, contrasted markedly with the fear

generated by the virally circulating beheading videos, which suggested the dematerialization of

the (enemy) human body. And yet it is exactly in that gap between the material and the

immaterial that imagination flourishes, and in which the true power of the Islamic State is

exerted. The Islamic State is ‘imagined’ in many ways, by many groups, individuals, and even

statistical measurements and studies. Yet in part, the variety of theorizations is due to the way it

manages to elude each one; policy-makers and scholars are constantly re-theorizing or re-

imagining it because it does not fit any of their existing theories. This paper is my own attempt to

imagine the Islamic State. Doubtless, it will slip the boundaries of my imagining, but hopefully,

in the process, my reader and I will learn something important.

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Structure

One crucial imagining is the way US policymakers and others trying to combat or deal

with it see the Islamic State. To them, it is the boogeyman, gobbling up land that rightly belongs

to a sovereign nation-state and killing or enslaving the people who live there, all to construct its

own state based on a twisted version of Islam that must be not only defeated, but degraded and

ultimately destroyed. Yet the very actions taken by these policymakers, colored by their

perception of the Islamic State, in turn helps determine what the Islamic State is; move and

countermove is one way to characterize a war, as well as a (virtual) game, and the engagement of

nation-states with the Islamic State is in some ways both. Then too, just as the early execution

video, the beheading of Nicholas Berg, was a reaction to Abu Ghraib, so can the formulation of

the Islamic State be seen as a reaction to Western policies of intervention in the Middle East. In a

way, the Islamic State was imagined into being as a counterweight to Western, neo-liberal,

democratic state-building projects. This and other ways the Islamic State was ‘imagined’ into

existence as the answer to struggles including religious sectarianism, anti-authoritarianism, and

proxy wars will be the focus of Chapter 1 of my thesis.

Chapter 2 will explore the way the ideological underpinnings of the Islamic State, its

religious and socio-political content, animate its imagined utopic vision. The Islamic State’s

main ideological concepts do not derive from a single, unchanging ideological discourse. Rather,

they are excerpts of longer Salafi-jihadist religious and socio-political narratives, and

furthermore are deployed by the Islamic State in a way meant to support its utopic vision of

itself. This vision, the so-called Caliphate, is both religious, the embodiment of the pure Islamic

law that is (in the eyes of those who imagine themselves the only true believers) the only rightful

law to govern humanity, and socio-political, the solution to the perceived long decline of Islamic

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civilization and the final installment in the clash of civilizations. However, the religious and

socio-political elements are not separate, but mutually construct and reinforce each other in the

animation of the Islamic State’s particular Salafi-jihadist ideology.

Finally, Chapter 3 will look directly at the mobilization of specific concepts in the virtual

sphere, namely the use of violence as a spectacle for control and the construction of a virtual

community. First, it will suggest that the Islamic State uses beheading and other forms of

particularly intimate, material violence in both its physical and increasingly its virtual territory,

which overlaps those of existing nation-states, to create its desired subjects. Next, it will address

the virtual networks the Islamic State relies upon to disseminate these effects, relying on

Benedict Anderson’s conception of the imagined community alongside modern terrorism and

extremism theorists (McCauley, Sagemen, and Hoffman) and media theorizations of the Islamic

State (Winter, Klausmen, Farwell, and Zelin) to suggest that IS has created its own imagined

community that stretches from its physical territory to the virtual networks of social media and

the dark web and then into the physical territory claimed by other nation-states.

Ultimately, the Islamic State uses the projection of violence and its virtually based

imagined community to create itself as a powerful global imaginary. It is at once manifest in the

past and omnipresent in the transnational social biome of the web, authorized by the bodily and

material facticity of beheadings and conquered cities, which is then distilled into the individual

who has been drawn into the Islamic State’s imagined community. From there, the virtual, global

imaginary of the Islamic State is embodied in both purposeful and unconscious or unexpected

ways, enacting physical effects, for example, the recent spate of IS suicide bombings around the

world. Such incidents of violence are read through their media depiction as the body broken

apart and reassembled for the construction of a powerful imaginary of a visual text, then virtually

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consumed as the images circulate through invisible social spectrums. In the end, both people

individually and governmental entities tend to react more to their conception of an entity than its

reality, so that its imagined form is what actually shapes the world around it. Paris and San

Bernardino are only two examples of the way the Islamic State, imagined, can be translated

through the medium of the virtual, through the individual, and have consequential effects on

what we commonly conceive as reality.

Conclusions

Thus, its use of spectacular, intimate violence and media networks may be more central

to the socially concrete force of the Islamic State’s imaginary than either its religious or political

ideologies or its physical, territorial existence. At its core, the Islamic State is not just a terrorist

organization; we have seen terrorist tactics overcome a political ideological position before.2 It is

not just a localized, insurgent state; we have seen that before as well.3 These specifics

disintegrate as they approach the imagined reality. The Islamic State is finally, or rather first,

some combination of a utopic vision and a boogeyman: both imagined, both constructed by

sprawling, virtual communities, and both having very apparent, real existence, real effects, not

only despite, but because of, their nature in the shared imaginary, which is then distilled to the

level of the individual or downloaded by the individual and manifested through the individual

into our lived existence.

Though this conception must be considered alongside other analyses, as the Islamic State

is a constantly changing subject and this is merely yet another imagining of it, it is my hope that

2 For example in Sri Lanka, the Shining Path, the IRA, in Chechnya, and perhaps in Xinjiang.3 The true nature of the Islamic State is contested; as I will discuss in chapter 1, it has aspects of a terrorist organization, an insurgency, and a state, but the whole is more than the sum of these parts.

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such a project will emphasize the importance of understanding the Islamic State according to its

own imagined and transforming nature. This is not to say that my own treatment has been any

less flawed, as it is impossible to conduct an analysis without picking a particular point upon

which to focus, or to do so without a particular point of view. Yet the point of this thesis is to

acknowledge the inherent difficulty of trying to understand the Islamic State in the first place,

given how attached modern policy and scholarship is, according to a rationalist Western

tradition, to structured understanding. In defiance of this tradition, the Islamic State straddles the

divide between logic and chaos; it employs smart tactics, but its ultimate goal is an apocalyptic

dissolution.

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Chapter One:

The Making of the Islamic State

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Introduction

In this chapter, I will attempt to elucidate the rise and development of the Islamic State,

the establishment of its physical existence. First, I will give a brief overview of some of its key

features. Then, I will give an account of the formulation of the Islamic State. There are many

different explanations of how the Islamic State arose and why it has taken on the form,

characteristics, and tactics which it has. Instead of privileging one or another of these

explanations, I will attempt to weave them together with an objective historical account of the

rise of the Islamic State, emphasizing various points in the history at which certain aspects or

contributing factors are said to have played a pivotal role in its construction.

Among these explanations are Western intervention in Middle Eastern politics,

particularly in Iraq, sectarianism in both Iraq and Syria, which was exacerbated by a proxy war

between (Wahhabi) Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, populist visions of the Arab Spring and

authoritarian backlash against those uprisings, which partially explain the Syrian civil war, and

the involvement of various regional and non-regional state actors in proxy wars in both Iraq and

Syria. Yet it is important to note that each explanation is an attempt to understand the Islamic

State by applying a particular framework, rooted in a particular perception of the situation. Each

explanation attempts to fit the reality on the ground into a larger model, yet none accounts for

every element. In a way, explaining the Islamic State’s physical existence is just the first of many

instances in which it escapes the rational imagination, or policy-makers,’ academics,’ and the

public’s current conception of it. Furthermore, different groups or people rely on different

explanations based on their own worldview. Thus, when relying on or referencing various

explanations, I will also address who most prevalently uses it and suggest why that might be.

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Similarly, describing the Islamic State’s existence by listing attributes such as its

territory, its manpower, its resources, and its beliefs is also a way of putting it in a box, of

pinning it down, so that policy-makers and others attempting to combat it can understand it.

However, each of these factors is constantly evolving, constantly morphing; the Islamic State is

not static, but rather extremely fluid, and transforms everything around it just as it transforms. It

has no stable identity, constantly changing its face to fit the situation. Thus, any attempt to

describe it physically automatically simplifies it, and that simplification can be dangerous

precisely because transformation is such an essential part of the Islamic State’s nature. Yet in

order to understand the more amorphous levels of the Islamic State, such as its ideology and its

transformative, virtual existence, it is first necessary to acquire at least a basic understanding of

its physical existence, as flawed as that framework may be.

As it exerts itself in the specificity of material contexts, the Islamic State stimulates the

fevered imaginations of erstwhile opponents; their anxieties compel them to conjure imaginative

structures to contain it, such as the theoretical explanations mentioned above. These theorists

(politicians, military personnel, scholars, and even common citizens trying to understand the

group they are so afraid of) pin down what the Islamic State is in order to combat it or deal with

it (physically or mentally), and this ‘pinning’ is exactly their weakness. In pinning it down,

boxing it in, they claim to ‘know’ IS—the common Orientalist trope that knowledge is power—

yet IS escapes this trope. At the moment they know it, or even before they know it, it morphs

again, escaping their imagining, and the strategy for handling it based on that knowledge or

imagining is already moot. Even in the case of this paper, the very necessity of interweaving

explanations with history suggests that in some ways, the physical existence of the Islamic State

is beyond the author’s current ability to explain it.

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Features of the Islamic State

Briefly, the Islamic State (as it is now known, and which I will abbreviate as IS) is an

extremist jihadi group that aims to found a new Sunni state, an Islamic Caliphate modeled after

the original Caliphate following the time of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, in the

region of Iraq and the Levant (Napoleoni x). It is neither a terrorist organization nor an

insurgency nor a state, but some amalgamation of the three, with distinct characteristics of its

own. The group is led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a mysterious figure who was reputedly born in

Iraq and joined the Iraqi insurgency after the 2003 NATO invasion.4 Al-Baghdadi later emerged

as the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), out of which IS grew (McCants Kindle Location 1321).

However, due to its brutal tactics and its extreme commitment to the foundation of a Sunni state,

IS is an outlier even among militant Islamist groups, and al-Qaeda has since renounced it (Stern

and Berger 180).5

The ideology of the Islamic State is based on the Salafi-jihadist tradition and will be

further addressed in Chapter 2. Briefly, Salafi Islam is a Sunni fundamentalist or ultra-

conservative reform movement with three branches: purist or quietist, which is apolitical,

activist, which denotes reform through political involvement, and jihadist, which denotes reform

or more accurately revolutionary transformation through violence. The root salaf comes from the

Arabic word for predecessors and is used in the Quran to reference the earliest generations of

Muslims (Stanley).6 Salafi-jihadism, which is the central religious ideology of the Islamic State,

4 For an English profile of Baghdadi, see McCants Kindle Locations 1227-1347; for a profile in Arabic, see Haniyya and Ramaan 237-239.5 The falling out did not solely concern the Islamic State’s tactics, however; it also involved its refusal to obey commands from the central al-Qaeda organization (see Stern and Berger 180).6 See Lo, “Seeking the Roots of Terrorism” for an explanation of the origins of the Salafi political movement in Paris. Kurzman’s Modernist Islam contains a valuable selection of original texts from the founders of the Salafi movement (for example, “Ikhtilaf al-qawanin bi-ikhtilaf ahwal al-umam” by Muhammad Abduh and “al-Tajdid wa al-tajaddud, wa al-

23

follows the jihadist branch of Salafism and combines the Salafi tendency towards reform with

belief in jihad as a permissible means of transforming society. Its core goal is to return the

Islamic community to its pure origins in the original Caliphate and its basis in strict sharia law

through any means, including offensive violence. Proponents of Salafi-jihadism seek to revitalize

the Muslim community, which its disciples believe has been on the decline due a series of

attacks by the West, or the groups they term “Crusaders,” by fundamentally transforming every

aspect of society according to an Islamic model (Moghadum). It is important to distinguish

Salafi-jihadism from Islam itself because only a tiny fraction of Muslims believe in Salafi-

jihadism. It is a splinter, extremist sect of the larger faith, as evinced by the fact that fewer than 1

in 100,000 Muslims have joined Islamist terrorist groups ascribing to Salafi-jihadi ideologies

since 9/11 (Kurzman, The Missing Martyrs 11). However, Salafi-jihad is inherently linked to

Islam, and thus must be called a religious ideology; according to experts from the Combatting

Terrorism Center, Salafi-jihadists invoke religion by referring to themselves and their enemies in

religious terms, describing their strategy and mission as religious (a jihad carried out through

martyrdom operations), and justifying their acts with selective references to the Quran (Price,

Milton, al-Ubaydi, and Lahoud).

Structure of the Islamic State

For obvious reasons, it is difficult to definitively describe the Islamic State’s structure.

However, based on recovered documents and insider reports (interviews with militants as well as

defectors), experts have constructed a partially accurate picture of the organization. According to

Haniyya and Ramaan:

mujaddidun” by Muhammad Rashid Rida) which clearly highlight that it was intended as a reformist political movement and not a revolutionary militant one.

24

“the organizational structure of the state depends upon a hierarchical structure; the Caliph is its head, and he oversees the direct supervision of the councils, a term Baghdadi used instead of the term ministries used by his predecessor. The councils are the joint regulators of the State…Baghdadi enjoys wide powers to appoint and dismiss heads of the councils after seeking the opinion of the Shura Council, which is advice and non-binding” (202, translation mine).

Haniyya and Ramaan go on to describe a structure including regional heads of Iraq and

Syria, the Shura Council, and religious, legal, media, military, and security councils as well as a

complex treasury in charge of donations, charity, ransoms, the seizure of resources and goods

from places controlled by the organization, natural resources and minerals, the imposition of

taxes and fees, government finances, and the proceeds of agriculture (Haniyya and Ramaan 202-

213). There are also administrative regions, known as wilayat, each with their own head

(Haniyya and Ramaan 213). A Clarion Project report constructed from internal IS documents

largely reiterates this structure, emphasizing that Baghdadi has final authority (Frieland 18-20).

According to Frieland’s model, two deputies for Iraq and Syria operate directly under Baghdadi.

Additionally, the councils include treasury, transport, security, prisoners, and foreign fighters, as

well as special branches for military operations and media operations. Beneath the regional

deputies are governors responsible for administering their specific provinces, particularly

important given the Islamic State’s emphasis on state functions (Frieland 18). Thus, within its

provinces, the Islamic State operates its own civil services including education and health care. It

also runs its own sharia courts, which are responsible for all legal affairs; there are no separate

civil courts, as IS sees no distinction between religion and state (Frieland 18).

Yet although separate sources confirm this structure, it is not static or fixed; as the

Islamic State gains and loses territory, it may add or remove provinces, or may need to form or

eliminate various offices or leadership positions. For example, the office responsible for foreign

fighters was added after the Islamic State began to receive a large number of Western recruits.

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Similarly, state services are established and maintained based on the Islamic State’s territorial

holdings and ability to protect those holdings and provide services; they are not fixed features,

but constantly shifting depending on other factors.

Similarly, the leadership itself is in flux; the individuals and positions may be filled or

unfilled depending on need or circumstance. This is especially true given the high turnover rate

in leadership positions as the United States and its allies continue to target IS leadership figures.

Thus, in many cases, the leadership or organizational structure is actually more of an idea than a

reality. While it is useful for policy makers and military and intelligence leadership to describe

the structure of the Islamic State as a method for dealing with it (either by eliminating its

leadership or infiltrating its components), imagining it as fixed to that framework runs the risk of

assuming that the framework is static and will not change, as well as forgetting that the structure

is the result of circumstance and utility.

Membership of the Islamic State

Overall, the United States House Committee on Homeland Security estimates that the

Islamic State can currently muster approximately 25,000 fighters, although large numbers of

these may have been killed in recent air strikes (House Committee on Homeland Security 12).

The bulk of these fighters are jihadis from Syria, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern countries, most

notably Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. Many of the Syrians were initially involved in the uprising

against Bashar al-Assad, or were freed from Syrian prisons during the uprising (Harkin 1). The

Iraqis include large numbers of Sunni tribal fighters, particularly those who were part of the

Sahwa, or Awakening, and former Ba’athist leaders who were removed from the government

following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein (Weiss and Hassan 50).

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However, a significant number of these fighters are Westerners: the latest estimated

figures range from 5,000 to 10,000, including over 250 Americans (House Committee on

Homeland Security 12). The large mass of so-called ‘foreign fighters’ poses particular concerns

to their host governments. Already in Paris, we have seen an example of IS fighters returning

‘home’ to conduct an attack (House Committee on Homeland Security 13). While the concern is

certainly a valid one, the terminology is questionable; individuals who join the Islamic State

frequently do so because they do not consider their country of origin ‘home’ and instead wish to

be part of IS’s utopic community. Thus, if they do ‘return’ to their original country to conduct an

attack, it is less a return than an attempt to bring the Islamic State to that country, through the

exercise of violence (see Chapter 3).

Much work has gone into estimating the numbers and countries of origin of the fighters,

yet it is important to think beyond the numbers and country names and consider what they mean.

The Islamic State did not always exist; the ‘army’ of the Islamic State, its mujahidin, or fighters,

was created rather than previously extant. It was formed by individuals who each came from

somewhere, and who coalesced into a body that fought to create it, drawn from all ends of the

earth into the physical territory of the Caliphate. The explanations mentioned above are examples

of individual explanations for joining, of which there are many more.7 But it is worth considering

whether factors beyond the physical conditions of their lives or countries played a role in the

coalescence of the Islamic State fighters. Many of them joined during the insurgency in Iraq and

Syria, and their contributions were part of what created the Islamic State in the first place.

7 A defector study by Peter Neumann identifies three main recruitment ‘narratives,’ including “a belief that Sunni Muslims in Syria were being faced with genocide,” the conviction that “IS represented a perfect Islamic state which every Muslim had a duty to support,” and an appeal to “personal and material needs” (Neumann 9). These narratives are typical of similar studies, but Neumann cautions that individual reasons for joining are much more complex than overarching narratives would suggest.

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Vision of the Islamic State

The Islamic State distinguishes itself through its sophisticated use of the Internet, its

widespread propaganda campaigns marketing a utopic community, the Islamic umma reborn,

while at the same time evoking terror and awe through its visceral depictions and almost

veneration of violence, its brutal treatment of anyone it views as heretical (anyone who does not

support its agenda or is not a devout Sunni) (see Chapter 3). Each of these tactics is amorphous

and depends upon perception. Propaganda is all about convincing the viewer of a certain point of

view, or at least upon providing an image which the viewer can perceive in a way that satisfies

some need or want on their part. For example, a unified Islamic umma is a utopic goal at the

moment, as the number of states, sects, factions, and other alliances dividing Muslims is at an

all-time high; violence may affect only the victim physically, but its depiction is meant to distill

the effect based on the viewer’s reading of it; and heretics or apostates are a group defined by

discourse, a definition constantly changing based upon who is perceived as a threat to the ‘true

believers,’ or, in other words, the Islamic State’s project. According to Stern and Berger, who

have written a widely-acclaimed book on the subject, “ISIS has made its name on the marketing

of savagery, evolving its message to sell a strange but potent blend of new utopianism and

appalling carnage to a worldwide audience, documenting a carefully manipulated version of its

military campaigns…” (Stern and Berger 2). In other words, its tactics are more about vision and

optics than physically winning a war.

Rise and Development of the Islamic State

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The initial question, of course, is how IS developed in the first place. Entire books have

been devoted to the subject already, so I will leave a more complete answer in capable hands.8

Instead, I will address particular aspects of the Islamic State’s rise as a method of grounding

further discussion of its vision, and why and how it has achieved ‘success’ by constructing itself

as the sole, legitimate authority of Muslims, based on its control of a utopic but also physically

existent state living its interpretation of ‘original’ sharia.

The Islamic State did not develop in a vacuum. Its rise to power was and still is

intimately connected to both historical trends and regional developments, which also contribute

to its continued existence. Though the exact causation is complex, it is beyond the scope of this

thesis to determine exactly which factors contributed to what event, and to what extent. Instead,

the following brief history of IS’s development will attempt to touch on popular explanations for

the Islamic State’s rise in order to identify their value as well as their limitations. These

explanations include backlash against Western interventionism, the failure of the democracy

project in the Middle East, the revival of sectarian tensions, the opportunity offered by regional

populism, the rejection of Western free market capitalism, and related competition over regional

natural resources and power brokerage, epitomized by a collection of proxy wars. As previously

mentioned, each of these explanations is proposed by various parties in their attempt to ‘handle’

the Islamic State; thus, each conception has a project and also defines the Islamic State in a

certain way, which may elucidate certain of its aspects while ignoring, missing, or misreading

other aspects.

Iraqi Roots: The Consequences of Western Interventionism and Sectarian Conflict

8 For example, McCants gives a particularly nuanced account framed by the evolution of the Islamic State’s utopic vision (The ISIS Apocalypse), while Hassan and Weiss addresses the Islamic State’s rise with an eye to internal dynamics (Inside the Army of Terror).

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One popular explanation for the Islamic State’s rise is that the United States’ invasion

and occupation of Iraq and the sectarian policies of the Shia majority Maliki government

encouraged a Sunni insurgency, elements of which became the Islamic State. Politicians and

political critics on both the American left and right, who blame Presidents Bush and Obama

respectively for the situation, have popularized this explanation in the wake of the Iraq War in

order to gain ground at the expense of their opponents. In other words, this explanation is used in

America for political gain. However, another party, namely scholars critical of Western politics,

have pointed out flaws on both sides of the political spectrum with the goal of highlighting the

negative consequences of American intervention generally. Frequently more concerned with the

repercussions within the Middle East itself rather than in American politics, this group of

scholars opposes Western interventionism, a common sentiment in the countries concerned. This

kind of critique is relatively new, having emerged as the result of a perceived series of policy

errors beginning with Vietnam, but more recently including the American government’s

handling of the Iraq-Iran War, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now Syria. As for the role of

sectarianism, Sunni-majority governments and populaces (particularly Saudi Arabia) commonly

blame Iraq’s Maliki for the rise of IS in Iraq and Assad for its rise in Syria, while Maliki’s Shia

regime and Iran more frequently point to the involvement of Sunni governments and their

support for radical Sunni elements against Shia regimes as a contributing factor to IS’s rise.

While the exact magnitude of causation is unclear and each of these claims may have

some merit despite the clearly political reasons for espousing them, it is undeniable that the US

invasion and Maliki’s sectarianism dramatically changed conditions in Iraq, and that the Islamic

State’s precursor organizations developed under those new conditions.

Narrative of Western Intervention: The US Invasion of Iraq

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Prior to the US invasion, Iraq was led by Saddam Hussein, the leader of the Baath Party

in Iraq, a socialist party that was mainly but not entirely Sunni and also largely secular. Under

Saddam, members of certain tribal families (those from the Tikrit region, his home) and the

Baath party received special benefits, while Shiites and Kurds frequently faced discrimination

and sometimes active violence. Iraq’s Shiites, although the majority population of the country,

were denied political participation, and their religious and political activities were increasingly

restricted after a failed uprising following the 1991 Gulf War, for which thousands were killed

(Amos 43).

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 to overthrow Saddam Hussein, whom they

claimed was a threat both to his own people and to the democratic world order due to his

possession of weapons of mass destruction, his history of aggressive foreign policy, and his

support of terrorist organizations purportedly including al Qaeda. The reality of these claims was

less an issue than the United State’s perception of the threat, a statement supported by the fact

that, despite finding no WMDs, the Bush administration cited a global ‘war on terror’ as a

justification for its actions (Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim 198).

Following Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, the United States established a transitional

government in Iraq headed by Paul Bremer, whose first decisions in office would have extreme

consequences for post-invasion Iraq and indeed regional stability as a whole. As head of the

Coalition Provisional Authority, Bremer banned any member of the Baath party or Saddam

Hussein’s administration from working in the civil service. Though this was marketed as a

method of preventing the continuation of corrupt practices, favoritism, and Sunni abuse of Shia

Iraqis, it also had the consequence of putting thousands of Sunnis out of work with no other

prospects. Furthermore, Bremer also disbanded the Iraqi army because of concerns about the

31

Sunni military leaders’ ties to Saddam Hussein. Thus, the Baath party bans and dissolution of the

army put approximately a hundred thousand experienced, well-qualified Sunni Iraqis out of work

and out of luck, alienated from the country they had run (Stern and Berger 19).

Finally, the 2006 elections had long-lasting consequences. Jalal Talabani, a Sunni Kurd,

was elected President. Due to the historic disenfranchisement of Shia under Saddam Hussein, he

was pressured to appoint Shia Nouri al-Maliki as Prime Minister instead of another Shia

candidate who was considered too favorable towards Sunnis by the Shia majority. This decision

would have unintended consequences. Although the new Prime Minister initially promised to

restore order in the country through unity, he became increasingly sectarian as time went on

(Cockburn 48).

Capitalizing on Sectarian Conflict: Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq

The American invasion had catalyzed an explosion of jihadi activity in Iraq, as jihadi

leaders used it to support their narrative that America had hegemonic designs on the Middle East

and that the Muslim world was necessarily at war with the West (Lawrence xxiii). While Osama

Bin Laden had previously framed the conflict as a war against “global unbelief,” the US invasion

brought the “far enemy” of America right into the Middle East, making it an obvious target even

for those who had been previously unconvinced (Lawrence xxiii). The uptick in terrorist attacks

after the invasion was one reason the United States was so set on nation-building in Iraq, as it

needed a strong government to help combat the terrorists, who, after all, were the original 9/11

enemy. However, the new government did not solve the situation but made it worse, and the

conflict in Iraq escalated into a simultaneous jihadi insurgency and sectarian civil war, in which

framing and perception played integral parts in determining both strategy and particular actions.

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Al Qaeda in Iraq, the earliest precursor to the Islamic State, was one of many

organizations that emerged in 2004 to resist the American occupation, but distinguished itself

with its particularly sectarian bent (Bunzel 14). It was led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian

thug-turned-terrorist who had found purpose in the Afghan jihad and fled to Iraq after the

invasion of Afghanistan, where he joined Ansar al-Islam. Zarqawi was vehemently opposed to

the American occupation and formed his own organization, Tanzim wa-al Jihad, to resist,

attacking both American and Shia targets (Haniyya and Ramaan 32). In 2004, he swore bayat, or

allegiance, to Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda (also known as al Qaeda central, to

differentiate it from its various affiliate organizations), with whom he had a lukewarm

relationship. Zarqawi’s organization was transformed into Tanzim wa-al Jihad fi Bilad al

Rafidayn, or al Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, which became commonly known in as al

Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI for short (Haniyya and Ramaan 42). AQI consisted of mostly Sunni

fighters, many of whom had been forced out of work with the disbanding of the Iraqi Army.

They were attracted by Zarqawi’s anti-Shia rhetoric and the opportunity he offered to take

revenge on both parties that had disenfranchised them, the Americans and their supposed Shia

puppet, Prime Minister Maliki (McCants Kindle Locations 152-178). Thus, the Islamic State’s

predecessor organizations were already predicated upon a strong sense of Sunni identity, al-

hawiyya al-Sunniyya, which was central to their organizational makeup and ideology.

Though AQI was one among many jihadi groups in Iraq fighting both the Americans and

the Iraqi government, it received special attention for its brutal violence; Zarqawi’s group was

responsible for the kidnapping, execution, and documented beheading of American citizen

Nicholas Berg, a practice which became IS’s trademark (Weiss and Hassan 31). It also had a

goal beyond the expulsion of the Americans; AQI viewed Shia Muslims as heretics, destroyed

33

Shia holy sites, and attacked Shia villages and tribes in an effort to purify their land. Indeed, AQI

was in large part responsible for the shift in Iraq from insurgency to civil war; according to

Amos, who has written extensively on what the invasion meant for Iraqis themselves:

“the Sunni insurgency’s alliance with al Qaeda [or generally the jihadists] began with the common goal of fighting the U.S. occupation, but al Qaeda’s brutal tactics, massacring Shiite civilians and targeting Shiite religious institutions, would eventually drag the entire Sunni community into a confrontation with the better-equipped Shiite militias backed by Ministry of Interior forces.” (23)

The framing of the conflict as a sectarian one, a position purposefully supported by Zarqawi, and

ironically so by Prime Minister Maliki, actually deepened and extended it, transforming the war

against jihad into a civil war.

These early trademarks—the use of extreme violence, sophisticated use of the Internet,

and the declaration of other Muslims as apostates and thus permissible targets (a practice known

as takfir, the application of which is disputed even within jihadi circles)—are all recognizable in

the practices of the Islamic State today.

Zarqawi’s bloody rampage through Iraq attracted attention, particularly as he was

responsible for inciting much of the sectarian violence, and he was killed in a US drone strike in

2006. Yet the conflict was far from ending. After Zarqawi’s death, al Qaeda central, now led by

Ayman al-Zawahiri, reasserted control over the other jihadists by urging them to form an Islamic

state, the idea being that a single legitimate authority would cut down on infighting among

various jihadist groups. A group of Iraqi jihadists announced the establishment of the Islamic

State of Iraq, led by Abu Omar al Baghdadi, to whom Zarqawi’s successor in AQI swore loyalty.

Following Zawahiri’s suggestion, the new ISI shifted priorities from sectarian violence, instead

focusing on the establishment of an Islamic authority. Yet the violence against civilians

continued unabated (Bunzel 17-18).

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In response to the continued insurgency and sectarian warfare, General David Petraeus

began the American troop surge, bolstered by a new alliance with Sunni tribal elements who had

grown tired of the sectarian tensions and violence espoused by Zarqawi. This tribal movement

was known as the Sahwa, or Awakening, and pushed many al Qaeda militants, alongside other

jihadi elements, across the border into Syria (Broder 3). By 2008, the surge and Awakening

appeared to be successful. Even more welcome, the drop in violence was accompanied by an

improvement in sectarian tensions, epitomized by Prime Minister Maliki sending the new,

largely Shia, Iraqi army to combat Shia militias running rampant in certain sections of the

country. Most notorious among these militias were the Sadr brigades, or the Mahdi Army,

controlled by Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who encouraged them to attack Americans and their

Sunni allies alike. The Mahdi Army frequently operated with the covert assistance of the Iranian

foreign intelligence and military apparatus, the Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force, despite

Iran purportedly assisting the US and Iraq against the jihadists (Weiss and Hassan 50-57).

Political Vacuum: American Withdrawal from Iraq

When Prime Minister Maliki’s political situation became more precarious around the

2010 Iraq elections, he consolidated power once more along sectarian lines, purportedly in return

for Iranian assistance. Furthermore, while Bush had negotiated an agreement for American

troops to remain in Iraq until 2011, President Obama’s similar negotiations to extend the stay of

a small portion of troops and trainers past that time, even as the rest of the troops were drawing

down, foundered. Resistance to American occupation was at an all-time high, and it was at this

point that Prime Minister Maliki’s policies became more notably anti-American, and also more

sectarian/pro-Shia (Stern 29). At the same time, the Sadr brigades continued assaulting American

35

and Sunni targets, including Sunni civilians. Thus, the American drawdown actually coincided

with an uptick in violence and sectarian tensions. While Obama marketed the withdrawal of all

American troops as the end of the Iraq War, Iraq’s problems were just beginning. Upon their

withdrawal, Prime Minister Maliki began a campaign against high-placed Sunnis, supposedly to

protect his government. High-placed officials were removed and exiled, while Shia militias

continued to purge Sunni villages. Three years of this was enough to make many Iraqi Sunnis

willing for, or at least not downright hostile to, the return of IS (Cockburn 52).

Thus, the United States’ occupation of Iraq left behind a fractured, sectarian government,

a people wary of Western interventionism and imposed democracy, and plenty of

disenfranchised, armed, and dangerous young men as potential recruits for a resurgent jihadi

campaign. Crucially, the individuals most capable of rebuilding the country and supporting

functional governance were the Sunni professionals forced out of the civil service and army,

many of whom joined the millions of Iraqi refugees and exiles in a mass “exodus of the

professional class (Amos, xii).” As would become all-too apparent later, many of the most

disillusioned went to Syria. From this point of view, the conflict in Iraq was constructed by the

interference of outside parties and the overly sectarian actions, or instigations, of internal parties.

In 2010, the leadership of ISI was again decimated by a US drone strike. Yet rather than

die out, the organization was once more re-invented. Into the vacuum stepped Abu Bakr al

Baghdadi, the current leader of the Islamic State. Baghdadi had been captured in the early days

of the Iraqi insurgency and spent time in the Bucca detention camp, where he was further

radicalized and, most importantly, made many contacts who would become important figures in

IS leadership (McCants Kindle Locations 1251-1347). After his release, he joined ISI, and was

36

chosen to succeed Abu Omar al Baghdadi because of his religious education (mostly acquired in

the detention center) and his strategic vision (McCants Kindle Locations 1251-1347).

Baghdadi rebuilt and in many ways transformed ISI by filling strategic positions with his

own allies, many of whom had been in Bucca with him. Several were former Baathist leaders

disenfranchised by Bremer’s bans, who became important figures in IS because of their military,

bureaucratic, and organizational skills despite their essentially secular worldview (Broder 3;

Harkin 2). Capitalizing on its new leadership, ISI escalated its violent attacks in 2010 and 2011,

just as the US was drawing down, and further supplemented its ranks with mass prison-breaks,

freeing many of the leaders of the Iraqi insurgency and jihad.

The Arab Spring of Syria: Populist Uprisings and Proxy War

The most common explanations for the conflict in Syria focus less on the consequences

of United States involvement than those of United States under-involvement and the over-

involvement of other actors. Generally speaking, the populist Arab uprisings reconfigured the

regional power balance in unexpected ways. Most relevant to this thesis, the failed (or, as some

would claim, ongoing) uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and resulting civil war

in Syria created a power vacuum filled by militant elements including an early iteration of the

Islamic State. Experts characterize the power struggle resulting from (or continued in response

to) the Arab Spring in various ways, including an extension of the populist backlash against

authoritarian Arab regimes to one against the liberal, Western, free-market capitalist system that

supported them (Khalil), a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, Iran, and their various allies for

regional hegemony based on sectarian affiliation (Amos), and a struggle to shape regional

security according to particular outside interests (Cockburn). Each of these explanations has

37

merit but supports a particular vision of the phenomenon that may not encompass all of its

aspects or tell the full story. Telling them separately may make the specific explanations more

clear, but will invariably miss some of the complex linkages.

The Arab Spring

The Arab Spring began in Tunisia in 2010 and spread rapidly, toppling rulers in Tunisia,

Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, sparking uprisings in Bahrain and Syria, and inspiring large protests

in other countries including Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria, and even Saudi Arabia. The protests

were in large part inspired by desperate social and economic conditions made worse by the

repression of authoritarian regimes. Many experts trace the problems, first diagnosed in the 2002

UN Arab World Development Report, to the adoption of neoliberal policies by Arab regimes in

response to IMF, World Bank, and Western state pressure. This position has become more

popular in the wake of the global financial crisis, which exposed previously hidden or ignored

fault-lines in the globalized economy.

According to this theory, as expressed by Yousef Khalil, neoliberal restructuring replaced

the social services typical of Muslim governments, which are responsible for providing for their

people according to Islamic tradition. Yet in order to adapt to the (western conception of) the

modern world, “Arab governments were compelled by the need to secure aid and favor from the

West to transform their governments from “social states" to "regulatory states," as "fiscal

austerity was prioritized over employment generation and inclusive growth” (Khalil). The result

was a lackluster civil service, skyrocketing unemployment, and structural deficiencies in

government social services, which combined to leave many citizens, especially recent college

graduates, unemployed, underserviced, and without alternatives. Overall, the result was a feeling

38

of disillusionment with the government’s ability to provide for its people. This was compounded

by widespread government corruption and favoritism.

All that was required was a spark to light up the whole conflagration, which was provided

by the brutal attack on Mohamed Bouazizi by Tunisian police forces. The backlash spread across

the region rapidly, boosted by social media, with the goal of toppling corrupt, illegitimate

regimes (ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam, or the people want to topple the regime, was the

unofficial motto of the revolutions) and restoring the dignity of the people. Underpinning that

moral victory, of course, was the idea of change; as explained by Marc Lynch in Foreign Policy,

toppling the regime would be useless unless whatever took its place could solve the economic

and social problems underpinning the uprising in the first place.

In some cases, most notably the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Islamist forces took

advantage of the backlash against authoritarian governments to rise to power; they offered a

particularly attractive alternative due to their history of providing social services. Yet the Muslim

Brotherhood was overthrown within a year, having failed to solve the social and economic

problems at hand. It was replaced by what is essentially a military regime led by General Sisi—a

reincarnation of the overthrown authoritarian regime of President Hosni Mubarak. Under Sisi,

censorship is on the rise and unemployment is not falling; the problems are still not solved, as

‘success’ in the eyes of the Arab Spring protesters will only be achieved when a stable

government codifies open political and social spaces for all of its people and also restores

economic stability and opportunities for employment (Ismael and Ismael 231).

The Syrian Civil War

39

The goal of the Arab Spring may have been to solve problems, but this was rarely, if

ever, the result. Syria is one notable example where the violent upheaval unleashed by the

uprisings continues to this day. Inspired by the successful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and

sick of unemployment and government repression, Syrian youths began to protest against the

regime of Bashar al-Assad. The protests were met with the most brutal crackdown of the

uprisings, yet government violence only elicited more support for the protestors. Eventually,

what began as mass protests devolved into civil war, and the civil war in Syria became a key

factor in the rise of the Islamic State.

There are various theories for how, exactly, the Islamic State was able to take advantage

of the civil war and rise so rapidly to power; after 8 years of slow growth in Iraq, the group

exploded out of the shadows in 2013 and controlled much of Syria by 2014. The most popular

theories are that IS took advantage of the failure of populist visions of democracy and the

perception that Western neoliberalism had caused the problems in the first place, that

authoritarian backlash validated or at least necessitated violent forms of opposition, which the

Islamic State took advantage of, and that the fall of regimes or their perceived instability

encouraged regional powers to engage in a proxy war to support their interests, which

inadvertently funded the rise of the Islamic State. Again, each of these theories frames the

conflict in a certain way that elucidates aspects of the Islamic State while eliding others; in an

attempt to box it in to address it, they may allow it to slip out of reach.

1. Populist Visions

40

According to one position, it is the very failure of both secular authoritarian and religious

regimes to solve the political and economic problems rooted in neoliberal restructuring which

has allowed for the rise of the Islamic State. This position is a more recent view espoused by

neoliberal critics, who frequently focus on the West’s complicity in supporting authoritarian

Middle Eastern regimes, as well as by more leftist populist groups advocating for the necessity of

a new governmental vision in the Middle East. The limitation here is that these critics imagine

solving the political, economic, and social problems as a final solution; however, such a long-

term focus may ignore immediate necessities. This view once more hinges upon a failure of

imagination; according to one author, writing from within Syria, “a simple-minded delusion that

most problems would vanish once democracies had replaced the old police state” was at the heart

of the new reformist governments of the Arab Spring (Cockburn 141). Thus, “they wrote their

own doom” (Cockburn 141).

For the populist masses and their more religious allies alike, the Arab Spring revolutions

were all about taking down the police state. However, there was little vision beyond that; once

the singular goal was achieved, the vision frequently collapsed because nothing else held the

masses together. That had been the role of nationalism in the old authoritarian governments,

which put state nationalism off limits for the new governments. Without nationalism, they were

left with few tools to retain the loyalty of religious sects or ethnic groups that began feuding

again once it became clear that the economic and social issues had not been solved. In some

instances, such as Egypt under Morsi’s Islamic Brotherhood, an established organization was

able to substitute religion as the coherent vision. Yet when it became clear that the new

government would not be able to fix the social and economic problems still plaguing the country,

it too was overthrown.

41

Thus, the Islamic State, which espouses its doctrine of war with the West and a utopic

Islamic caliphate, is actually one of the only factions in the region offering an alternative to

western neoliberal ideology (Khalil). Indeed, IS purposefully capitalizes on disillusionment with

the new governments formed in the wake of the Arab Spring by highlighting its doctrine of war

with the West. One of its key tenants, discussed in Chapter 2, is that the Western world is

responsible for the decline of Islamic civilization and its economic and social bankruptcy and

that violent struggle between the two is necessary for the revitalization of Islamic civilization.

According to the Islamic State, western neoliberalism is inherently flawed because it is a man-

made system, operating according to man-made laws. In contrast, it proposes sharia, or God’s

laws as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, and a new Caliphate operating only according to

those laws. Furthermore, it positions its new territorial holdings as an actual operational state

following sharia law, and highlights its successes (territorial expansion and continued existence

in the face of the opposition of the entire international community) as proof that it is a viable,

indeed the only viable, alternative to Western neoliberal capitalism.9

This theory suggests that an alternate, non-neoliberal, governing and societal model is

necessary to combat the vision of the Islamic State. Clearly, such a model would be difficult to

construct. Furthermore, the main limitation is that, by focusing on such an all-encompassing

model, proponents of this theory may ignore smaller-scale approaches to the situation, ways to

think about or combat the Islamic State that are not directly related to its governmental and

societal system.

2. Authoritarian Backlash

9 See chapter 2 for further discussion of the Islamic State’s ideology, particularly conceptions of the clash of civilizations, jahiliyya society, and sharia law.

42

Another interpretation holds that it was the authoritarian backlash of Arab regimes which

led to the rise of the Islamic State, as their increasingly desperate tactics for holding onto power

alienated entire populations, promoted sectarianism, and created power vacuums, all of which

provided the perfect conditions for the rise of the Islamic State. Jean-Pierre Filiu persuasively

argues this position in his book From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-Revolution

and its Jihadi Legacy. This kind of interpretation is more popular among Middle Eastern

intellectuals and experts on the region who have a long history of criticizing the censorship and

harsh policies of authoritarian Arab regimes. Its limitation, however, is that the model focuses on

a single state actor and its interactions with various parties, ignoring the significance of

interactions between non-state parties within the conflict.

According to this interpretation, the violence in Syria offered the perfect opportunity for

Baghdadi to expand from Iraq. The Iraqi-Syrian border had always been porous, but it was

especially so in 2012, as the American invasion in Iraq and sectarian tensions had made certain

Sunni tribal families whose territory stretched across the border sympathetic to ISI’s cause.

Already, jihadis had been flowing across the border into Iraq to resist the American occupiers;

now, Baghdadi used the same routes to send his fighters into Syria, purportedly to join the fight

against the repressive Assad regime (Amos 55). Baghdadi’s operatives were tasked with

establishing a new jihadist organization, meant to be the Syrian wing of al Qaeda. These

operatives, including Abu Mohammed al Jawlani, founded Jabhat al-Nusra. In the beginning, al-

Nusra maintained its appearance of independence, hiding its ties to both al Qaeda generally and

ISI specifically, and quickly became one of the most successful groups in the fight against Assad

(Stern 41).

43

From this viewpoint, Assad’s violent crackdown against his own citizens, which drove

Syrians to violently oppose him, gave the forerunners of the Islamic State the chance to establish

themselves in Syria. For example, al-Nusra was extremely popular in those early days, before its

ties to al Qaeda were revealed, because of its success against regime forces compared to

moderate secular forces composing the Free Syrian Army. This success was due in large part to

the group’s religious emphasis, which attracted donations from wide-ranging and wealthy

Islamist networks. Yet it also began cooperating with secular groups and other militias in Syria;

all the various allies shared was opposition to the Assad regime (Harkin).

This viewpoint suggests that the Islamic State arose because of a paradigm of violence in

the Middle East; thus, the formulation requires a political or diplomatic solution, including the

transformation of governmental systems in the region. Yet it misses key aspects of the story.

For one, though certain groups took advantage of the situation, they were not all

motivated by a desire to overthrow Assasd. Other factors were at play, including complexities

within the so-called rebel factions in Syria. First, the rebellion was less spontaneous than it

appeared; most of the rebel forces were financed by outside parties, including the US, Qatar,

Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. While the outside powers were operating under the assumption that

all of the active militant groups opposed Assad, that was not the case. In fact, conflicts between

the militant factions were at least as significant as the conflict between them and the Syrian

regime (Weiss and Hassan 86).

Most significantly, al-Nusra is not actually the direct predecessor of the Islamic State.

Actually, Baghdadi, who had continued his consolidation of power in Iraq while al-Nusra took

advantage of the civil war in Syria to establish a foothold there, announced a merger of ISI and

al-Nusra in 2013. He called the new group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (al-Sham in

44

Arabic), known by the acronym ISIS. This announcement surprised both Jawlani, who had

become the leader of al-Nusra, and Zawahiri, the leader of al Qaeda central. Jawlani turned down

the merger and pledged allegiance to Zawahiri, putting al-Nusra into conflict with ISI (Joscelyn).

Baghdadi ignored Zawahiri’s command to keep the two groups and regions separate and

continued his goal of creating an Islamic state across the Iraqi-Syrian border, sending more of his

own fighters into Syria and recalling his remaining loyal fighters from al-Nusra to join ISIS. As

opposed to al-Nusra, which won allies in Syria, ISIS continued Baghdadi’s violent and single-

minded approach and came into direct conflict with al-Nusra and other rebel forces in Syria

because it refused to share territory (Harkin). Eventually, al Qaeda Central formally disavowed

ISIS due to Baghdadi’s defiance and violent conflict with other jihadist groups in Syria (Bayan

bi’sha’ni ’alaqat jama’at Qa’idat al-Jihad bi-jama’at al-Dawla al-Islamiyya fi al-’ Iraq wa-l-

Sham).

3. Power Vacuum and Proxy War

At the same time that the Islamic State was taking advantage of the uprising against

Assad to gain ground in Syria by posing as a rebel group, there was another set of influences at

play. According to this analytical lens, the rise of the Islamic State can also be explained by the

struggle of regional powers, particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran, to fill the power vacuums caused

by the fall of Arab regimes. Proxy war models such as this were popularized during the Cold

War by theoreticians and policymakers in both the United States and the Soviet Union; the

model became the paradigm through which the Cold War was carried out, with each country and

factions within countries viewed according to their affiliation or potential affiliation to one group

or another. This model suggests that groups behave according to a singular interest in one side or

45

another of a binary conflict—yet, as we will see in the case of the Islamic State in Syria, the

reality is often much more complex.

The rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia is deeply rooted, harking back to the original

divide between Shia and Sunni Muslims over the proper leadership of the Islamic Caliphate, or

the Islamic polity created to rule the Muslim community after the death of Muhammad, the

founder of Islam (Lewis, The Political Language of Islam 44). After Muhammad’s death, the

majority of Muslims, who became known as Sunni, thought that the next caliph should be chosen

by the community of Muslims. However, a smaller faction, now known as Shia Muslims,

believed that the title should be hereditary and supported the claim of Ali, the cousin and son-in-

law of Muhammad, to the Caliphate. The Sunnis prevailed and Abu Bakr was elected as the first

caliph. Ali was eventually chosen as the fourth caliph, but bloodshed broke out in the interim,

and Ali himself was murdered. After his death, the Shia faction refused to recognize the

Umayyad caliph, leading to the death of Ali’s son Husayn in a famous battle at Karbala. The

incident has been memorialized and is used as a defining moment for Shia identity. The two

sects have been rivals since that time, with Sunnis recognizing successive Caliphs, while Shia

look to the imams, the descendants of Ali, as their religious authorities (“The Sunni-Shia

Divide”). Shia Muslims form the majority in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain, with a large

contingent also in Lebanon, while Sunnis are the majority in the rest of the Muslim world.

According to the sectarian proxy war model, the conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia

is one of regional hegemony, for which they have used the sectarian divide as a tool to spread

their control. This process was especially marked following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran,

which turned Iran from a largely secular, westernized nation under the Shah into an overtly Shia

nation experimenting with Islamic rule. After the revolution, Iran supported groups in the region

46

with Shia agendas, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, and saw itself as the true “Guardian of the

Islamic Revolution” (Cockburn 79). On the other hand, Saudi Arabia sees itself as the guardian

of true Islam in the form of a strict Salafi strand of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism (an

offshoot of the Hanbali school named after the tribal elder al-Wahhab, who helped Ibn al-Saud in

his conquest of the Arabian Peninsula and establishment of the modern state of Saudi Arabia).

Threatened by Iran’s Shia transformation, Saudi Arabia intensified its campaign to spread

Wahhabism to the Muslim world. In recent decades, it has increased its sponsorship of schools

and mosques abroad. Critics of the Saudi regime argue that the increase of Wahhabi thought in

mainstream Sunni Islam is directly correlated with worsening sectarianism in region (Dorsey 3).

What a strictly sectarian view of conflict ignores is that Shia and Sunni communities themselves

are not monolithic. However, it is true that unitary sectarian identities do tend to emerge in times

of crisis, especially when Iran and Saudi Arabia support various factions, as in the Lebanese civil

war and now in Syria.

According to this viewpoint, the Syrian civil war is seen as a paradigmatic example of a

proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, who both want a favorable regime in power in

Damascus. Iran has supported Bashar al-Assad, an Alawi Muslim (Alawis are a heterodox sect of

Shia Islam) from the beginning of the conflict, supplying weapons, advisors, and now even some

leadership from its own Revolutionary Guard. It has also sent Hezbollah forces into Syria to fight

on behalf of the regime; Hezbollah has long been recognized as a semi-autonomous tool of Iran.

On the other side, Saudi Arabia has funded Syrian rebel groups since the beginning of the

conflict, providing arms and money to help them topple the Assad regime, in just one example of

their commitment to Sunni (Wahhabi) regional expansion. Some of these groups have rather

extremist leanings, and a couple are purportedly tied to the Islamic State itself. One example is

47

al-Nusra, which Saudi Arabia purportedly supported in the early days of the war, before its

affiliation to al-Qaeda became clear (Cockburn xx). This is not the first time Saudi Arabia has

been accused of funding extremist Sunni groups; instead, it is a clear example of the ways in

which the Saudi Arabian and Iranian regimes have contributed to regional conflict along

sectarian lines. In sum, the sectarian formulation of the proxy war model for the Syrian Civil

War suggests that Saudi Arabia and Iran have extended and intensified the conflict as part of

their respective quests for regional hegemony.

Yet the proxy-war formulation is not confined to a quest for sectarian regional hegemony

between Saudi Arabia and Iran. While Western countries are quick to point the finger at these

two regional figures, they have also been involved in the conflict, shaping it in integral ways.

The United States, much of the EU, and most of the Gulf States have supported what they call

‘moderate’ rebel militias against the Assad regime, although again some of these groups have

turned out to be less than moderate. Turkey, too, has supplied rebel forces, although much of its

recent focus has been on attacking the Turkish and Syrian Kurds fighting in Syria, as certain

Kurdish elements are purported to have ties with the PKK, whom Turkey labels a terrorist

organization (Harkin 3).

In both cases, outside parties defined actors on the ground based on their own interests,

and these definitions had very real consequences for conditions on the ground. The US, EU, and

Gulf States hand-picked the recipients of their funding and weapons, whom they called the

‘moderate’ rebel forces. Yet as has been stated, al-Nusra, the al Qaeda affiliate, was among these

forces. In reality, the definition of moderate depended less on the group’s religious beliefs than

whether its strategy at the time matched the donor’s interests. In the case of Turkey, contingent

definitions again determined action; although it, the US, and the EU call the PKK a terrorist

48

organization, the PKK is also fighting IS. Thus, by attacking the PKK, Turkey is influencing the

balance of power on the ground in Syria based on its own personal conception of threat.

On the other side of the proxy war from the US, EU, and Gulf States (the ‘Sunni’

contingent) is Alawi Assad, backed by Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia (the ‘Shia’ contingent).

While they too fight IS, they also attack various rebel groups, seemingly more interested in

preserving the Assad regime than defeating IS. Thus, considering that the ‘moderate’ rebels in

Syria are fighting both IS and the Shia Assad contingent, it is more and more clearly another

fantasy that they could prevail. Military and intelligence insiders admit that they don’t believe

the ‘moderate’ rebel fighting force “really exists outside a few beleaguered pockets;” perhaps

most dramatically, it was recently claimed that the much-touted US training program graduated

less than a hundred militants, many of whom were immediately targeted and killed by IS

(Cockburn 34). In this instance, outside (mis)conceptions of the situation have led to action (the

funding of certain groups) which has had a detrimental but real impact on the situation as a

whole (the continuation of the conflict), especially considering that many of the weapons and

funds provided to the ‘moderate’ groups have ended up in IS hands.

We cannot determine the precise role of outside action in allowing the rise of IS in Syria,

but we can begin to picture it by asking a series of questions. How successful would the Islamic

State have been without foreign financing for rebel factions in Syria; would the Assad regime

have wiped the Islamic State out at its inception had the regime not been too busy fighting other

groups determined to overthrow it? Or, had Iran and its allies not supported the Assad regime,

would the rebels have already won the conflict and been able to focus solely on the Islamic

State? It is not the purpose of this paper to answer these questions, but it important not to dismiss

the significance of outside factors in the rise of the Islamic State.

49

That said, while framing the conflict as a proxy war either over religiously affiliated

regional hegemony or broader security-based interests is a useful paradigm for explaining the

actions of outside parties, it also elides the significance of events and actors on the ground. The

fact that outside parties support various factions in an internal conflict does not mean that the

conflict itself is fundamentally a proxy war. In this case especially, it is important to realize that

the conflict at its core is not just or even mainly about religion; it is about territorial control of

Syria. Certainly, other parties have gotten involved in the conflict in Syria because of their own

religious interests, or more broadly to affect the regional balance of power in their favor.

However, this foreign involvement has merely deepened and prolonged the conflict; it did not

cause it.

A final fault of the proxy war model is the reason it is used in the first place, which is that

it makes conflicts tidy. It allows its proponents to file various actors away into false binary

categories, when in fact groups have multiple or changing affiliations. The Islamic State is a key

example; having gone through a rapid series of transformations, it is now one of the strongest

actors in Syria. Initially supported by Qatar and Saudi Arabia, it is now their purported ‘enemy,’

and yet likely the only actor capable of making any headway against the Assad regime. This is

yet another instance in which IS slips out of the convenient theory created to define it.

Summary

As discussed, a combination of factors contributed to the rise of the Islamic State,

including backlash against Western intervention in Iraq, sectarian tensions, which the Islamic

State’s precursors were able to capitalize on, the failure of democracy-building in both Iraq and

Arab Spring countries, the violent backlash of the Syrian regime against a popular uprising,

50

which allowed the Islamic State to move into Syria as a rebel group, and the engagement of

various outside parties in Syria in service of their own sectarian and regional/hegemonic

interests. The exact degree to which each of these factors contributed to IS’ rise is beyond the

scope of this paper; what can be said, however, is that they did contribute to its rise, and that it

isn’t going away anytime soon. Furthermore, each of these factors was based upon a particular

conception of the situation which the Islamic State was able to take advantage of; the key to its

success was its transformative capability, its ability to ‘take advantage’ of the ways other groups

perceived and shaped the situation, either by exacerbating and then using sectarian tensions, by

offering an alternative vision to neoliberal democracy, by posing (perhaps truly) as the best

chance against an authoritarian regime, and by carefully positioning itself within a complex

proxy war.

The Territorial Construction of the Islamic State

The physical, territorial existence of the Islamic State is one of the major factors it uses to

distinguish itself from other jihadist organizations and previously asserted ‘caliphates.’ While

borders and control are constantly in flux, the symbolic power of holding territory, especially

territory with historical, strategic, and religious significance, crucially contributes to the Islamic

State’s legitimacy. By conquering and holding a swathe of territory in the ancestral land of the

Muslim umma, including the site of the prophesized final battle between the true believers and

the Crusaders (addressed in Chapter 2), ISIS demonstrated enough power and obtained enough

symbolic legitimacy to support its declaration of itself as the Caliphate, the Islamic State. Thus,

ISIS’s dramatic territorial conquest in 2014 played a pivotal role in enabling its desired

incarnation as IS.

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Raqqa Campaign

If Zawahiri believed al Qaeda’s disavowal of ISIS would weaken the group, he was

sorely disappointed. Following the announcement, ISIS only grew in strength, conducting an

extended campaign in 2014 that established control over Raqqa and much of the surrounding

territory. This campaign shifted the balance of power in Syria, as ISIS won the advantage from

the rebels and al-Nusra, who were also busy fighting the Assad regime. The victory was

significant both strategically and symbolically. Historically, Raqqa served as a “surrogate

capital” to the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid, and it is currently being used as the Islamic

State’s capital in Syria (Esber). More significantly, the beheading of American journalist James

Foley was staged just outside of Raqqa, and the image of the beheading came to represent Raqqa

(and through it, the violent power of the Islamic State) to a Western audience. Thus, Raqqa has

become a symbolic target, and is constantly bombarded by American and Russian planes.

Raqqa is also significant strategically, as it sits on the Euphrates river and also connects

Mosul and IS’s Iraqi holdings to crucial oil resources in the Syrian dessert (Esber). Without the

proceeds from this oil, the Islamic State would not be able to sustain its military campaign or its

administrative and governmental projects. Finally, Raqqa also gives the Islamic State a key

staging ground from which to attack Kurdish forces in the north of Syria. Thus, Raqqa was, is,

and will undoubtedly continue to be a key front in the Islamic State’s territorial battle.

Mosul

In Iraq, ISIS capitalized on the disillusionment of Sunni Arab tribes, particularly those

who had fought for the United States as part of the Sahwa only to be kept out of the government

by Maliki. They were aided in this regard by extreme animosity towards the Shia militias that

52

Maliki relied on to fight ISIS in parts of Iraq. Purportedly 80 Sunni tribes fought alongside ISIS

in its campaign in Iraq in 2014, which culminated in the conquest of Mosul (Cockburn 15). This

achievement shocked international audiences, especially footage of the Iraqi army fleeing in the

face of the ISIS militants, as the US had invested over $25 billion in the army at that point (Stern

45). Of course, this was the army purged of the experienced Sunni fighters who had led it under

Saddam Hussein, and many others had defected to defend their tribes or join the jihad during the

ongoing sectarian conflict. Furthermore, the retreat of the Iraqi army was purportedly catalyzed

by the opposition of the Sunni citizens of Mosul even in the face of the IS advance. The Sunni

residents of Mosul supposedly mistrusted the (now mostly Shia) Iraqi army trying to defend

them, which they saw as the tool of Maliki, who was in turn the puppet of Iran (Cockburn 16).

This is yet another instance in which perception played a huge role in shaping events on the

ground; IS’s careful framing of itself as a Sunni force and cultivation of tribal Sunni elements

contributed to its military victory.

The conquest of Mosul was important to the Islamic State both strategically and

symbolically, beyond the shock value of defeating the Iraqi Army with hardly a fight. Mosul is

the second largest city in Iraq and the largest urban area controlled by the Islamic State.

Historically Kurdish, the city was Arabized under Saddam Hussein, and now has a majority

Sunni population. This demographic composition proved a key factor in the Islamic State’s

conquest of the city, as described above. Furthermore, many Iraqi army officers were from

Mosul; expelled from the army by the transitional government or Maliki, some returned home,

and now serve as key administrators for the Islamic State (Micallef 2). Finally, Mosul occupies a

key position on the Tigris River; together, Raqqa and Mosul encompass the territory of the “land

of the two rivers,” the historical land of Islam which the Islamic State lays claim to. These two

53

cities are surrounded by holy sites, both Shia and Sunni, symbolically charging conquest of the

territory.

Having taken Mosul, ISIS then advanced to Saddam’s home of Tikrit, capturing

additional American military equipment along the way. This advance was met with fear and

disbelief in the mostly Shia Baghdad, where ISIS success was attributed to a Sunni revolt against

Maliki. The common conception was that it would be quelled or the Sunnis would desert ISIS

when Maliki was replaced, or that the army had retreated because the Kurds were backing ISIS

and had stabbed the army in the back. Neither of these beliefs were true; instead, they were

stories the Iraqi regime and Shia populace told themselves because they could not imagine the

truth: that somehow, the Islamic State was forging its own existence (Cockburn 31).

The Declaration of the Caliphate

The military success enabled another key transformative moment: in June 2014, the ISIS

spokesman al-Adnani announced that ISIS was reconstituting the Islamic Caliphate (al-Adnani).

Crucially, this announcement preceded the consolidation of a large portion of territory claimed to

be part of the caliphate (al-Sham, or greater Syria, including Lebanon and Jordan as well as Iraq)

or the establishment of the state institutions that would legitimate the claim. It was a declaration

requiring a leap of faith based on the progress already made and belief in an imaginary

construction that would be actualized. This declaration was followed a few days later by al-

Baghdadi’s sermon at the mosque in Mosul, where he was declared to be the new “Caliph

Ibrahim,” though it was still unclear what he would rule over, and announced that the new

caliphate would henceforth be known as simply the Islamic State, or IS.

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The declaration was significant because the Caliphate is an extremely powerful image in

the Sunni Muslim imaginary, where it represents the unity of the Muslim community and the

peak of its power and religious purity. The original referent is the First Rashidun Caliphate, the

entity constructed to rule the community of Muslims after Muhammad’s death. It was led by the

first four rightly guided caliphs, who are collectively known as the rashidun in Arabic, and is

generally conceived as the Golden Age of Islam. In the early days of Islam, the Caliphate

wielded great political and spiritual authority not only over the people within its immediate

territory, but over all Muslims (Khan 4). By referring to itself as the Second Rashidun Caliphate,

IS claims itself to be the successor of that caliphate and demands the support of Sunni Muslims.

Furthermore, the Islamic State’s declaration of the Caliphate is also a reclaiming of the

political power of Islam. In the eyes of many Sunnis, the abolishment of the office of the

Ottoman caliph after World War I, the last to hold the title with any real power, marked “the end

of Muslim political power and the triumph of the West” (McCants Kindle Location 2121).

While other jihadi groups pursued the establishment of a caliphate before IS, they largely saw it

as an unattainable goal. Either the West was too powerful to be defeated or Sunnis were too

divided to recreate an entity meant to oversee them all. By seizing territory through its own force

of arms and supporters, establishing its own government, and then declaring the Caliphate, the

Islamic State defied both the conventional jihadi tradition as well as the nation-state system.

However, it also demonstrated the resources, ability, and religious knowledge (through the

training of Baghdadi) to make its claim seem feasible. It had become too powerful to dismiss out

of hand.

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Conclusion

The Islamic State continues to pose a threat on multiple levels. First, it continues to hold

territory in Iraq and Syria, attract recruits, and expand its resources through black market oil

profits, kidnapping ransoms, and other avenues. The limited military campaigns against it have

had some effect, but debate over whether stronger military options, such as the territorial

eradication of IS, or containment are preferable continue, as do debates over how to resolve the

civil war in Syria, or if it must be resolved in order to defeat IS (“Containment is not enough”

debate). Similarly, while Abadi has improved the sectarian situation in Iraq, there is no guarantee

that the various factions will continue to work together. As I have attempted to point out, the way

various parties conceive of the situation (through sectarian terms, as a populist struggle, as a

proxy war) has huge implications for the way they handle it. Thus, the situation is extremely

fluid, subject to the optics it is seen through, and extremely responsive to attempts to shape it,

especially through the media and other propaganda. Any ‘spin’ on the way the situation is

perceived may have larger repercussions, as it will change the way different groups react

according to their interpretive paradigm.

Secondly, IS has demonstrated that its reach extends far beyond its territory with a recent

spate of global attacks, amplified by the Internet and media coverage. As one reporter attested,

commenting on the wave of attacks, “belief that IS is only interested in Muslim against Muslim

struggles is another instance of wishful thinking: ISIS has shown it will fight anybody who does

not adhere to its bigoted, puritanical, and violent variant of Islam,” and, as demonstrated, now

has the capability to both carry out and inspire attacks far from its physical territory (Yourish).

While civilians continued to die by the thousand in Syria and Iraq, according to figures from the

New York Times, the civilian death toll due to IS attacks outside of those countries in 2015 was

56

over 1000 (Yourish). These attacks took place in countries including France, Libya, Tunisia,

Nigeria, Yemen, Egypt, Turkey, and the United States, while attacks in early 2016 took place in

Indonesia, France, Pakistan, Belgium, and Turkey and were planned in Germany and Russia.

Thus far, I have attempted to cover the basic features of the Islamic State and various

explanations for its rise. Each of these explanations has its own optics, revealing and concealing

different aspects of the situation, and is frequently advanced according to the viewpoint of the

author, policy-maker, etc. Yet none of them reveals the full story; boxing the Islamic State into

paradigms constructed to explain it only falsely simplifies the situation, while aspects escape,

slipping beyond the borders imagined to contain it. Clearly, there is more to the story than state-

building and physical territory.

Even should the physical state be eliminated, it is far from certain that another militant

organization would not rise from the ashes. After all, IS’s very vision is apocalyptic—and the

apocalypse it seeks is predicated upon war with the West, a final battle against the Crusaders to

take place at Dabiq. This vision will be explored in Chapter 2 as part of a discussion of the

ideology of the Islamic State, which has contributed to solidifying its territorial control and

physical construction in crucial ways.

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Chapter Two:

The Ideological Composition of the Islamic State

58

Introduction

Despite the preoccupation of Western countries with the Islamic State’s territorial

holdings and terror attacks and the Islamic State’s own insistence on its physicality, backed up

by great attention paid to the provision of state services inside its controlled territory, IS is much

more than a pseudo-state. Indeed, none of its physical attributes would exist without the belief

system that shapes them. Without this belief system, its ideological content, IS would not have

been able to marshal the necessary manpower or resources to conquer that territory, let alone

control it and establish something along the lines of a functioning state within it. Furthermore, it

is the ideological content, excerpts of specific religious and socio-political discourses, which

support belief in both an Islamic state and the Islamic State in the first place, which make it an

imaginable possibility. Thus, its ideological content is no less part of what makes the Islamic

State ‘real’ than the people who fight for it or the black market oil that finances it—arguably, it

is more important, as it enables that existence in the first place.

In Chapter 1, I attempted to weave together various explanations for the way the Islamic

State developed to make sense of an historical account of IS’s rise and its territorial

manifestation. These explanations included a response to western intervention in the Middle

East, increased sectarianism, populist visions, the authoritarian crackdown on the Arab Spring,

and self-interested proxy wars. Yet the very fact that paradigmatic explanations for the Islamic

State’s rise were necessary to make sense of the historical or factual developments suggested that

the Islamic State is beyond our current imaginative capabilities to conceptualize it.

In this second chapter, I will elucidate the ways in which the Islamic State first existed as

an ideological harbinger of its territorial form, which arrived later. In other words, IS anticipated

its territorial form in its ideological constructions. The development of the Islamic State as an

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active organization with territorial holdings, a bureaucratic structure, resources, and a fighting

force was a fixing of specific, constructed ideological discourses into reality. This ‘fixing’ of

ideology into the physical is not a direct or one-to-one process. It is dynamic and itself slippery,

subject to particular imaginings and the nuances of context. Yet it is inarguable that ideological

narratives are a powerful mode of imagining and shaping the world, and certainly play an active

role in the construction of the Islamic State.

Islamic State founders did not construct their own belief systems from scratch, but rather

mobilized historical religious and socio-political narratives that circulated throughout the Sunni

region. Even as they mobilized them, they were clearly influenced by the discourses and they

themselves have become products of the narrative ideology. Salafi-jihadist religious and socio-

political narratives shaped the historical situation and the beliefs of IS founders in the first place,

so that the creation of the Islamic State was their only imaginable answer to the ‘real’ situation

on the ground. They adopted particular aspects of these narratives in the ideology of the Islamic

State, which was discursively mobilized and then ‘fixed’ (unpredictably) to structure the

continuously shifting physical modes described in Chapter 1.

In essence, this chapter seeks to identify the roots of the Islamic State’s ideology in

historical Salafi-jihadist and socio-political discourses circulating in the Sunni region of the

Middle East. It will explain core concepts and trace their development by various key thinkers,

finally arriving at the Islamic State’s conception. Rather than a fixed understanding of the

Islamic State’s ideology, this chapter aims to construct a more dynamic vision of ideological

narratives at work through tracing where particular ideological concepts come from, how they

have developed, how the Islamic State views them, and how that conception shapes the Islamic

State’s vision and manifestation of itself.

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Ideology of the Islamic State: Religious and Socio-political Discourses

Ideology and Discourse

The Islamic State’s belief system, the way it views the world and its goals, is shaped by

two ideological discourses, which are both historical bodies of thought and real narratives

developing and working within the Islamic State itself. In this context, I am using discourse to

describe an archival body of thought and ideas about the world. Discourses can be constructed

out of larger bodies; for example, Salafi-jihadist discourse is carefully selected from the much

larger body of Muslim discourse. Then, ideology will refer to a system that draws selectively

from a discourse or discourses to link thoughts, beliefs and myths with action (Ball and Dagger

5). More specifically, put in conjunction with social theory on group dynamics in extremist

groups, ideology is the constellation of non-physical beliefs used to explain their social,

economic, and political situation to a specific in-group, which often coincides with the

construction or definition of an out-group to blame for those conditions, the consolidation of the

in-group identity against that out-group, and finally a program for fixing the problematic

conditions, which the in-group is encouraged to carry out via action (Sageman 20; Haslam and

Reicher 3). According to this formulation, “ideologies are dynamic. They do not stand still,

because they cannot do what they want to do—shape the world—if they fail to adjust to

changing conditions” (Ball and Dagger 4). Thus, when examining ideologies, the author must be

careful to address both their historical development as well as the context presently shaping

them, and which they seek to change.

Accordingly, Salafi-jihadist doctrine and the history of Salafi-jihadist groups are the

constituent ideological discourse of the Islamic State. The discourse is extremely complex,

combining a developing set of Salafi-jihadist religious beliefs with anti-American, anti-Western,

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anti-Semitic, and similar perspectives influenced by the socio-political experience of the Sunni

Middle East, as perceived by Salafi-jihadists. The religious and socio-political aspects of Salafi-

jihadism are intimately connected, informing one another and together shaping the worldview,

beliefs, goals, and ultimately actions of those who ascribe to the ideology. For simplicity’s sake,

I will begin by discussing the main religious concepts and socio-political conditions or

perceptions that animate the Salafi-jihadist ideology of the Islamic State separately. Then, I will

discuss how they influence one another and overlap to orient Salafi-jihadists towards the

formation of a utopic, idealized caliphate through violence. This vision is described in several

influential Salafi-jihadist texts, discussed at the conclusion of this chapter, and informs the

Islamic State’s territorial conquest and physical construction of itself. Ultimately, the Islamic

State is the embodiment of a particular strain of Salafi-jihadi ideology as it is materialized on the

ground and manifested as a political state.

Salafi-Jihadism

As mentioned in Chapter 1, Salafi-jihadism is itself a religious ideology with the core

goal of returning the Islamic community to its pure origins in the original Caliphate and its basis

in strict sharia law (the Salafi, or Islamic purist, component, which idealizes a return to ‘true’

Islam), through any means, including offensive violence (a specific conception of jihad). Its

disciples believe that the Muslim umma has been on the decline for centuries due a series of

attacks by the West, or the groups they term “Crusaders.” To reverse this decline, they believe it

is necessary to fundamentally transform every aspect of society according to an Islamic model to

achieve the true, ideal Islamic state (Qutb, Ma’alim fi al Tariq 76). Of course, the definition of

true Islam is highly contingent, and its enactment in reality would be only one manifestation of

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an already imagined construct, a re-imagining of an idealized past, the first Islamic Caliphate that

followed the Prophet Muhammad’s foundation of Islam. According to Salafi-jihadist doctrine,

this society should be enacted through violent struggle, legitimized through a particular

conception of the Quranic concept of jihad (Moghadum).

It is important to remember that such ideologies are always constructed, and moreover,

that this ideology is extremely new and contextual; it is not a coherent religious sect dating back

to the Quran, but rather constructed out of bits and pieces of religious doctrine, the teachings of

various individuals (particularly Ibn Tamiyya, Said Qutb, and most recently Abu Muhammad al-

Maqdisi, discussed below), and the discourses of relatively new movements (Salafists and

jihadists respectively).

Salafism as a political movement originated in the mid nineteenth century in Paris when

Muhammad Abduh, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and Rashid Rida founded “a religious society

called the Salafi movement that sought to remedy Islamic schism by attempting to rationalize the

laws of the Qur'an with what they called the Nahdah movement (renaissance)” (Lo, “Seeking the

Roots of Terrorism” 1-2). In other words, the original Salafi movement was intended to guide the

Islamic community in the modern age. While they were bound by the belief that a return to purist

Islam was necessary, these intellectuals differed as to the details of what pure Islam entailed and

how to affect the transformation within modern society (Milton-Edwards 149-50). The initial

differences developed over time into branches of Salafism focusing on social activism (Afghani),

intellectualism (Abduh), and scripturalism (Rida—this is the closest to the modern definition of

Salaf). While these original founders were more concerned about the function of Islam in

modernity, later generations, including the Muslim Brotherhood and notably Sayyid Qutb,

focused instead on how to “Islamize modernity” (Milton Edwards 150). Salafi-jihadism

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developed out of Qutb’s jihadist strain of Salafism, catalyzed by his assassination in 1970. Thus,

Salafi-jihadism is already a permutation of another branch of thought, Salafism, which emerged

in the socio-political context of 19th century Egypt as a coping mechanism for modernity, and

was itself a single strand of thought within Islamic doctrine.

Furthermore, the ideological concept of jihad is not a monolithic one, nor a stable one; it

is as much a struggle within the Islamic community as against the non-Islamic community. The

definition of jihad is contested, yet its core or root meaning is “to strive in the cause of Allah”

(Lo, “Seeking the Roots of Terrorism” 3). Over time, the concept of jihad has developed special

meanings or levels; according to modern, mainstream Islamic scholars, the ‘highest form’ of

jihad, or jihad ul-akbar, is spiritual jihad or self-purification, while the ‘lowest form’ of jihad,

jihad ath-thukra, refers to physical struggle (Lo, “Seeking the Roots of Terrorism” 3). The nature

of jihad continues to be debated; definitions vary based on the viewpoint and goals of the

individual supporting them, and range from “striving to lead a good Muslim life,” to “working

hard to spread the message of Islam” to “supporting the struggle of oppressed Muslim peoples”

all the way to a definition in the vein of Osama bin Laden, ”working to overthrow governments

in the Muslim world” (Esposito 26). Only a small contingent of Muslims believe that jihad refers

to a violent struggle; even fewer believe that that violent struggle should be offensive and

expansive in nature, rather than defensive; and even fewer believe that civilians and especially

self-proclaimed civilian Muslims are permissible targets. This final belief is the endpoint of the

Salafi-jihadist conception of jihad: in order to return the community of true believers to the

practice of true Islam, which is the only rightful society for humanity, a violent battle against all

unbelievers, broadly defined, is necessary.

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Yet while Salafi-jihadism is an extremely minor strain in classical Islamic thought, its

disciples have had a disproportionate influence on modern Muslim discourse and political Islam.

Each definition of jihad varies, and yet derives from the same core teachings of Islam. The actual

perception of jihad as a struggle to purify Islamic society, and a struggle against the West and its

puppets in the Middle East, through violent, global action by Salafi-jihadi ‘vanguards’ like al-

Qaeda and IS is a recent (late 20th century) development. It is extremely contingent upon

perceptions of the conditions of society, and thus rooted in a particular historical moment and

place.10 Yet this very perception of jihad and its necessity in turn shaped the way its proponents

saw the world and how they felt they needed to act within it (i.e., wage a war against the Western

crusaders to purify the soul of Islam, an idea specifically forwarded by Osama bin Laden)

(Lawrence, Messages to the World xviii, xx).

From this point of view, the Islamic State is a religiously motivated organization and the

direct descendant of a chain of Salafi-jihadist organizations dating to the late 20 th century and the

Qutbist strain of the Muslim Brotherhood, including most recently al Qaeda. While the actual

organizations are relatively new, however, the archive of religious thought they draw upon is

much older; the discourse includes long debates over key religious concepts including jihad

(struggle), jahiliyya (pre-Islamic society), takfir (labeling someone an unbeliever), murtadd

(apostasy), and more. Salafi-jihadist thinkers have pushed the long debates over these concepts

to an extreme edge and used them to justify action against certain groups, defined as the out-

group (anyone not a true believer) based on what they see as religious justifications. While it is

10 For a nuanced discussion of the contested meanings of jihad within Islamic tradition, refer to Esposito, Unholy War (esp. Chapter 2), and Lawrence, The Political Language of Islam (esp. pp. 74-85).

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beyond the scope of this paper to trace the entire history of these debates, what follows is an

overview of key definitions and their significance to the vision of the Islamic State.11

Religious Discourse: Key Concepts

Leading Salafi-jihadists including the intellectual and political leaders of the Islamic

State and al-Qaeda support the rightness of their mission, to restore the caliphate at the expense

of the Western world, with copious religious references drawing on the “poetic and religious

traditions and collective memories of Islam” (Lo, Understanding Muslim Discourse vi). While IS

itself makes reference to selective excerpts of the Quran and the Sunna, the way in which it

deploys these religious messages suggests the influence of particular Islamic scholars.

Specifically, it emphasizes that both current Arab and Western governments are permissible

targets for jihad because of their apostate nature, that Shi’a and other sects considered Muslims

in mainstream discourse are actually apostates, and that the foundation of a pure Islamic state is

linked to the coming apocalypse, ideas which can be found in influential Salafi-jihadist religious

texts. It is not coincidental that the terms “apostate,” “jihad” “Islamic,” “Islam,” “state,”

“government,” and “people” are among the most popular vocabulary in every issue of Dabiq, the

Islamic State’s English-language magazine; while particular emphases vary, the core message of

each issue revolves around the religious mission to affect the political and societal reality of the

territory claimed as the new Caliphate, IS’ Islamic state.12 In the following section, I will profile

the development of the Islamic State’s most used Salafi-jihadi vocabulary.

11 For more comprehensive coverage, please refer to Esposito, Unholy War.12 As analyzed using the Voyant tool; see Appendix for results of vocabulary usage by issue.

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1. Offensive Jihad and the Concept of Jahili Societies

Some of the most oft cited sources in Salafi-jihadi thought are the works of Sayyid Qutb

(1906?-1966), who has been referred in the popular media as 'The Philosopher of Islamic Terror”

(Berman) and in scholarly literature as “the intellectual father of Osama Bin Laden” (Lo,

Understanding Muslim Discourse 30+). While Qutb was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood,

his own ideas differed from that of the Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna. Qutb

provided the basis for a more violently transformative vision of society, as opposed to al-Banna’s

gradual, societal and political approach (Lo, “Seeking the Roots of Terrorism” 2). Many of the

ideas that will be mentioned in this and the following section on socio-political discourse,

including the sense of an insurmountable division between Islamic and Western civilizations and

the religious mandate to revitalize the umma, can be found in Qutb’s work. Written during

Qutb’s time in an Egyptian jail for supposedly conspiring to assassinate Egyptian President

Gamal Abdel Nasser, Milestones, or Ma’alim fi al Tariq, is essentially a plan of action for the

foundation of an Islamic State. It is premised upon the notion that man must submit only to

God’s law as laid out in sharia, which defines an entire way of life. Thus, according to Qutb,

every society today is living in a state of jahiliyya, or the chaos of the time before the advent of

Islam, because it operates according to the laws of men and not of God (Qutb 78-86). He

included modern Muslim regimes in this prescription—indeed, it was primarily meant to refer to

Nasser’s Egypt—which he classified as apostate and not actually Muslim. This justified the use

of violent jihad to destroy these societies in order to free men from manmade laws and enable

them to choose and follow the law of God. Additionally, his most influential book, In the Shade

of the Quran or Fi Dhilal al-Quran, a Quranic commentary, uses textual evidence to outline his

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vision of an ideal Islamic state and society, which would be created upon the ashes of the modern

jahili societies.

This work offers a clear, religiously based ideology according to the definition of

ideology proposed at the beginning of this chapter, including definitions of in-group and out-

group (the umma and jahili society), a critique of social conditions, a prescription for fixing

them, and a call to action. Furthermore, the Islamic State’s own worldview, as espoused in

Dabiq, closely follows this vision, especially the ideal of a return to the early days of Islam

before its pollution, through the removal from and even removal of jahiliyya. Though novel at

the time, Qutb’s formulation became widely accepted within jihadi circles; his works are some of

the most read in jihadi training camps and, ironically, Middle Eastern prisons.

2. Takfir

One of Qutb’s main influences, and a major figure in Salafi-jihadist thought, was Ibn

Tamiyya. Writing at the time of the Mongol invasion, Tamiyya issued a fatwa permitting violent

jihad against the invaders on the grounds that they were unbelievers, or kafir, despite their

professions that they had converted. This process is the Islamic version of excommunication, or

takfir, and is highly contested in Islamic circles. Tamiyya’s argument that the Mongols were

lawful targets of jihad despite their profession to be Muslims because they failed to implement

sharia, and were thus apostates, or murtadd, serves as the main precedent for Qutb’s declaration

that the Muslim societies of his time were actually jahili. In his novel Unholy War: Terror in the

Name of Islam, John Esposito more fully traces the development of takfir and jihadi violence in

Islamic thought, to which Tamiyya was one of the earliest contributors (Esposito Ch. 2).

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In Al-Farida Al-Gha’eba or The Neglected Duty, Abdessalam Faraj pushed the

conception of jihad one step further, arguing for its application to kill ordinary Muslims in

addition to those proclaimed kufir. He said that “fighting the enemy that is near to us comes

before that which is far,” and that to establish a true Islamic State, it was necessary to destroy the

“apostate” ‘Muslim’ regimes of the region rather than the ‘far enemy’ of the West (Faraj 50). If

Muslims oppressed other Muslims, then they could be lawfully eliminated in the jihad to

establish a pure Muslim society.

It is especially important to note the way in which Qutb assimilated Tamiyya and Faraj’s

arguments into his own; this kind of archival construction and expansion is exactly the way

many Salafi-jihadists, and especially the Islamic State, justify their ideology as foundationally,

theologically solid. Again, though they purport to follow a ‘pure’ Islamic path, their religious

ideology is less that of the original Quran and original Muslim ancestors than a selective reading

of the Quran as interpreted by certain Islamic scholars.

Salafi-jihadist discourse laid the groundwork for the Islamic State project in many ways,

yet the examples of offensive jihad and takfir are perhaps the most significant. Had Faraj,

Tamiyya, Qutb, and others not previously defined the process for identifying and targeting

nonbelievers and even other Muslims who acted contrary to the interests of the umma, it is

unlikely that the Islamic State would have even imagined doing so. Yet today, these are some of

IS’ main tactics. A huge majority of their targets are considered Muslim in mainstream thought,

either Shia or Sunni of lesser conservatism than IS. Muslims are not lawful targets in the Quran;

without the precedent of takfir and Faraj’s argument for the lawful killing of fellow Muslims, the

Islamic State’s mass killing of these individual groups would be seen as illegitimate even among

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its own supporters. However, the cleansing of Islam is one of the main factors catalyzing and

extending the violence, as discussed in the context of sectarianism in Chapter 1.

Ironically, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, known as the spiritual mentor of Zarqawi,

actually opposed the Islamic State’s vehement, brutal, and broad application of the concept of

takfir to Shia in Iraq and expressed concern about its state-building project, siding with al-Nusra

in the factional split. Although Maqdisi advised his mentee to “stop the widespread use of

suicide bombings, indiscriminate violence, and takfir of entire groups of because it is wrong to

do so and hurts the image of Islam,” the Islamic State has only escalated such tactics

(Wagemakers 47). Thus, Maqdisi’s concern that its use of takfir to create an Islamic state would

result in a state which was not “a haven for every Muslim” but “a sword hanging over the

Muslims who oppose it” may well be accurate (al-Maqdisi). His hesitation is especially

significant because he is regarded, in McCants’ words, as the current “don of jihadist

scholarship” (Kindle Location 1662). Thus, Maqdisi’s disapproval suggests just how extreme the

Islamic State’s adopted interpretation of religious concepts, even those already part of the Salafi-

jihadist discourse, has become.

The Apocalypse in Islam

Another significant religious discourse informing the vision of the Islamic State is that of

the apocalypse story. Although not a main component of Muslim religious thought, there are

scattered references to the apocalypse throughout the Quran, and it has continued to be a motif in

strains of both Sunni and Shia belief. Thus, the apocalypse serves as another example of the

Islamic State’s selective approach to ideology, its constructed rather than previously extant

religious narrative.

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While it is beyond the scope of this paper to fully trace the role of the apocalypse in

Islam, a brief overview is in order.13 As stated, though the apocalypse does not play a central role

in Islam, it does appear in both Sunni and Shia thought and, just as it does in Christianity, is

more significant or central to certain sects or branches than others. While the Shia focus on the

coming of the Mahdi, or the twelfth imam, a kind of redeemer/messianic figure who will appear

in Mecca and lead his army to defeat the unbelievers, Sunni thought focuses on the coming of the

End of Days and a more sectarian battle. As several scholars, most notably John-Pierre Filiu in

his work Apocalypse in Islam, have suggested, apocalyptic thought has undergone a recent

upsurge in Muslim communities, just as it did in Christianity around the turn of the century. Filiu

suggests that recent events have created a common expectation in Muslim society of the

apocalypse. Beginning with the Iranian Revolution, the Siege of Mecca, and the Soviet

occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, individuals in the Muslim world have recognized recent

events as signs of impending doom. According to Filiu, the historical lines of Sunni and Shia

apocalyptic thought have also been supplemented by Christian messianism in modern times.

Finally, 9/11 and the occupation of Iraq accelerated expectation of the apocalypse, and Filiu,

writing in 2010, predicted a dangerous merger of millennialism and jihadism which we see

embodied in the Islamic State and especially its rhetoric today.

This sense of expectation is extremely significant; for the Islamic State, the apocalypse is

not just some far-off goal, on the other side of which lies a better world: it is here. Indeed, the

Islamic State’s project appears oriented towards bringing it about. As explained in the very first

issue of Dabiq, IS’s English language magazine, the apocalypse is supposed to occur after a final

13 See McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State for a detailed analysis of the Islamic State’s apocalyptic discourse and Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam for an account of the apocalypse in Muslim discourse more broadly construed.

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clash between the mujahidin and the Crusader army at the city of Dabiq, which is in Sham, or

Greater Syria. For this claim, the Islamic State relies upon a series of Sunni prophecies, including

one which says that “al-Sham is the Land of Gathering” for Judgment Day (al-Albani 14). Many

of the Islamic State’s incendiary tactics may thus be read as attempts to provoke the Western

nations into attacking them on the ground; over and over in execution videos, jihadis deride the

Crusader nations and their cowardly forces; they say they will continue to kill Western citizens

until their nations lay down their arms, or until every last fighter is destroyed. These

provocations make sense when read through the lens of the apocalyptic message: the Western

forces are what IS refers to as the crusaders, IS has made concrete strides in controlling the area

of Sham and has declared it the natural territory of its Caliphate, and a ground war in the region

would satisfy the last requirement of the apocalypse. Read in this manner, the physical actions of

the Islamic State are in some ways guided by the apocalyptic discourse. While it is questionable

if individual members actually want to bring about the apocalypse, it is clear that the vision is

being marketed as a kind of salvation, and thus the discourse influences action on another level.

In order to legitimate the Islamic State’s apocalyptic narrative, it has to take concrete actions

towards that end.

Contextualizing Salafi-Jihadism

Hopefully, this survey of Salafi-jihadist thought has made it apparent that the Islamic

State’s ideology has actually been constructed out of an existing discourse, which is already

marginal in broader Muslim discourse. As is particularly clear in the Islamic State’s version, in

which violence is perpetrated against anyone not an absolute supporter, in which heretic or

apostate is a code word for ‘in the way,’ far from fixed and immovable, religious concepts can be

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and are frequently used to legitimize physical action. Furthermore, legitimacy of belief is more

often politically or contextually than religiously motivated. Activated in a particular socio-

political moment by the conception of grievance, they become obvious tools for the creation of a

reality meant to supplant the offending society and fulfill the vision of a pure Islamic society in

the form of the original caliphate. However, this society can only be a re-creation of an already

distorted or idealized vision, and a re-creation, at that, informed by strong socio-political currents

and historical narratives.

Socio-political Discourse

The second discourse shaping the Islamic State’s ideology and, through that, its physical

manifestation, is the dynamic socio-political history of the Middle East and its interactions with

the West, both real and imagined. Socio-political realities have animated and influenced the

development of Salafi-jihadist ideology and frequently catalyze the moment of violent

enactment. These discourses shape the Islamic State’s ideological conception of its social and

political reality and are the products of a long history of regional and international political

developments exacerbated by social conditions. The body of the discourse includes both jihadist

and Western canon texts, speeches, and ideological frameworks that describe political and

economic conditions in the Middle East and especially interactions between Middle Eastern

countries and Western countries. This discourse has served a crucial role in shaping the

emergence of fundamentalist and jihadi organizations like al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Most

recently, scholars have focused on how developments in the wake of the Arab Spring,

particularly regime repression of various uprisings and the power vacuums left in the wake of

regional struggles, have contributed to the rise of the Islamic State. It is especially important to

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note that such socio-political narratives and contexts are not separate from but vitally inform the

formation of Salafi-jihadist thought as described above. In turn, certain religious concepts have

led to the conception of the historical and socio-political interactions of East and West in certain

crucial ways.

Parts of this history have been examined in the previous chapter, including special

attention to the ways Western intervention and sectarianism led to the real or physical emergence

of the Islamic State, with briefer mentions of the contributions of the Arab Spring and proxy

wars. Yet the previous chapter described the physical contributions of these factors; here, I will

elucidate the ideological framework they created, the way they set the stage for, or in fact

motivated and gave birth to, the vision of the Islamic State (both in the sense of the Islamic

State’s goals, but also in the sense of the Islamic State as a vision or a perceived reality,

something constructed from the pieces of or to mimic the pieces of a shared ideological belief).

As I have said, the religious arguments of Salafi-jihadist thinkers, especially relating to

jihad, takfir, and their implementation against variously designated non-believers, did not

develop in a vacuum. Rather, they were responses to perceived threats to Islamic society, and

very much part of their socio-political contexts. This is a central irony of Salafi-jihadists schools;

though they advocate a return to ‘pure’ Islam, they do so exactly because they are not, and

cannot be, separate from the ‘impure’ society around them. Thus, socio-political frameworks

construct the stage on which Salafi-jihadist thought and ideological prescriptions are conceived

and performed. In this way, Salafi-jihadi ideology is less a shared, continuous school of religious

thought than a contingent, manufactured collection of ideas, both justified and necessitated by

specific religious interpretations and selectively manifested in the physical world with the goal of

achieving a certain idealized vision of society.

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The Clash of Civilizations

One important aspect of this discourse is the so-called clash of civilizations, which has

been espoused on both ‘sides,’ both by the West and in jihadi circles. While Samuel

Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” is widely cited as the foundational text for the theory

that the Western and Islamic worlds are fundamentally incompatible and bound to clash, the term

was actually coined by Bernard Lewis in “The Roots of the Muslim Rage” (47-60). . In this work,

Lewis attempts to explain Muslim animosity towards the West and specifically America. While

noting that the Muslim world is not unanimously hostile towards the West and that it is not even

the most hostile community, Lewis suggests that ‘Muslim rage’ is a very real phenomena

grounded not in reaction to specific actions, but in a fundamental rejection of Western

civilization and principles (Lewis, “Roots of the Muslim Rage” 48). He dates the struggle

between Muslim and Western civilization back 1300 years, with Islam on the rise for the first

thousand, followed by a steep three hundred year decline. Lewis’s analysis echoes the arguments

of Qutb, Tamiyya, and their kin, claiming that in Muslim eyes, “what is truly unacceptable is the

domination of infidels over true believers…since it leads to the corruption of religion and

morality in society” (Lewis, “Roots of the Muslim Rage” 54).

Whereas Lewis ends his argument by saying that the clash will actually come down to a

struggle against fundamentalism within the Islamic world, which the West can have little or no

part in, Samuel Huntington expands and reifies the concept of an active clash between East and

West in “The Clash of Civilizations.” Citing the same history of Islamic rise and decline and

postulating that the Christian split between Church and State is the essential incompatibility,

Huntington proposes that the fundamental source of conflict in the new world will be cultural

and that the principle conflicts will be between nations and groups of different civilizations, not

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within them, as Lewis concluded. He has been critiqued for his refusal to recognize complex

interactions among and within civilizations and nation-states, especially the plurality of societies,

and his failure to recognize that extremists do not represent Islam (Said, “Clash of Ignorance”).

However, while his work is an extreme interpretation of Lewis’s idea and an erasure of its

complexities, it is not surprising. Instead, it mirrors the binaristic us vs. them mentality that

appears in jihadi treatises and the Islamic State’s ideology, a phenomenon which McCauley has

notably claimed is far from accidental in his book Friction: How Radicalization Happens to

Them and Us (McCauley and Moskalenko). This is another sense in which the socio-political

worldview of the Islamic State is part of a discourse: its radicalization of rhetoric and goals

echoes the radicalization of Western thinkers and sometimes policymakers in a haunting call and

response.14

The narrative of the clash of civilizations is significant because of how commonplace it

has become and the way it is reinforced from both sides of the perceived divide. In effect, the

discourse of a clash is what creates the ‘divide’ in the first place, strengthening ideological

positions on both ‘sides.’ While Lewis and Huntington represent the major Western voices in

this narrative, they are certainly not alone, and speaking back just as vehemently are the jihadists

who, relying on the concepts of jihad, jahiliyya, and takfir described above, envision a violent

struggle against the Crusader army, a struggle with both the West and Western influenced

elements of their own societies, for the soul of Islam. The two views are not separate, but rather

mutually reinforcing, and together create a discursive environment that makes continued conflict

all but inevitable.

14 Another crucial part of the discourse of the ‘clash’ is the ‘war on terror,’ described next as part of the Western democracy project and the discourse of Islamic decline.

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Feeding the Clash: The Western Democracy Project and the Discourse of Islamic Decline

Another socio-political perspective on the Middle East that has become an influential part

of Salafi-jihadist ideology is the narrative of Islamic decline and the role of the West in that

decline. A decade after Huntington, in 2002, the UN released the first Arab World Human

Development Report, commonly referred to as “Doomed to Failure,” which elucidated some of

the specific aspects or conditions encapsulated in the concept of the ‘Islamic decline’ (Farjani).

The Report claims that “deeply rooted shortcomings in the Arab institutional structure,”

particularly “deficits relating to freedom, empowerment of women, and knowledge,” “are an

obstacle to building human development” (Farjani VII). While not specifically referencing the

colonial and imperial context, the Report refers to economic lag and regional conflicts that hold

the Arab region back. However, its main focus is the advance of human freedoms in the region,

which are not seen as incompatible with Middle Eastern societies but do require institutional

change to be brought about.

Salafi-jihadists cite this exact same decline as the reason the revitalization of Islamic

society is so absolutely vital. Yet the two parties frame this decline differently. Whereas

prominent jihadist scholars, including Naji, Muhajir, and al-Suri (discussed in the next section)

see the decline of Islamic civilization as the direct result of Western interference, Western

intellectuals attribute it to something lacking at the core of Islamic society, namely a focus on

personal freedoms, as idealized in Western democratic society. This divide in perception feeds

into the sense of fundamental conflict between the Western world and Islam; as the discourse

and justifications become popularized, they increase the sense of an impermeable divide.

Thus, the War on Terror is a crucial example of the perceived ‘clash’ at work. It was both

premised upon and reinforced the divide in both perception and reality, as strengthened Western

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discourse (and action) against Middle Eastern ‘terrorists’ elicited similarly virulent reactions

from the ‘terrorists,’ Salafi-jihadist organizations like al Qaeda, themselves (Mamdani, Good

Muslim, Bad Muslim 247). For example, back in 2001, President Bush’s “War on Terror

Speech,” while serving to catalyze national support after the 9/11 attacks that shocked the nation,

also framed the conflict as an ideological one hinging on freedom and its lack. He explicitly

acknowledged that al Qaeda’s beliefs were a perversion of Islam, yet he also framed the battle as

ideologically rooted in al Qaeda’s hatred of American freedom, what he called “the American

way of life” (Bush). As described in Chapter 1, the physical manifestation of this ideological

approach to the 9/11 attacks, especially in Iraq, significantly contributed to the rise of the Islamic

State.

The ‘war on terror’ is also a paradigmatic example for how a Western democracy project

fed the perceived clash of civilizations. While the democratic peace argument was already

common during the Cold War as applied to the Soviet Union, it experienced a revival and

reapplication after 9/11. Finding no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration

turned instead to what is called democratic peace theory as a justification for invading and

occupying that country. The idea was that not only did Saddam Hussein pose a threat to the

world order established after the Cold War, as exemplified in his reckless war with Iran and

invasion of Kuwait, he also ruthlessly oppressed his own people and denied them fundamental

freedoms. According to many proponents of democratic peace theory, including Natan

Sharansky, the best method of overcoming repression and violence is to actively support the

spread of democracy. In The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny

and Terror, Sharansky argues that there are two kinds of state, one based on freedom and one

based on fear. According to the author, for both idealistic (democratic principles are supposedly

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common to all of humanity) and pragmatic (democracies supposedly prefer peace to war)

reasons, every democracy should make the spread of democracy its top foreign policy goal. The

Bush administration relied on a variant of this theory in its argument that invading Iraq to topple

Saddam was not only justified, but it also made good foreign policy sense, in that installing a

democratic government in Iraq would stabilize the region and American interests.

In Iraq, the United States operated according to the assumption that establishing

democratic governance and free markets would solve the economic and social woes caused by a

repressive, authoritarian government. In a way, this was the imposition by force of the freedoms

that the Arab World Development Report bemoaned the lack of. Yet, imposed as a blanket

solution, these efforts faltered. In fact, sectarian tensions under the new democratically elected

government directly attributed to the rise of al Qaeda in Iraq, a predecessor of the Islamic State

(Cockburn 50). Furthermore, while the Bush administration viewed its policy as the morally and

pragmatically correct championing of democracy and freedom, people in the Arab world,

especially jihadists, viewed it as yet another example of a Western attack on Islamic society.

This is a key example of the way in which the imposition of ideologies upon complex realities

produces results escaping the confines or vision of the original ideology. The results in Iraq did

not fit the ‘democratic peace theory’ discourse, instead producing more violence and partially

fueling the rise of IS. Other factors were at work that did not fit neatly into the freedom and

democracy and peace vision espoused by the Bush administration.

Furthermore, though framing its operation as a ‘war on terror,’ the US actually limited its

targets to al Qaeda core, its affiliates, and the Taliban. Technically, permissible targets under the

2001 Authorization of Military Force, the congressional document overseeing the war on terror

were defined to be “those nations, organizations, or persons [the President] determines planned,

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authorized, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such

organizations or persons” (2001 AUMF). However, for political reasons, the Bush administration

did not target the global jihadi movement as a whole and, most significantly, did not take

important steps to suppress agents in allied countries sympathetic to jihadist causes. Specifically,

in Pakistan, the Pakistani intelligence, or ISI, was closely linked to the Taliban, and in Saudi

Arabia there was significant individual funding to Sunni terrorist groups. The Bush

administration’s reticence to broaden the scope of its ‘war on terror’ may have had something to

do with the perceived importance of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as US allies. However, the result

was that its argument about freedom and democracy rang hollow, as the situations in both

Pakistan and Saudi Arabia fostered extremist strands of jihadi thought that contributed to the

continuation and resurgence of groups like the Islamic State (Cockburn 58). This is yet another

example where blanket ideologies both influence and are influenced by socio-political realities,

with unequal and unanticipated results.

Perhaps in partial recognition of the failures of US state-building in Iraq, President

Obama reframed the war on terror as an effort by the international community to destroy al

Qaeda and its affiliates. In his 2009 Cairo speech, Obama emphasized the commonalities

between the majority of the Muslim world and the United States and their myriad interactions,

directly refuting the idea of a clash of civilizations (“Obama’s Speech in Cairo”). He also

referenced the concept of Islamic decline and the fear and uncertainty it causes in many people,

reassuring listeners that development and tradition are not incompatible and thus implying that

there was no need for retaliation or conflict. Obama’s vision of an integrated, peaceful world, in

which we have moved beyond past conflicts and recognize our shared interests and trajectory,

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was meant to replace the idea of a war on terror with a more subtle vision of an idealized global

culture (“Obama’s Speech in Cairo”).

Yet nowhere in this speech did Obama question the primacy of democracy and Western

democratic ideals of freedom, nor did he question their universal applicability. Thus, while his

vision appealed to many mainstream Muslims, it did not address the fundamental issues jihadists

identified in Western society. In other words, he was not speaking to the jihadists; he was

attempting to construct a global environment alien to their vision and their beliefs and offering

another vision of a just or right society. Democratic peace theory and narratives of cooperation

and mutuality are thus utopic visions in just the way that the Islamic State’s caliphate is, and do

not solve or erase the discourse of a clash. Supporters of these visions speak in an echo chamber,

refusing to acknowledge any flaw, while outside the chamber, the other side strengthens its

opposition. And though Obama spoke of peace, he did so while the US army’s campaign of

violence (purportedly for the sake of peace) in the Middle East continued.

Realities of the Arab Spring

In some ways, Obama’s vision anticipated the Arab Spring, which the Western world saw

as a heroic attempt by Arab people to assert their voices and bring about democratic governance.

Yet such fixation on human freedoms and democracy ignores the historical and sociopolitical

context of the region, particularly the economic conditions which spurred people to action and

the political history that guided regime efforts to quash that action. Furthermore, this vision did

not predict the possibility of failure and its consequences, the ways in which desperate attempts

to hold onto power ended up catalyzing and metastasizing conflicts and the way authoritarian

fear of political Islam paved the way for the rise of a new regional power, the Islamic State

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(discussed in Chapter 1). The vision of the Arab Spring as a populist democratic movement is

flawed in just the way democratic peace theory is; it has been superimposed onto events with

complex causation and attempts to predict the actions of actors who are not operating according

to the same fundamental beliefs or narratives. Thus, the Western world can talk about the Middle

East, and terrorists particularly, all they want; all the talk does is deepen the sense of an

inevitable divide.

The Ideological Product of Socio-political Discourses

Thus, an examination of the sociopolitical discourse on the region reveals three important

factors. First, the narrative of a clash of civilizations, or the inherent conflict between the

Western world and Muslim societies, is as common in Western discourse as it is in Salafist-jihadi

discourse, and the two discourses reinforce one another. Secondly, Western scholarship tends to

view the decline of Islamic civilization, and especially the lagging development of Arab

societies, as a factor of their authoritarian nature and lack of human freedoms. This view directly

contrasts jihadist claims that Western intervention and conflict are the cause of Islamic decline.

These contrasting views reinforce the narrative of the West at war with Islam, especially in the

context of the United State’s democracy building project in the Arab world. Finally, while many

in the West viewed the Arab Spring as a promising sign of democratic transformation in the

region, this perception ignored the fundamental social and economic grievances that led to the

uprisings, which in turn empowered groups like the Islamic State to emerge from the chaos left

behind, as discussed in Chapter 1. In all of these examples, discourses about the socio-political

reality of the region played an active role in shaping an ideological belief in the fundamental

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divide between East and West and the necessity of a clash between the two to resolve socio-

political grievances. This ideology is a key tenant of the Islamic State.

Interpreting the Jihadi Treatises: The Conjunction of Narratives in Salafi-jihadist Ideology

The case of the jihadi treatises, which seem to inform much of the Islamic State’s action,

vision, and formulation, is a prime example of how its religious and socio-political belief

systems are not separate, but actually interact and inform one another. It is this overlap that

forms the overall ideological system and actually begins to determine the shape and actions of

the organization. Separately, they propose a correct, moral, religious framework for society and a

series of paradigms for viewing society as it exists. Together, they begin to offer a way to shape

that existent society into the idealized utopic vision, which is arguably what has been and is

being carried out. For example, the socio-political narrative of a clash between East and West

partially accounts for the flood of jihadis into Iraq after the US invasion and the Islamic State’s

ability to capitalize on that moment for its rise. Similarly, the religious belief in takfir and the

purification of the umma may be seen to shape the Islamic State’s emphatic campaign against

Shia and escalation of the sectarian conflicts in both Iraq and Syria (see Chapter 1).

As discussed in the previous section, conceptions of a broad clash of cultures in Western

thought have been eclipsed by the complex realities on the ground, and those trying to solve the

conflicts, like Obama, lean on shared commonalities to project a peaceful vision of the future.

Yet Salafi-jihadists themselves continue to capitalize on deeply rooted difference, motivated by a

sense of historical and political subjugation.

The religious doctrine espoused in these treatises typically focuses on the ideal form and

strategy for the creation of the ideal Islamic state, and we can see very real links between these

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suggestions and the Islamic State’s enactment of its own state, as described in Chapter 1 and

further elucidated in the remainder of this chapter.

Foundational Jihadi Treatises: The Conjunction of Discourses

I will thus close with a discussion of the foundational jihadi treatises whose core concepts

and prescriptions most closely echo, and have been cited as the inspiration for, the Islamic State.

Indeed, these parallels are not accidental; key IS figures have cited jihadi authors as their

ideological inspiration, and various of their writings have been found in IS strongholds. The

direct influence of these treatises on the IS project is a key example of how a developed ideology

can influence the exertion of power and shaping of reality. These treatises offer a glimpse into

both the proposed strategies and the underlying assumptions of the Islamic State movement.

While varying in their emphases, they tend to combine underlying sociopolitical assumptions

with religious justifications, exemplifying the complexity of Salafi-jihadist ideology.

The first, Idaratu-l Tawahush (translated as The Administration of Savagery or The

Management of Savagery) by Abu Bakr Naji, has been cited as a key influence on the Islamic

State due to parallels drawn between his plan of action and the strategies employed by IS (Stern

and Berger 23). Naji’s goal is to lay out the broad outlines of how to destroy apostate Muslim

regimes so that they fall into savagery. The state of savagery will instill total obedience in

subjects through fear and intimidation while also evoking complete hatred of their enemies. At

this point, the jihadi group can step in to build their state in the region of savagery (Naji 11-12).

This prescription is eerily similar to the emergence of the Islamic State; as discussed in Chapter

1, the organization originally capitalized on the anti-American insurgency to move into the

region in Iraq and the revolt against Assad to move into Syria, catalyzed and expanded sectarian

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violence in both, and then consolidated its territorial ‘state.’ Naji also offers specific

prescriptions on a variety of topics, including the use of media and propaganda, response to

enemy air-strikes, recruitment and training of a vanguard youth, and how to administer and

control the state, which are close to the strategy of the Islamic State.15 Finally, his entire work is

grounded on the assumption that the Muslim umma needs to be rescued from a state of decline

and that only true believers guided by Sharia law will be able to create the rightful Caliphate, as

discussed above.

A second jihadi treatise, The Call to Global Islamic Resistance or Da’wat al-

Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah al-Alamiyyah, by Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam Nasar,

otherwise known as Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, is premised on a similar conception of the decline of

Muslim civilization, its humiliation at the hands of the West, which wants to subjugate it, and the

necessity of its revitalization. al-Suri believes that the umma can only be restored if the broader

Muslim community joins the jihadi “vanguard” to defend itself and extend its right to rule over

the earth (Nasar 5). His underlying assumption is the superiority of the umma, grounded in its

true belief and commitment to Sharia law. This conviction is evident in the manner in which the

Islamic State kills anyone in its path it deems an unbeliever. There are no qualms over killing

women, children, or even self-identified fellow Muslims; the Islamic State follows the most

radical version of takfir, condemned by one of its own spiritual mentors, described above.16

Furthermore, there is no consideration for other lifestyles; in its territory, the Islamic State

imposes what it sees as absolute sharia law without any consideration for whether or not the

15 For further colloquial discussion of the parallels between Naji’s work and IS’s strategy and tactics, please refer to Jack Jenkins, “The Book That Really Explains ISIS,” and Alastair Crooke, “The ISIS’ ‘Management of Savagery’ in Iraq.”16 See McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse Chapter 5, “Sectarian Apocalypse” for an account of the Islamic State’s justification of violence against Shia and Yazidi of all ages and genders, as well as Maqdisi’s split with Zarqawi.

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people in that territory ascribe to the same view. If they have been subsumed into the Islamic

State, they must become part of its vision and adopt its ideology, or else they too are the

eliminable enemy.

A third important text, less well known in Western circles but influential in jihadi ones, is

Treatises in the Jurisprudence of Jihad, or Fiqh al-Jihad, by Abi Abdullah Al-Muhajir, the

sheikh of IS leader al-Baghdadi. Muhajir’s project is to use Islamic Jurisprudence, or fiqh, to

justify violent jihad against all targets (Muhajir). The permissibility of this jihad lies in the same

assumption previously elucidated that the jihadis are the true believers and protectors of the faith

and that all current societies, Muslim as well as Western, have broken from true Sharia and the

rules of God. Muhajiir’s treatise is an expansion upon Qutb’s work and more clearly outlines the

actual enactment of that jihad, which the Islamic State appears to be carrying out.

There are two common themes in these works. The first is the necessity of rescuing the

umma from its decline at the hands of the West. The second is that it is permissible to do this by

violence, through jihad, because only the jihadis are true believers and thus capable of restoring

the umma to its rightful place. Each of these themes ties together threads of the religious and

socio-political discourses discussed above. The religious concepts of the true Islamic

community, the purpose of jihad and how to identify permissible targets, and even the

apocalypse envisioned as a final battle against the West, are animated for use in the socio-

political context of economic and cultural decline, Western interventionism and exploitation, the

bankruptcy of current authoritarian regimes, and the lack of successful alternative visions.

Together, these discourses form an ideology that, though constructed out of selective religious

readings and particular, contextually, experientially informed views of society, becomes the

animus of the Islamic State.

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Conclusion

As has been elucidated, the Islamic State certainly rose out of established ideological

discourses, which it both used to shape its own Salafi-jihadist ideology and which its ideology

was unconsciously shaped by. The Islamic State’s physical formulation can be seen as an attempt

to manifest its ideological beliefs. Yet these ideological discourses can only account for a small

portion of what the Islamic State is. For every mention of Islam, the apocalypse, the state, and

the Crusaders in its propaganda, there is something else not being said. Though the same

concepts make up the majority of its propaganda content (see Chapter 3 for a more complete

media analysis), the vision they construct is a fairly flat utopia, a mythic reconstruction of an

idealized reality backed up by religious justifications that lean heavily on the intellectual work of

a limited number of theorists from a splinter sect of the religion. If this were the whole of the

Islamic State’s content, the entirety of its animating force, it would not be very convincing.

There is also the question of how big a role macro or organizational level belief has on

the actual operations of the organization, which are, after all, conducted by individuals.

Individual members or supporter of IS are motivated by a wide range of things. While many

express beliefs or motivations echoing those described above, they also cite other factors.

Adventure, riches, social comradery—these are cited just as often as, and often instead of,

religious or socio-political explanations, especially by lower-level members (Neumann 9).

Furthermore, the Islamic State, as has been explained, is only one in a long line of Salafi-jihadist

organizations, and only one with the ideal of an Islamic Caliphate. The whole point of this

chapter, that the Islamic State emerged out of and was shaped/enabled by pre-existing religious

and socio-political discourses, lumps it together with other organizations shaped by and shaping

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those trends. So the trends or ideology alone cannot explain the Islamic State’s existence, even as

they were crucial for shaping its physical reality, as described above.

In the end, ideology is only another convenient framework for imagining or grasping the

Islamic State. Describing it through that framework alone, and especially as I have, through the

lens of two categories, creates artificial confines which eliminate other important attributes, or

else draws false divides between connected factors. For example, the religious belief in jihad as

an active struggle, even including violence against nonbelievers, is not unrelated from the socio-

political belief in a historic and continuing clash of civilizations and Western responsibility for

the long Islamic decline. In fact, as I have attempted to express, they are mutually supporting.

Not only that, but they developed together and frequently serve as shorthand for each other, as

exemplified in the ideological formulations and prescriptions set forth in the jihadi treatises

described above.

Beyond that, saying that the Islamic State is shaped by its ideology limits the conception

of it to things resultant from or easily connected to that ideology and thus runs the risk of

ignoring other essential factors, the spaces where it slips over and beyond what can be easily

grasped as ideas into the space of the virtual subconscious. This will be the subject of Chapter 3,

where I will explore how the Islamic State’s deployment of intimate violence and virtual

networks allows it to shape its own reality beyond the usually conceived limits of its territorial

and ideological reach.

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Chapter Three:

The Islamic State’s Virtual Reality

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Introduction

The Islamic State’s goal, animated by its Salafi-jihadist ideology (described in Chapter

2), is to create its utopic vision in the flesh out of the existing order (the physical process of

which was described in Chapter 1). To do so, it employs violence that is an amalgamation of the

‘medieval’ fear tactics of the Eastern horde, for example Ghengis Khan, and the more

technologically advanced, mediated tactics of modern states, enacted both in its physical territory

and increasingly its virtual territory. This violence is spectacularized through the Islamic State’s

sophisticated media and is used to reinforce its power both at the level of the state and globally,

spread into and then manifested out of a virtual community. The intimate violence of the Islamic

State elicits both terror and desire, aimed to create the ideal subjects for its new world:

individuals wanting the bodily, immortal power it projects (IS fighters and supporters),

individuals made docile by its violent assertion of dominance (IS subjects), and individuals

provoked to take it on (IS enemies).

In Chapter One, I attempted to explain the rise of the Islamic State through the lens of

several common analytic paradigms, including sectarian warfare, populist struggles, proxy war,

and a battle for global hegemony. Yet each of these explanations is limiting precisely because it

describes the Islamic State through the lenses of the modern Western world, built on rationality

and the interactions of nation-states, through situations modern nations, their politicians, their

military institutions, and their policymakers have seen—and theoretically resolved—before.

Again, IS does not operate according to this rational, secular, bounded understanding of the

world—it does not even see itself as a part of that world. Rather, it is attempting to create a real

yet utopic alternative.

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In Chapter 2, I outlined a series of religious and socio-political concepts that Islamic

State founders selected, transformed, and combined into a new ideological framework to

describe, justify, and legitimize their vision of that imagined utopia. All too often, commentators

dismiss IS’s vision and ideology out of hand, claiming it is too extreme, too foolish, and too

contradictory (many Muslims denounce it as completely anti-Islamic) to attract and mobilize the

kind of support necessary for its state (or rather, world)-building project. The common refrain

goes that yes, a few radicals here and there will join, but not that many people think like this. It

won’t get any worse; it cannot last much longer. And yet, IS is still around. Policy-makers,

academics, and politicians from both Western and Middle Eastern countries continue to ask how

such a vision could be attractive, and continually predict its collapse. However, the vision is

successful precisely because it is not the world its critics come from, and is in fact already

reshaping that world through its exercise of violence.

In this chapter, I will attempt to explain how the Islamic State makes its reality viable and

attractive through the virtual and the imagined. IS mobilizes its self-vision as a utopic reality to

attract people into its imagined community, a horizontal collection of individuals who may be

physically unknown to one another, but are bonded by the way in which they imagine themselves

to be part of a collective vision constructed through shared media outputs (Anderson 7, 38).

Simultaneously, IS uses this media projection to terrorize others into reacting to it, drawing

closer to its envisioned apocalyptic clash. It uses psychological warfare and virtual networks to

manipulate individuals, organizations, and even states into acting in certain ways, thereby

shaping its desired reality. Ultimately, the Islamic State creates the possibility of itself through

the projection of fear and desire along electronic networks—the networks of technology, of the

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Internet and television and mobile phones and radios, and the synopses of the human mind, in the

way people imagine and react to it. In the end, these networks are both virtual and real.

First, I will provide an account of the Islamic State’s media network and propaganda

output for background. Next, I will attempt to parse what sets the Islamic State’s use of violence

apart from the typical violence enacted by nation-states and in popular culture, why it is so

effective, what that particular ‘effect’ is, and how the Islamic State uses violence for its own

ends. I will argue that the Islamic State uses beheading and other forms of particularly intimate,

material violence in direct contrast to the often more abstract violence of nation-states. IS uses

these and other forms of violence, enacted in both its physical and increasingly its virtual

territory, which overlaps those of existing nation-states, to create its desired subjects.

Next, I will describe the networks the Islamic State relies upon to disseminate these

effects, relying on Benedict Anderson’s conception of the imagined community (Anderson)

alongside modern terrorism and extremism theorists (McCauley, Sagemen, and Bergen) and

media theorizations of the Islamic State (Winter, Klausmen, Farwell, and Zelin) to suggest that

IS has created its own imagined community, stretching from its physical territory to the virtual

networks of social media and the dark web and into the physical territory claimed by other

nation-states. IS is not contained by any of these material or immaterial places, but rather

operates more robustly and provocatively, shaping the interactions of states, militaries, and even

individuals according to their conceptions of it.

Finally, I will argue that the way the Islamic State is able to exert its vision through

violence is by uploading and downloading this fantastical, ideological vision into people. The

Islamic State does not exist as an entity of its own right; it was created, constructed out of

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particular concepts, particular people, and particular resources, but all according to a vision

shared and enacted by individuals who imagine it, and enact it, in their own way.

Media Analysis of the Islamic State

Much has been made of the Islamic State’s elaborate media networks. IS emerged into

the spotlight during a kind of social media ‘fad’ popularized during the so-called Arab Spring

and successive waves of technological innovations in the West, particularly the proliferation of

mobile device applications. Thus, it is only natural to devote time and attention to the Islamic

State’s use of the Internet and its carefully constructed and deployed media output. Yet claims

that the Islamic State is unique because of its use of social media and its sophisticated

productions often overemphasize the method at the expense of the content and the underlying

conditions for its success. IS uses social media and Internet technologies because they are an

effective way to reach and appeal to mass audiences. However, this approach would never be

effective if IS didn’t have something attractive to market in the first place, its utopia, and

something to market it on and through, its network.

Many individuals and institutions have already and are currently conducting media

analyses of IS propaganda. Typically, these studies consist of collections of IS media

productions from active Twitter users, bloggers, and other sources, collected during a specific

time frame and coded for content divided into several thematic categories. Though the specific

time frames, sources, and samples vary, the results do offer some commonalities. One common

conclusion17 is that the IS media network operates according to a “centralized decentralized”

structure; that is, most of the content is disseminated by a huge number of both real and

17 In Berger’s “The IS Twitter Census,” Klausen’s “Tweeting the Jihad,” Zelin’s “The Media Strategy of IS,” Winter’s “Documenting the Virtual Caliphate,” and Farwell’s “Media Analysis of ISIS”

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automated supporters outside of IS controlled territory. However, the original content is initially

shared by a select number of designated “feeder” accounts controlled by individuals inside IS

territory who are taking active part in the jihad. Thus, the content is strictly controlled and

aligned with key IS tenants, but has the appearance of organic spread. Of course, from the

second level disseminators, the material often becomes viral; as it captures the attention (and

condemnation) of people outside the IS network proper, it hits the mainstream news cycle and

from there filters into the collective imaginary.

Several studies have attempted to sort IS media output by theme in order to understand its

marketing strategy. These studies have the advantage of including Arabic language material,

while more popular reporting focuses on the material easily accessible, like the English-language

magazine Dabiq. As only about 7% of IS’s media output is in English, analyzing the whole

archive is crucial for a complete picture.

In “Tweeting the Jihad: Social Media Networks of Western Foreign Fighters in Syria and

Iraq,” Jytte Klausen concludes that Western fighters tend to produce highly instrumentalized

messages, including religious instructions and battlefield reports, meant to construct the image of

the Islamic State as a pure religious community and also an inevitable military success. Violence

and death are still very much key signifiers: according to Klausmen, “the most graphic pictures

send a message of unconstrained power: the power of the fighters is supreme and the enemy is

worthless…dead jihadists are often touched up and presented in softened tones with a half-smile

on their face and lovingly buried. Enemy corpses are gruesomely depicted” (13). However, less

frequent themes are still significant: Klausen points to ‘lifestyle tweets,’ such as a sudden deluge

of cat pictures in one week, as efforts to humanize the jihadis in contrast to their enemies. In her

words:

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“The purpose of the seemingly innocuous tweeting of cat pictures and hanging around with friends, blended with staggering depictions of brutality, is to drill home one message: You belong with us because jihad is an individual obligation for every Muslim. The content conveys that fighting—and dying—will give your life meaning, and is just plain fun and similarly exciting, but “better,” than playing video games like “Call of Duty” on the couch at home. The secondary messages piggy-backing on the Twitter streams range from the dehumanization of other Muslims (Shi’a in particular) and the bravery of the righteous fighters.” (Klausen 19-20).

Seemingly innocuous lifestyle tweets actually provide the material for the environment of the

Islamic State’s virtual community, the space in which members are meant to imagine themselves

existing or should seek to be a part of. Viral memes function as a shared media form drawing

together the individuals of the community, in just the way that books and the physical text served

as the foundation of Anderson’s nation-as-imagined-community, described later in this chapter.

The Quilliam foundation, a de-radicalization think-tank based in the UK, conducted a

similar study on IS media output without the focus on Western fighters in particular. The

Quilliam writer, Winter, found that there is a broad consistency in the IS narrative, but suggests

that it changes emphasis on particular themes based on the day-to-day situation on the ground.

The six parts—which Winter emphasizes are non-discrete—of the Islamic State’s message

identified in this study are mercy, belonging, brutality, victimhood, war and utopia. Currently,

the victimhood, war, and utopia themes receive the most attention in IS media broadcast, with

over half of the content focusing on civilian life in IS held territories. Winter suggests that this

focus is part of IS’ marketing campaign for its utopia (Winter 6). In his words:

“with its ‘caliphate’ narrative as a unique selling point, the group is able to decry the intransigence of its jihadist rivals, pick holes in their respective programmes, and claim that Islamic State alone is legitimate in the eyes of God. Through the portrayal of seemingly every facet of life in the ‘caliphate’ – from treatises on hijab and martyrdom to photo reports on melon agriculture, camel breeding, frame-making, masonry, pipeworks, and videos showing the implementation of Islamic State’s version of the shari’a and zakat distribution – the propagandists are able to create and cultivate a comprehensive image of utopia.” (Winter 30)

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Ultimately, the caliphate appeals to people not just because of its violent mastery over life and

death, but also because of its perceived religious piety, judicial order, economic plenty, and

social justice, depicted and attested to by its propaganda overload.

In “Picture or It Didn’t Happen,” Zelin identifies similar media categories, including

military, governance, da‘wa (call, as in the call to the vision and true Islamic practice) hisba

(justice), promotion of the caliphate, and enemy attack. He echoes the observation that the

purpose of broadcasting the military activities is to portray IS as always active and victorious,

while the other categories focus on governance, the viability of state, and the ideal nature of the

caliphate (Zelin 1).

He also makes the important point that IS media networks do not take place solely in the

virtual sphere. IS also conducts its media operations on the ground in IS controlled territories.

According to Zelin, “IS also organizes viewing parties of its official content locally in the

territories it controls. It also has created so-called nuqat i‘lamiyya (media points) in a number of

cities and villages. These consist of a stationary stall, a small shack, or a roving car or

Winnebago that distributes printed, CDs/DVDs, and/or USB drives of IS official media to locals,

with a target audience mainly comprised of children and young teenagers” (Zelin 1). This form

of indoctrination is especially important as bodies on the ground, particularly those of children,

are the primary form of reproducing the Islamic State.18

However, while IS propaganda blasts are constant and, in certain segments of the

Internet, extremely popular, they have limited effects alone. They provide the material content,

but the ultimate goal is the psychological impact on people, the way in which the material is

downloaded into the human brain, the way it is imagined, and how that imagining draws people

18 See Bloom, “Cubs of the Caliphate” for a report on the Islamic State’s indoctrination of children.

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into the vision or forces them to react. The propaganda itself captures the imagination of its

viewers, implanting the desire to join through broad media networks. However, actual

recruitment takes place on peer-to-peer sites, suggesting the importance of the overlap between

broader media networks and real (if virtual) communities of people. In contrast to more positive,

community-building propaganda, which often requires some form of personal connection to be

effective, the Islamic State’s violent propaganda is meant to extend its control through media

networks without person-to-person contact. Yet ultimately, it is the intimate, material nature of

the Islamic State’s version of violence that determines its impact on the viewer.

The Islamic State’s Use of Violence

As this paper has discussed previously, from its earliest stages as AQI in Iraq, IS has been

characterized by abnormal, deviant violence. It first made major headlines for its brutal, highly

publicized beheading of Nicholas Berg in 2004 (see Introduction), and the spate of beheadings,

massacres, and systemic rape have only increased as IS has gained power and more importantly

control over both its physical and virtual existence.19 This violence was not abnormal in the sense

that it was unprecedented: indeed, beheadings videos have become extremely common in jihadi

circles, not only in the current conflict, but in Palestine, Chechnya and beyond (Bunt, “Digital

Jihadi Battlefields” 249). Furthermore, beheading is not even uncommon in Western history and

narrative; it is a common occurrence in a variety of Western media ranging from slasher films to

popular action flicks to video games. Yet that exact popularity, its effectiveness, the way

beheading seems to elicit both a fascination and visceral horror that demands the audience’s

attention, points to a ritualized and ideological instrumentality beyond that of a mere trope.

19 For an example of how IS justifies its institutionalization of rape, see Su'al wa-Jawab fi al-Sabi wa-Riqab.

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In the following, I will argue that what distinguishes the Islamic State’s beheading videos

from other forms of projected violence, including its filmed raids, is that they are de-

contextualized and transportable, demanding that the viewer imagine themselves to be either the

victim or the perpetrator, both of whom are symbolically defined and stand in for broader

communities. The intimately material nature of beheading contrasts with the more abstract

materialism of the capitalist, neo-liberal order, symbolically putting dominion over life and death

into the hands of the Islamic State. The projection of this representation through media networks

elicits desire in potential IS members and terror in potential victims who view it, helping to

construct them as the Islamic State’s ideal subjects (members or supporters and enemies

respectively, who will react according to their particular perception of the Islamic State, which is

framed by the media image it projects). Thus, violence holds a place of privilege in catalyzing

the manifestation of the Islamic State.

Ghazawat

Beheading videos are only one of the many forms of violence routinely employed by the

Islamic State. For comparison, it will be useful to begin with another major genre of ‘violent’ IS

propaganda videos, filmed raids or military operations which its media apparatus calls ghazawat.

Ghazwa was the name given to the war and raid led by the Prophet of Islam, Muhammad, against

the Qurayyash, who denied that he had been chosen by Allah as the last Prophet and continued to

worship idols rather than convert to Islam. The followers of the Prophet were forced out of

Mecca by the Qurayyash and began the Hijra to Medina. Later, Muhammad led his followers in a

defensive clash against the Qurayyash at Badr, which was known as the Ghazwa (“A Short

Summary of Ghazwa (Battle of) Badr”). Ghazawat thus literally means a battle in which the

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Prophet participated. Therefore, the decision to call its raid videos ghazawat suggests that the

Islamic State is using “politics of naming” as described by Mamdani in his work on classifying

the violence in Darfur (Mamdani, “The Politics of Naming”). In Mamdani’s example, the

decision to call the violence “genocide” (by the US) was undermined by the refusal of the UN

commission to call it such, which cast doubt not only on the severity of the conflict, but also on

what should be done about it and how to view the different parties (Mamdani, “The Politics of

Naming”). Similarly, the Islamic State calls its raid videos ghazawat, while its opponents would

more likely refer to them as terrorism or war footage. The suggestion that the Prophet is

symbolically part of the Islamic State’s military operations, through the name ghazwa, suggests

that the operations are divinely inspired and morally correct. Naming them such denotes a

feeling of divine right, as if the raids are equal to the original Ghazwa, carried out against enemy

infidels to save Islam. The Islamic State’s opponents, including the Assad regime, Hezbollah, the

Syrian militias, and the Western, Russian, Turkish, and Gulf State troops supporting them, are

equated to the original enemies of Islam, justifying their destruction and indeed prefacing their

doom.

Stylistically, these videos or photo slideshows feature action sequences that would not be

out of place in a Hollywood blockbuster or video game; they are fast-paced, sometimes choppy,

increasingly flashy, but mostly focus on the action, the mission, the movement, the forward

progress towards the goal. As many scholars have noted in their analyses of IS media output, the

Islamic State’s portrayal of its military endeavors constructs a sense of constant momentum and

imminent victory (Stern and Berger 249; Zelin 5; Winter 36-37). Despite the fact that in reality,

the Islamic State must sometimes be on the defensive (it is, after all, fighting a war on three

fronts, against Assad, the anti-IS coalition, and other extremist groups), its videos almost never

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depict IS under attack. If they do, the segment is short, focuses on the sacrifice and bravery of

the mujahidin, and is followed by a triumphant forward push.

More often, the military operation videos, particularly the carefully crafted narratives of

specific raids, feature the defeat of enemies and seizure of new territory. According to Winter,

“Ghazwat events are painstakingly choreographed such that, when combined with a textual

narrative, the reports seem to unfold in real time” (Winter 25). For example, during IS’ spring

2014 offensive, YouTube was inundated with video and photo clips depicting the raids, which

then made their way onto mainstream news media sites as ‘footage’ of the carnage on the

ground, despite being constructed by the Islamic State itself.

These choreographed videos serve a certain role: they help circulate IS the way it wants

to be imagined, the way it needs to be imagined in order to successful. In Zelin’s words, “there is

always progress, with enemies being killed, defeated, or territory taken over” (5). Winter

concurs, explaining that “in order to buoy up support and perpetuate the perception of its

apocalyptic momentum, it must always appear to be triumphant” (24). Circulated on the dark

web and then creeping into mainstream media, these depictions become an invitation to

prospective jihadis: join our brotherhood, and you can go on adventures like this. You can be this

guy, or one of his band of brothers.20

Beheading Videos

20 While the spaces of social media such as Twitter are effective in circulating the Islamic State’s message to the widest possible audience, it is actually the dark web, or a collection of websites which are publically accessible but hide the IP addresses of their servers, meaning they cannot be accessed through search engines, that is most effective for the construction of community. Because of their perceived privacy, dark web sites are popular among jihadis, and many individuals, after making contact on more public sites, shift to dark web forums that allow protected person-to-person interaction without the fear of discovery or censure (Bunt 205-10).

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Beheading videos, on the contrary, are not meant to depict or approximate live action or

real events. The ‘action’ sequence of a beheading video is not immediately enticing; it does not

read as a ‘good adventure.’ It is nothing short of a ritualized, contained, staged, slow-motion

dematerialization of a human life. Writing on symbolism in terrorism, Matusitz characterizes

such staged, violent spectacles as having a “magical type of panoptic power” with “the ability to

both impress and terrify viewers” and thus subconsciously influence their actions (Matusitz 297).

Because of its careful framing of macabre theater, because of the timeless, placeless character,

because the victim could be anyone (so long as they are the enemy) and the killer could be

anyone (but working for the goal of the utopic caliphate) the tableau is fantastically and

ideologically mobile. More than that, it can be mobilized, beyond an invitation via the depiction

of specific events. The ghazawat are fast paced and meant to grab a certain kind of viewer

(wherever he is) and drag him along, but they are fixed in reality, real place, and real time. The

beheading videos take place outside of those streams. Mobilized in the currents and networks of

the Internet, uploaded into virtual imaginaries, they take on a special kind of power, and exert a

more powerful control.

Staging Transport

The beheading video itself is framed as a performance; it is meant to be seen, constructed

with its seeing, its reception, in mind. In the first place, the camera is always in the middle

distance: there are no close ups or long pans. It fixes on the actors (the jihadis and the kneeling

victim). There are no wide shots to provide context. There is no sense of depth. The camera

blocks out all other information, forcing the viewer to see the beheading, focusing them on the

spectacle (“Although the Disbelievers Dislike it”). Yet this very focus, this fixation on visibility,

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activates the imagination. It is in the ghostly periphery that the imaginary flourishes. With no

context, no exact place or time, no other information, the scene can take place anywhere and

happen to anyone. To a prospective jihadi, the scene becomes a possibility, a scene that he can

take part in. To a prospective victim, a Westerner, a Shia, a secular Sunni, anyone described by

IS as an enemy or anyone who imagines themselves to be an enemy of IS, the scene is a threat

and deadly performance of a future in which IS governs all bodies with brutality.

Precisely because of its floating significance, the compact, staged moment of beheading

is portable. Not only can the stage, the compact box of the beheading, the tableau of the jihadi

and the victim, be transposed anywhere in the physical reality where there is a jihadi and a victim

to be found, but it can be transported on virtual planes as well. The beheading videos circulate on

screens—computer screens, mobile devices, TV screens—acquiring the additional significance

of their framing. A commentator gives the beheading meaning, positive or negative. The

imagination of the recipient interprets it further. It does not carry its context with it, and is all the

more powerful, more flexible, and more capable of transformation for that portability.

The beheading video is a deathly staged box, like a play, like a dream. It floats outside of

reality but haunts the very real imagination. This is the last realm the beheading moves in, and

the one in which it has the greatest impact: the imagination. Referring to similar instances of

violence and their media circulation from her case study on the Patani resistance in Southern

Thailand, Virginie Andre says that the circulation of visceral violence (particularly bodily

mutilation and beheading) in the virtual realms has repercussions more significant than just

reaching a larger audience. In her words, “it enables the lifting of any notion of temporality on

these exactions, as the act is continuously played and replayed and the body of the victims

repeatedly desecrated. It becomes an indefinite political spectacle of human body desecration”

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(Andre 1209). People see it; people talk about it. It moves from one mind to the next, acquiring

force and meaning through subsequent imaginings, active in the individual mind and the

collective unconscious, until it takes on a meaning and a force through its discussion that was not

contained in the initial scene.

Spectacle of Violence: Symbolic Theater

The staged beheadings also operate as a kind of symbolic theater in which the body of the

individual stands in for the collective body of the community he has been labeled a part of. The

body of the unbeliever itself becomes a theater, a stage upon which the ritualized, symbolic

decapitation takes place. Upon this stage, decapitation is an act, a method for taking the body

apart “to divine the enemy within” (Andre 1206). In explaining why the Patani insurgents have

adopted decapitation as a method for controlling the local community through fear, Andre says

that through decapitation:

“the insurgents reflect the labelling of all these individuals as the enemy, for not taking sides, or for not fighting alongside the insurgents. The dismemberment, burning or mutilation of the body, therefore, can be seen as a symbolic gesture at the rest of the community, the communities of the area that witness the aftermath or hear of the head or corpse found down the street.” (Andre 1207)

Essentially, the insurgents are using bodily dismemberment to physically and

symbolically manifest the clash of civilizations, the self/other divide, and a jihad against kafir

(unbelievers) and murtadd (apostates), ideological concepts described in Chapter 2. The same

can be said for the Islamic State and its depiction of dead and dying bodies. In his media analysis

of IS propaganda output for the Terrorism Research Initiative, Zelin identifies over seven

derogatory, ‘othering’ terms used repeatedly in the IS videos from a single week: “murtaddin

(the apostate awakening), in reference to its Sunni enemies in Iraq and Syria; ‘B.K.K.’ al-

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murtaddin (P.K.K. apostates), Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria; tanzim al-nusayri (the Alawite

regime), the Assad regime and its supporters; junud al- taghut (soldiers of the tyrant), in

reference to those fighting under General Khalifa Hiftar in Libya; jaysh al-safawi (the Safavid

Army), a euphemism for the Iraqi army that is controlled by Iran since the Safavids are an old

Iranian Shia dynasty; al-ahzab al-kurdiyya al-ilhadiyya (the atheistic Kurdish parties), another

reference to the PKK as well as the YPJ in Iraq and Syria respectively; and al-hashd al-rafidi

(the rejectionist committees), a derogatory way of describing Shia and referencing the militias

established by Shia Iraqis” (Zelin 4). Zarqawi himself, the leader of Tawhid al-Islam and AQI,

was instrumental in popularizing many of these terms: he wrote an influential letter explaining

why Shia were “adu al-qarib,” the near enemy, and a more important target than the American

occupiers (Zarqawi in Haniyya and Ramaan 37-8). In this letter, Zarqawi identified what he

called al-rafidiyya, or rejectionists, Shia who had once been affiliated with the Sunnis but

stabbed them in the back, as a greater threat than the murtadd or the kufr (Haniyya and Ramaan

37). Each of the derogatory terms, some of them popularized by Zarqawi and used in IS

propaganda videos to this day, describes the way in which a body of people are “outside the pale

of Islam” and are thus “legitimate targets,” validating IS’s use of extreme violence against the

collective group and the individual bodies of its members (Zelin 4). Yet by such standards,

especially the way the Islamic State applies the title of apostacy, unless one is an avid supporter

of IS, they are likely to be a target to its violence.

Thus, in the case of the Islamic State, the beheading videos have even further significance

and impact than is suggested in Andre’s case study on the Patani. In this case, the ‘rest of the

community’ to whom the beheading gestures is everyone who does not believe in the Islamic

State’s aim of a utopic Islamic community: the West generally, but anyone else who would

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challenge it as well. Here, ‘the rest of the community’ is both global and virtual, as the beheading

videos circulate through Internet pathways, televisions, and most significantly, the minds of the

recipients. Here, everywhere is ‘down the street from violence’ (Andre 1207).

Intimate Violence: Medieval

Beyond their mobility and symbolic power, the beheadings that characterize IS violence

are significant for another reason: their intimate, visceral materiality. As I have said, decapitation

is not unknown in Western society, nor is personal, close-quarters killing. Nation-states around

the world, not just in the ‘barbaric’ lands of the East, to which Western nations purport that IS

has more similarities, still invoke the death penalty; horror films are full of intimate death, blood,

and gore, and whole theater audiences still flock to see them (Stern and Berger 209). The

difference is that IS beheadings are a different kind of ritualistic drama, with a system and

technique alien to modern Western aesthetics. Again, alien here does not mean unknown; rather,

it is exactly known, in the distant past. The word most commonly used to describe these

beheadings, in which a masked jihadi uses a sword to decapitate his Western foe, is ‘medieval.’

So on the one hand, the act of violence seems irreconcilably out of touch with the modern world,

our reality, because it uses a weapon associated with the past.

Furthermore, the sword carries a significant symbolic meaning in Islamist cultures; “it is

a premodern weapon that alludes to the violent reality of the jihadist fight” (Matusitz 213). Thus,

the sword connects the present reality to the early foundations of Islam and the establishment of

the Islamic Empire at the point of the sword. It is associated with “the purity, nobility, and

overall uprightness that are connected to the Prophet Muhammad, his companions, other early

Islamic heroes, and their successful military campaigns,” thus legitimizing modern-day violence

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at the point of a sword and connecting it to the successful jihad (and overall golden age) of Islam

(Matusitz 213).

Intimate Violence: Material

However, I would argue that the beheadings are most disturbing, and most powerfully

affect the imagination of Western individuals and collectivities, because that sword is wielded in

such intimate contact with its victim. A single person wields it to kill another. The act is entirely

in their two hands. The effects are noticeable (blood sprays; the head is removed in increments)

and prolonged (the beheading is more hacking or sawing than the smooth slice of the French

guillotine). What is unimaginable is not such a violent death, nor beheading itself. Rather, it is

the conjunction of the isolated, decontextualized stage, the body labeled the jihadi savior, the

body labeled the Western infidel or the unbeliever, and the sword that links the two: death in

close, intimate proximity, with no special effects, no mediation. The camera might as well not

exist, except to put the scene in a little box, a box that can be transported anywhere across the

electrical pathways of modern technology and of the human brain.

The closeness, the embodied tactility of the execution, powerfully collapses material

distances. It suggests a power over the human body, but more than that, over mortality itself. On

the one hand, it threatens to dematerialize the body of the Islamic State’s symbolic enemies, its

victims. On the other, it is a suggestion to the susceptible, potential supporter or member (a rare

type, but one IS is effective in reaching) of the power, the dominance, the lifestyle awaiting them

in the utopic reality the Islamic State constructs. To an individual alienated from the abstracted

materialism of the West, this intimate kind of violence is a powerful draw.

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In the West, materialism manifests in the purchase of objects, the objectification of

bodies, and even the commodification and purchase of bodies, the dismemberment of bodies—

but always through a screen, a screen of money or technology or space. Slaughterhouses and the

sex trade operate in the background of society, and knowledge of them lurks in the subconscious,

but they are not frequently acknowledged or made visible. The kind of violence in IS execution

videos is commonplace in horror films, but more than that, it is becoming mainstream in such

pop culture staples as The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Thus, Western audiences are not

unfamiliar with blood and guts and gore. They watch it nightly on their television screens, and

some of them even seek it out in violent video games, and others take an active part in its

(mediated) enactment through drone strikes, commanding death and destruction from thousands

of miles away and watching it on a screen as if it took place right before their eyes.

Yet what makes such death, or even the taking of human life, the dismemberment of the

body, palatable in Western society is that the lives are meant to be taken, and the bodies are

meant to be taken apart. In what Byers and Johnson call “the CSI effect,” the authors propose

that American crime shows display the artificiality of the body as an authorization for destroying

it (Byers and Johnson 96). Similarly, in slasher films, the body is the stage for the expected

violence; in video games, other characters’ bodies are targets to destroy; the same is true for

drone strikes. IS execution videos offer another kind of materialism: an intimate, visceral

mastery over the human body, the power of life and death grasped in two human hands, the

materiality of body to body in opposition to the abstracted materialism of the West.

It is true that beheading videos represent only a small part of the Islamic State’s media

output, and some might claim that I’ve devoted inordinate attention to them. If this is true, it is

not my fault alone. Western media, commentators, and audiences do tend to spend much more

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time discussing IS brutality and violence than other aspects, including its efforts at state-building

and religious indoctrination, which IS itself emphasizes. This may be in part due to limited

access; most of IS’ media material is published in Arabic, while the small amount of English

language material, most notably Dabiq, is produced specifically for Western audiences. On the

other hand, of the material IS produces for Arabic-speaking audiences, over half focuses on

civilian life in IS-held territories. The Quilliam study refers to this theme as ‘utopia,’ while Zelin

classifies it as ‘the caliphate campaign,’ but both agree that the Islamic State expends a great

amount of energy and resources in marketing a vision of itself as the physical manifestation of

the religious and socio-political construction described in Chapter 2 (Qinter 30; Zelin 6).

Manifestations of the Management of Savagery

Within this complex media construction, violence occupies a place of privilege as a

driving factor for the actual manifestation of the Islamic State. On the one hand, IS is attempting

to ‘sell’ its vision to the people who can make it a reality. Yet the vision does not exist

independently of IS; it is not automatically accepted. Both the religious doctrine and the violent

methods appeal only to a fraction of the world’s Muslims, let alone its overall population. In

order to enact its vision, IS first needs to create the subjects who can enact it, either through

instilling in them desire or forced docility. It is here that violence comes back into the picture. In

addition to offering the promise of intimate dominion over life and death to potential supporters,

thus instilling desire to join the cause, the purpose of the beheading videos, the executions of

deviants in IS territory, the systemic rape,21 and the other violent acts IS propagates, as well as

21 US news sources including the New York Times have cited interviews with Yazidi women who escaped IS captivity, claiming that IS is using methods of forced birth control to maintain their population of sex slaves, whom they manage through a department of war spoils (Rukmini). The physical and sexual exploitation of women as ‘spoils,’ and the control of reproduction and women’s bodies, is a classic example of domination, occupation, and

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their circulation through virtual channels, is to spread terror. IS attempts to control both hearts

and minds, within its territory and beyond, by spreading terror through the dismemberment of the

body, with the ultimate goal of creating subjects who will embody (physically manifest) the

Islamic State.

It is here that we come back to the jihadi doctrines from Chapter 2, specifically, The

Management of Savagery, which some commentators read as a playbook for the Islamic State.

Naji’s treatise, as described in Chapter 2, describes how jihadis should destroy apostate Muslim

regimes so that they fall into savagery against their own people. In response to violent attacks,

the regimes would reallocate their resources, leaving power vacuums which the jihadis could use

to rebuild the land into their own caliphate. Essentially, violence and cruelty are necessary to

achieve control, and are meant to be directed at the jihadis’ own desired subject population as

well as their enemies, in order to break them psychologically and ensure absolute obedience.

Only through savagery can they create the conditions for their eventual success, the

establishment of an Islamic State, built upon the ashes of the old state and the bodies of its

‘managed’ people (Naji). This proposed project exactly parallels the Islamic State’s conquest in

Syria and Iraq, where it has gained territory and subjects at the expense of the Iraqi and Syrian

regimes, who have at times brutalized their own people in their efforts to retain control.

This last observation, namely, the lengths to which Bashar al-Assad has been willing to

go to retain some measure of control over some parts of ‘his’ country, suggests an oft-ignored

truth: some of the greatest proponents of terror for control are states themselves.22 Thus, if the

Islamic State is seen as an aberration for the atrocities it commits on its own as well as other

control through fear. For a more formal discussion of such topics, please refer to Renzetti, Edleson, and Bergen, Sourcebook on Violence Against Women.22 For a more comprehensive handling of terror as a tool for control, please refer to William Perdue’s Terrorism and the State: A Critique of Domination Through Fear.

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people, this is largely because of the ‘medieval’ connotations of its violence (again, more

visceral, intimately material than is common in our modern world) and the fact that it is not a

nation-state, that it is exactly seeking to undermine existing nation-states. Violence used by

states supports the existing international order; violence used against states, in service of a

counter-ideology to the state system, is an aberration, no matter the degree to which it differs or

does not differ from state violence (Perdue 24).

Furthermore, the stories coming out of IS controlled Iraq and Syria are frequently ones of

brutality and violence. Yet these stories are sensationalized exactly because so few people come

out of the territory, and because, despite such brutal violence, IS continues to exist. Al Qaeda

actually highly discouraged similar acts of violence against fellow Muslims after recognizing

that they alienated the masses (al-Zawahiri, “Letter from Zawahiri”). IS expresses no such

concerns; rather, it glorifies violence. It does not need the masses to support it, nor does it expect

them to, because the masses are not what it defines as ‘true believers.’ In addition to a docile

subject population, the Islamic State needs a contrast against which to define itself, an enemy to

fight; its utopic vision ends in the apocalyptic battle with the Crusaders. Thus, it does not shy

away from fear and hate, but rather seeks them out as yet another aspect of its own strength, and

another sign of its success.

Islamic State Subjects

Ultimately, the goal of the Islamic State’s media project, its projected vision of itself,

enacted through both visceral, intimate violence and the transmission of that violence, is the

creation of its ideal subjects. These subjects come in three categories: supporters and fighters,

who are attracted by the promise of intimate material power, as well as the community or

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brotherhood described briefly below, docile subjects, those people inside the Islamic State’s

physical territory or within reach of its projection of terror who have been cowed by its promise

of retribution, and enemies, those provoked by the Islamic State’s broadcast violence into

attacking it.

Of course, this project is not complete: the final vision is the creation of a utopic Islamic

State, full of loyal subjects, whose creation will signify the coming of a final apocalyptic clash

with the Crusader forces. The utopic vision requires a certain configuration of supporters and

subjects mobilized against a system that oppresses them (in this case, the mobilization of true

believers against neoliberal Western modernity and its allies, as described in Chapter 1). The

construction is not without precedent; the anti-imperialist struggle urged by Franz Fanon comes

to mind here. According to Perdue, “the utopian ideology of terrorism” (although it is arguable

whether IS is a terrorist organization, it does enact acts of terror) “is part of a larger ideological

struggle, designed to develop a political consciousness within a political audience. However, the

audience in this case is an underclass and utopian ideology is intended to transform that class

into a material force for the alteration of human history” (Perdue 13). This closely parallels the

Islamic State’s conception of an Islamic decline, to be combatted by the resurgence of the

caliphate, achieved through force of arms. From its point of view, Muslims have been the

underclass for two thousand years; now, it is using fear and marketing its utopic vision to forge

its own reality.

In order for this to occur, the Islamic State needs to assemble and catalyze the final clash.

Thus, beyond creating desiring subjects (its supporters and fighters) and docile subjects (the

people in and around its territory), it needs to both create its enemy and draw them in. To

complete the final picture, the Islamic State needs to force Western troops and their (in its eyes

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infidel) Iraqi, Iranian, and Syrian allies to face it on the ground, within the physical territory of

the caliphate. Thus, the violence is far from an end; while on some level IS leaders must know

that they cannot win a pitched battle with all of the forces arrayed against them, they also know

that their constructed enemies are not likely to engage head-on after the drawn-out wars in Iraq

and Afghanistan. Instead, IS leaders are likely to continue their provocations to strengthen the

picture of the impending apocalypse that will mark the success of their utopia, as if inviting the

West to join them in its construction.

The Islamic State’s Imagined Community

As integral as the management of savagery, the control of subjects on the ground, and the

provocation of its designated enemies are to the Islamic State’s project, these elements alone are

not enough to secure its existence, nor do they fully encapsulate its vision. As I have suggested

previously, both the core tenant of the Islamic State and its core strength is the Islamic State as a

vision and a manifestation of a utopic reality, an alternative to the unstable, morally bankrupt,

and abstractly materialist world it both reacts to and depicts as its raison d’etre. Crucially, the

Islamic State is implementing that utopic reality not merely within its physical territory, but in

virtual territory as well. Through its media campaigns, both its portrayal of itself and its active

outreach to individuals and communities, the Islamic State has focused on constructing a

network of believers well beyond its physical territory in Syria, Iraq, and nearby countries. This

network is not just a support system for IS; it actually functions very similarly to Benedict

Anderson’s famous ‘imagined community,’ and is itself an essential component of the Islamic

State. The Islamic State’s imagined community also follows many proposed aspects of social

network studies on extremist groups, particularly with respect to the creation of in and out

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groups. Ultimately, the imagined community allows the Islamic State to draw in individuals who

would ultimately be unable to join, and also to exert its influence in territory far beyond its

physical territory, manifested by individuals operating in the physical space of other nation-states

and connected through its very real social network.

Imagined Communities

Anderson first proposed the term ‘imagined community’ in order to describe the ‘nation’

as a particular cultural phenomenon. Specifically, he called the nation “an imagined political

community…both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 6) While it would be an

interesting project to examine the ways in which the Islamic State both fulfills and undermines

Anderson’s notions of the nation (particularly its sense of boundedness), it is beyond the scope of

this paper. Instead, I will focus on his definition of an imagined community, which he

approaches through the lens of the nation. According to Anderson, a nation is “imagined”

because, despite the fact that each member will never know, communicate with, or meet every

other member, “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson 6).

Communities, in his view, “are to be distinguished, not by their falseness/genuineness, but by the

style in which they are imagined” (Anderson 6). Furthermore, Anderson’s communities denote a

notion of “deep, horizontal comradeship” and are brought together through the consumption of

shared media productions; in the case of the original nations, this media production was print text

(Anderson 6, 38).

Anderson focused on the nation’s imagined component to explain the particular, deep ties

between people who would never meet and the differences between collectivities of peoples who

imagined themselves differently, particularly the volatility of clashes between different

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imaginings. While he applied the concept to the nation, it is immediately evident that a

horizontal, collective kinship may emerge between people who will never meet in other spaces,

too. After all, the construction is tied less to a physical space than to the shared vision of a group

of people who imagine themselves to be part of a larger collective whole.

Social Networks in Extremist Studies

Additionally, there is a large and expanding body of literature on extremist networks,

including valuable theorizations of extremism online and the social construction and dynamics of

extremist groups, which can be used to examine the virtual community of the Islamic State. In

the past, theorizations focused on individual pathology as an explanation for joining extremist or

terrorist organizations and undertaking violent action (radicalization to the point of violence for

the purpose of terrorist action, or action against civilian targets meant to elicit political or policy

change). Recently, there has been a general move away from an individual pathology approach

to a focus on group dynamics and interactions. For example, in Friction: How Radicalization

Happens to Them and Us, an important text on radicalization as a dynamic process rather than a

predetermined pathway, Clarke McCauley characterizes terrorism as normal pathology and says

that terrorist acts are actually rational attempts to elicit a violent response in order to polarize

people into an us vs. them divide, both attracting and consolidating support as the victim reacts

with prejudice against Islam and Muslims. Thus, in McCauley’s view, “the response to terrorism

can be more dangerous than the terrorists” (McCauley and Moskalenko 214-225) . He also offers

an explanation of the role of group dynamics in terrorism in his book Terrorism and Political

Violence, theorizing political radicalization as a dimension of increasing extremity of beliefs,

feelings, and behaviors in support of intergroup conflict and violence. Out of twelve of

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McCauley’s proposed pathways to radicalization, ten of them occur in the context of group

identification and perceived threat to the group. Thus, radicalization is not often an individual

process, but rather a feedback loop between individuals, communities, organizations, and states.

The Islamic State’s own group dynamics are very much similar to those described by

McCauley in terms of in-group mentality and the importance of the consolidation of the in-group

against an external threat for escalating violence. It is important to remember that in the

beginning, IS gained visibility and legitimacy by capitalizing on sectarian tensions, the US

occupation of Iraq, and the civil war in Syria. Its aims were the same in each conflict: define the

enemy, and capitalize on hatred of that enemy to gain support. In the first case, the enemy (the

outgroup) was the Shia; in the second, the United States and its Western allies (as well as the

Iraqi government and the Iranian regime supposedly pulling its strings), and in the third case, the

Assad regime. These ‘outgroups’ correspond to several of the epithets coined by Zarqawi and

described by Zelin in his media analysis of IS propaganda, mentioned previously in this chapter:

al-hashd al-rafidi (the rejectionist committees) for the Shia, jaysh al-safawi (the Safavid Army)

for the Iraqi army and its Iranian supporters, and tanzim al-nusayri (the Alawite regime) for the

Assad regime and its supporters. Of course, the other epithets signaled additional out-groups

within those conflicts, as part of the Islamic State’s modus operendi is to label all groups who do

not support it as the enemy.23

23 For reference, the complete list of frequently repeated derogatory terms identified by Zelin in the week-long segment of IS media output was: murtaddin (the apostate awakening), in reference to its Sunni enemies in Iraq and Syria; ‘B.K.K.’ al-murtaddin (P.K.K. apostates), Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria; tanzim al-nusayri (the Alawite regime), the Assad regime and its supporters; junud al- taghut (soldiers of the tyrant), in reference to those fighting under General Khalifa Hiftar in Libya; jaysh al-safawi (the Safavid Army), a euphemism for the Iraqi army that is controlled by Iran since the Safavid’s are an old Iranian Shia dynasty; al-ahzab al-kurdiyya al-ilhadiyya (the atheistic Kurdish parties), another reference to the PKK as well as the YPJ in Iraq and Syria respectively; and al-hashd al-rafidi (the rejectionist committees), a derogatory way of describing Shia and referencing the militias established by Shia Iraqis

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Additionally, the increasing escalation of IS violence can be linked to McCauley’s

theorization of political radicalization. The stronger the ties within the group, the more its

‘ingroup’ identity is consolidated against that of the outgroup and the more prone to violence

both it and its individual members become. Violence becomes a way of reinforcing ingroup

identity and attracting and keeping members of the ingroup by initiating them into a ritualized,

radical lifestyle that is only acceptable within that group.

In Leaderless Jihad, another important theorization of individual radicalization and social

dynamics in extremist networks, Marc Sageman concurs that group dynamics are important in

individual radicalization, but proposes his own variant pathway (Sageman 208). According to

Sageman, the individual, outside influence, and group dynamics come together in a four-step

process through which Muslim youth become radicalized. In one step, traumatic events, either

personally experienced or learned from outside sources, spark moral outrage. This outrage is

interpreted through a specific ideology, the broad history of Muslim grievance and Western

persecution narrative discussed above, and then shared online. The personal account resonates

with the experiences of others, eventually sparking group action (Sageman 20-30). Sageman’s

account suggests that the steps can take place in different orders or simultaneously; thus, the

pathway is not restrictive, nor is it one-directional or inevitable. While it would be a mistake to

say that every individual follows this pathway into the Islamic State, especially given that so

much of the Islamic State’s materialization has resisted existing paradigms, it is certainly

possible to identify parallels in the stories of individuals who have joined this Islamic State.

However, such comparisons are unfortunately beyond the scope of this project.24

24 Much of the analysis of IS done in the United States has actually focused on radicalization pathways as a point of intervention. See START Center, “Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States: Preliminary Findings,” 2015 for a case study of individual pathways and J.M. Berger’s “Tailored Online Interventions: The Islamic State’s Recruitment Strategy” for a more theoretical account.

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IS as Imagined Community

Thus, the Islamic State accomplishes its project of creating ideal subjects (those desiring

its utopic vision and those obedient to its will, as well as the enemies necessary to frame the

vision against) by constructing an imagined community through media networks focusing on the

depiction of the caliphate utopia and its violent dominion over life and death. In contrast to

Anderson’s textbook case of the imagined community, the nation, the Islamic State’s imagined

community is not physically bounded; indeed, its very nature is to cross and dematerialize

national boundaries, to exist in the virtual spaces online and in the minds of its members. Yet the

sense of solidarity, of a shared vision, of knowing and being part of a community of brothers,

despite not knowing each and every one (such knowledge is especially dangerous in the case of

IS, as it can be used to track down cells and other individuals) is absolutely crucial for the

enactment of the Islamic State.

The caliphate is, in essence, the community of true believers. First and foremost, it

requires people, loyal subjects, to support it. Yet people in a physical territory can be wiped out;

they can be controlled, undermined, and recalibrated by the conditions on the ground. People in

an imagined community, spread between physical territories, still share the same goals and

beliefs and comradery that make them part of the utopic vision, but they have more flexibility,

more resiliency, and more possibility for action precisely because of their dispersal.

Virtual Territory

More valuable to the Islamic State than its physical territory, then (although this is

necessary as a stage for the final battle), is its virtual territory. This is the territory in which it

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most critically expands. While its physical expansion may have stopped for the time being, in the

virtual realm, IS is still gaining ground. This is true even as social media sites like Facebook

(and, with less success, Twitter) attempt to shut down IS accounts, as they gain back the Internet

territory most easily deemed virtual. The real goal is the ‘virtual’ territory of the minds of

people: people who might support the Islamic State, people who might join it, and people,

perhaps most crucially of all, who might confront it in a certain way based upon their own

imagining of it, which in turn is a reaction IS’s specific imagining of itself that they have

received.

Conclusion

Alongside or even more significant than its physical presence, a major component of the

Islamic State’s project is to create an image of itself online, a digital utopia constructed through

carefully controlled media networks. Despite the constant complaints of Western countries

directed at Turkey, there is only limited access to the physical Islamic State. This is exactly why

the Islamic State’s virtual territory, its digital presence, is so crucial: it both spreads a carefully

crafted vision of the Islamic State and materializes it in the minds of people far beyond that

physical territory. The result is an imagined community that spans both physical and virtual

spaces, evading the control of such constraints as national borders, Internet censorship, and even

social taboos. Of course, aspects of this digital utopia slip well beyond the control of IS

leadership as well. However, as unruly as the digital utopia is, it is linked through the initial

utopic vision of the Islamic State back to the material, real moment embodied on the ground.

In a way, all of the virtual, digital work is done to enable and manifest a reality that

would be eschewed in the previously extant reality of nation-states. The shock of the Islamic

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State’s existence and its tactics, to the Western world, is that in our view, it shouldn’t exist, and

they shouldn’t be successful. But it does exist, and they are successful, precisely because they

refuse, or combat, or offer an alternative to, the world that they shouldn’t exist in. And by

offering the possibility of another world, the Islamic State has begun to make it a reality.

Ultimately, the Islamic State deploys images of violence, domination, and just

governance, its utopic message, through its media networks in order to foster in the minds of its

viewers, its consumers, the need to be a part of it. Through that desire, viewers become pulled

into the larger imagined community, which spans the physical territory of the Islamic State as

well as its virtual territory, and reaches through that territory into the physical territory claimed

by others, yet which they do not completely control.

This physical and virtual flow leaches into the ideological and material spaces of the

West and so the vision of the Islamic State reaches the body of a Westerner, draws him/her out

of Europe or America (mentally if not physically) and lands him in the matrix of ideology and

concrete action, of the imagined made real, the Islamic State.25 As part of that imagined

community, he joins a real social world, complete with social networks, personal contact, and,

should he chose to accept it, a mission with particular tasks to accomplish (either specifically

assigned to him or imagined to be his duty). The social world of the Islamic State is not

territorially bounded; it defies the physical constraints placed on the Islamic State and pushes

back against them as individuals make new connections and draw in more and more of their own

circle. The Islamic State’s media network thus culminates in social contacts and real

relationships that exceed the allowance of mere digital forms to build the trust necessary for

enacting complex plans. It is manifested into a real network of individuals and finally

25 The Islamic State is not unique in this regard; while it is not generally recognized, all states operate on this confluence of mythology, materiality, and ideology.

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downloaded into the real world as the new member makes contact both with the mythologized

land of the Islamic State whose representation first invited him on this journey, and the real

people who have become his comrades in the utopic march to the apocalypse.

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Chapter Four

Conclusions:

Imaginings Beyond the Nation-State Order

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Introduction

One aspect of this thesis has been to explore the ways in which the Islamic State is

imagined by policy-makers, intellectuals, and individuals, as well as its own agents, and to

suggest how those canonical imaginings are insufficient for a complete understanding of it.

Proposed explanations of the Islamic State that operate according to the rules of the nation-state

are limited in their ability to account for every aspect of the Islamic State, which is premised

upon a dematerialization or a defiance of the nation-state system.

In Chapter 1, I described the various analytical perspectives of IS shaped by ideological

and historical understandings of the Cold War, religious divides in the Middle East, populist

movements, and global hegemonic power struggles. These perceptions of the Islamic State shape

actors’ (such as the U.S. or EU security agencies) reactions to it, which in turn influences the

Islamic State’s own strategies. The same can be said for the ideology of the Islamic State. After

all, as Chapter 2 explored, the ideological content of the Islamic State has itself been

purposefully constructed, with concepts and narratives picked out of existing ideological

discourses and mobilized into a new ideology to support the formation of an idealized, utopic

state. As the situation changes, the ideas necessary to support a specific reality within that

situation may also change. Just because the Islamic State is viewed as a fundamentalist

organization does not mean it cannot improvise. In fact, both the physical manifestation of the

Islamic State and the ideological content supporting it are subject to constant transformations,

elicited by forces both local and transnational, and envisioning them as fixed and separate will

provide only a flawed, fragile, or incomplete understanding.

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Toward Understanding the Islamic State

Thus, in order to truly grasp the Islamic State, policy-makers and scholars both must

move beyond their current, Western rationalist-oriented imagining of it narrowly conforming to

definitions of a physical, territorial pseudo-state, a terrorist organization, or a group of religious

fanatics. Instead, they must consider how IS is all these things at once, and how it is not just one

thing but a construct shifting between collected strategies and forms. This chimeral nature of IS

is reflected, as described in Chapter 3, in its manifestation through virtuality, where it is an

idealized utopic vision constructed and justified out of carefully selected religious and socio-

political tenants, uploaded into virtual communities, and downloaded through reactions to violent

control or desire into individuals who manifest it, albeit sometimes uncontrollably, into the

physical world. This manifestation is enabled by the real social world of the Islamic State, which

defies both the physical constraints of the Islamic ‘State’ and the imagined limitations on

comradery and action deriving from sociality conducted through digital forms.

22 March 2016: Beyond Imagination

I woke up this morning to a deluge of notifications on my phone. Brussels had been hit

by a series of three suicide bombings, two at the Zaventem airport and one on the metro. Over

the course of the day, more information became available. The attacks had initially killed 31 and

wounded over 300. Five men were purportedly involved, three of whom killed themselves in the

bombings. Several days later, details are still surfacing. One of the attackers fled without

detonating his bomb; the media is speculating that this was a freelance journalist who was

arrested and charged in the wake of the attacks but later released for lack of evidence (BBC,

“Brussels explosions”). Apparently, the bombers filmed Belgium’s top nuclear researcher before

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the attack. Perhaps more worrying, one of them had been deported by Turkey in 2015, at which

time the Turkish authorities asked their Belgian and Dutch counterparts to apprehend him as a

dangerous militant, a request which was not fulfilled (BBC, “Brussels attacks”). As the

investigation continues, links between the Brussels attacks and the attacks in Paris last November

are emerging.26 Immediately after the attack, horror and grief spread across the Internet and

newswires like shockwaves, just as it spread by word of mouth.

However, as shocking as the initial impact was, it rapidly wore off. In some ways, it

seemed like an echo or a re-enactment of Paris, a recitation of terror. Just as the attack itself was

recognizable, so too was its aftermath. First the initial reports, then speculations about the

attackers, then global messages of solidarity for the victims while the hunt for an explanation—

and the perpetrators—continued. Somewhere in there, the Islamic State claimed responsibility.

The statement surprised no one.

If the attack had been carried out by a group of state-sponsored assassins, it would have

been surprising. If it had been carried out by a no-name organization with little resources or

manpower, it would have been surprising. If it had been carried out by the Islamic State last year,

as it was making its spring offensive in Iraq and Syria, it would have been surprising. And yet,

occurring at this juncture, the Brussels attack was less a surprise than a confirmation of what the

Islamic State has become, and a warning that working conceptions of the Islamic State are sorely

in need of reevaluation. New frames of analysis must be developed to comprehend what IS

actually is, and what it seeks to be.

The Limits of Security Paradigms

26 For example, authorities have now confirmed that Najm Laachraoui, who was named a day before the attack in Brussels as a major suspect from the Paris attacks, was one of the Zaventem airport bombers. (BBC, “Paris and Brussels bombers’ links uncovered.”)

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Before Paris, the debate in Western political and security circles revolved around how to

combat the Islamic State, particularly through a full-on military operation to wipe out its physical

territory or through a policy of containment, isolating the Islamic State within that physical

territory until it ran out of fuel (money, manpower, resources, and support).27 These debates were

supplemented with counter-insurgency and counter-messaging strategies; however, the general

implication was that soft power or relying on regional allied forces alone would not defeat the

Islamic State. In intellectual circles, overlapping with and broadening the largely military and

counterinsurgency policy outlook, academics added nuance to the arguments, elucidating

ideological strengths and weaknesses (Bunzel), tracing the organizational structure of the Islamic

State (Frieland), and offering explanations for the popularity and reach of it media networks

(Klausen; Winter; Zelin; Farwell).

Yet as has been suggested in Chapter 1, explanations of the Islamic State and its rise were

based on particular paradigmatic understandings of it, and those understandings in turn were tied

to the beliefs of the individual or group attempting to understand it. For example, leftist groups

and others challenging neo-liberal, capitalist systems are more likely to see the Islamic State as a

twisted version of a populist alternative to corrupt state systems (Khalil; Ismael and Ismael),

while those embroiled in the conflict on the ground in Iraq and Syria view it as a civil war

complicated by sectarian tensions (Cockburn; Amos). In the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, the

US political, military, and security apparatus is much more likely to view IS as an insurgency

and treat it as such; at the same time, the ‘war on terror’ has become so ingrained that they are

unlikely or unwilling to let go of such familiar ideological apparatuses.28 Considering this, the

27 For an example of the debate among policy experts, please see “Containment is not enough: ISIS Must Be Defeated,” Intelligence Squared US.28 For more on the influence of the ‘clash of civilizations’ and ‘war on terror’ narratives, see Chapter 2.

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common ‘sophisticated’ view of IS as a hybrid insurgency and terrorist organization appears

natural. In many ways, the description is accurate. However, viewing the Islamic State from

within a single paradigm obscures elements that do not fit the mold, putting both nation-states’

comfortable understandings of it and their security at risk, even before it slips the bounds in

unexpected ways.

Already, scholars are attempting to craft more complex and flexible analyses of the

Islamic State. Works such as Stern and Berger’s IS: State of Terror and McCants’ The IS

Apocalypse are valuable, nuanced approaches to the Islamic State that question more utilitarian

policy and intellectual approaches. Stern and Berger, for example, devote entire chapters to the

Islamic State’s use of psychological warfare (Chapter 9) and its apocalyptic vision (Chapter 11).

They emphasize the significance of IS provocation and suggest that military force alone will not

be enough to combat it. Acknowledging the complexity of the Islamic State, its precarious

position straddling the line between terrorism and insurgency, Stern and Berger end by stating

that we must avoid taking the bait on the Islamic State’s provocation towards polarization and

emphasizing the necessity of combatting IS on the messaging front (Stern and Berger 244). All

of these suggestions are valuable and align with points made in this thesis. However, what is

missing is a sense of the scope of the Islamic State’s existence as a virtual entity, not merely its

use of virtual methods.29

Although his particular focus is on the Islamic State’s apocalyptic vision, McCants

perhaps comes closest to grasping the Islamic State’s shifting nature when he suggests that one

way to “reconcile the contradictions” of the Islamic State is that it is “devoted to establishing an

ultraconservative Islamic state at all costs, so it modifies its religious and political doctrines

when they get in the way of that goal” (McCants Kindle Location 27000). Although this

29 See Chapter 3, IS as Imagined Community and Conclusion

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approach is perhaps too utilitarian, McCants adds the valuable point that we need to adjust our

own expectations of the Islamic State in light of its transformative capabilities. His final

suggestion is that the Islamic State’s expansive policies put “the continued existence of its state”

at risk, perhaps because of its “suicidal” insistence on becoming a “world-encompassing state”

(McCants Kindle Location 27001). In McCants’ eyes, the Islamic State’s collapse would not be

the end of the jihad; other jihadist groups, individuals and organizations, would fill the physical,

ideological, and virtual vacuum it left behind. This is important, and forgotten by many seeking

to defeat it. Yet McCants, too, frames the Islamic State’s defeat as inevitable.

In the end, the issue with both Stern and Berger’s and McCants’ formulations is that in

order to reach final conclusions, they fix the Islamic State in place, just as policy experts and less

nuanced academic approaches do. Despite referencing the virtual sphere, the psychological

components, and the ideological aftermath of the Islamic State, they do envision an end to it.

And an end to something, in their eyes, can only come if it is defeated, and it can only be

defeated by a plan to combat it, and a plan to combat it can only be formulated if we know what

it is. The problem is that the Islamic State is not any one thing. Stern and Berger and McCants

know this; they reference its transformative, non-fixed nature. Yet in the end, they are writing

books on the Islamic State, and books on the Islamic State have to sell, and in order to sell, they

have to appeal to audiences, and audiences (both policy circles and the public) want answers to

the Islamic State. Thus, Stern and Berger and McCants prescribe answers, because any gesture

towards a solution backed by an air of authority seems to calm the nerves of the West, if only for

the duration of the reading.

The wave of spectacular suicide attacks carried out by IS and its supporters in the last

year suggests that their answers weren’t enough. In fact, they suggest those trying to combat the

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Islamic State weren’t even asking the right questions. Political and military policy experts were

so focused on ‘ending’ the Islamic State that they forgot an essential point: the Islamic State’s

end is a part of its very conception. It isn’t worried about the end; it’s more concerned with

provoking the violent conflagration to reach it. And, to that end: the terror attacks on highly

visible Western targets, coupled with a persistent and pernicious presence morphing and

undulating through the web.

Shocked

We, the international community, were shocked by Brussels. But at the same time, we

weren’t. Such events have rapidly become part of our reality, such that the duality of our

reaction, the immediate, visceral shock coupled with the immediate recognition, the inevitability

of the event, echoes the duality of the Islamic State, its almost schizophrenic, constantly shifting,

unfixable nature. On the one hand, the Islamic State is operating in Europe, in the West. It is at

work in shifting cells of individuals overlapping territorial boundaries, visible to authorities in

the extradition of an individual, disappearing in his escape. It is at work in the echo of bomb

blasts and the screams of individuals; the flinch away from a bearded man; the disdain for a

veiled woman. It is at work in the rejection of refugees and the closure of camps. More than

anything, it is at work in the shadow of threat and fear and the immediate, perceived necessity of

reaction, the tightening of security, the promise of safety, of retribution, the fixing of lines along

borders and in the sand.

Yet on the other hand, it remains a constant, physical presence in Iraq and Syria, a

governmental operation so rigid in its enactment that it seems a mockery to Western observers,

who claim its radical rigidity will be its demise. The nation-state order has come to expect the

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second version of the Islamic State, just as it expects its end. The first version, the new version,

especially its stark contrast to the ordered governmental mode, shocks it. Political rationalism,

shaped by the client state proxy wars of the Cold War, have accustomed it to a kind of

practicality: state-based systems are used to terror networks they can cut off the funding to,

whose leadership structures they can dismantle, whose ideology they can undermine. They are

used to other states they can pressure, politically or militarily, into obedience. What they are not

used to is this juncture between the two, this entity which shifts at will between them, which is at

once both and neither thing.

There’s a similar (dis)juncture in the reaction to the Brussels attack, how individuals

living within the (Western) nation-state order are shocked and yet not shocked. In the first

reading of shock, they are horrified, in their minds naturally so, by an unexpected atrocity, death

and destruction and the dismantling of their sense of security in a western space, the invasion of

the Oriental horde, the violent Islamic Other.30 Yet this shock fades quickly as they tell

themselves, they recognize, that it was only to be expected, that it is natural, because this is what

the violent Other does. The second shock is more resistant, less easily dismissed. It is the kind of

shock that strips emotion from the individual, the kind that turns the human into the automaton,

incapable of any action but obedience. This is the shock of the incorporated subject, the subject

the Islamic State seeks to create through its reign of terror.31 In the end, it doesn’t matter whether

the subject is obedient to the Islamic State, within its territory, or to western states mandating

reaction against it. Either way, the lines are drawn, the two sides reinforced. The more shocked

people are, the less likely they are to resist the long march to the apocalyptic clash.

30 See Edward Said, Orientalism, for a discussion of the trope of the Eastern ‘Other.’31 See Chapter 3 on The Management of Savagery

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Attacks like Paris and Brussels terrify a Western popular audience because, just as they

seem inevitable, they also seem to define a particular moment. They make it appear as if a

violent battle is all but inevitable. Yet in reality, the moment is in flux, and the attack is a hinge.

It is terrifying exactly because it is so volatile. The Islamic State’s goal is for the violent moment

to combust like the bomb that caused it, and it’s easy for both individuals and security and police

systems to oblige, for the moment to descend into further conflict and violence. It’s harder to

grasp the possibility that the hinge, the possibility of the moment, does not have to swing one

way. It is a moment of rupture, of disjuncture; the violent present is constantly in flux. The

Islamic State’s vision is predicated on tipping that present farther towards an apocalyptic clash.

Yet the present can tip the other way as well. Individuals and governments just have to

remember not to let fear mandate their reaction, and remember that what matters most are the

moments between now and the Islamic State’s idealized, imagined ‘then.’ If the Islamic State

ever is defeated, the international community will have to live with the reality that led to its

defeat, and that that defeat is not likely an end to the problems that led to the Islamic State’s

rise.32

The Public Stage

The proliferation of spectacular suicide attacks on global targets, planned and undertaken

by the Islamic State and its affiliates, marks a shift in the Islamic State’s tactics. Its media

presence, the ‘image’ of the Islamic State most likely to come to mind was, from its inception to

last year, that of the contained beheading/execution video. Now, that image has been replaced

32 As McCants suggested, it is extremely likely that another jihadist group will rise to replace the Islamic State, and not just replace it; destroying IS’ physical territory will merely scatter its individual supporters and cells, like a virus in the global bloodstream ready to reemerge.

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with the suicide bombing in the Western public sphere, and, to a lesser extent, with the chaotic

Turkish border (which itself abuts the West). Not only has the scope of the target shifted from

the individual standing for a specific enemy community to the enemy community itself, so too

has the stage. From a single room or screen, where the execution took place, the stereotypical

scene of IS violence has shifted to a section of the open, public world. More significantly, the

killing ground is no longer in the bounds of the physical caliphate, but in the Western world, a

shift enabled by the expansion of the Islamic State’s virtual territory, the manifestation of its

vision through its imagined community.33

Suicide bombings are more spectacular than beheading videos, but they still exercise

intimate, material dominion over (sometimes Western) bodies. Their intention is to elicit

reactions out of fear that will polarize society and bring the Western world, the Islamic State’s

perceived ‘Other,’ into its physical territory for the final clash, while alienating Muslims from

the Western world enough to join it.

Intimate Counter-Spectacle

Thus, these attacks can be read against IS executions and violent enforcement of order in

the Middle East as a kind of counter-spectacle. At the same time, they mark a continuation of the

psychology of fear and intimate materiality underlying the Islamic State’s beheading videos.34

The beheadings were staged, boxed, and easily transportable from screen to screen, their impact

read through the commentary of news reporters and the electric firing of human synopses. The

bomb exploding in the metro train car or the airport is staged as well; it too is contained within a

physical space and interpreted through multiple media. The question is the scale, the kind of

33 See Chapter 3 on Imagined Communities, IS as Imagined Community34 See Chapter 3 on Intimate Violence

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numbers the staged incidents impact. The beheading video is a restrained and managed spectacle,

enacted on the constrained body of a single individual, just as the Islamic State’s enactment of

governmental savagery is constrained to the bounded body of its physical territory. In contrast,

the airport and metro bombings are all about circulation, circulation beyond the virality of the

broadcast image. The airport and metro are places people move through; the very physical

location is a stage for motion and transport. Thus, attacks in these places operate like a virus in

the bloodstream; they can pop up anywhere, and their impact can go anywhere.

Just like the beheading videos, the fear of impact can be packaged and transported. But

the physical space of the metro or airport adds another level of transport, beyond the ghostly,

non-descript execution stage. It is all too easy to make the mental leap from a bombing occurring

in the Brussels metro to the New York metro; that’s exactly the point. Thus, the bombs erupt not

only in the ghostly imaginary, but in the very real space of the political and social world, the

public spaces of the Western metropolis. All the Islamic State must do is conjure enough

individuals into that space to make it happen.

Narratives of Fear

Anxiety, their own quest for structure and order, compels national security teams,

politicians, policy-makers, scholars, and even private individuals to conjure imaginative

structures to contain the Islamic State, as described in Chapter 1. Yet reactions born out of

anxiety and fear are exactly what the Islamic State wants. Its own members have admitted that

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part of the project of attacks like Paris and Brussels is to turn the West against refugees, and thus

turn Muslims against the West.35

The point of terror and fear is to disrupt everyday life, to polarize the sides and reify the

clash between the umma and the West.36 While the definition of terrorism itself is contested,

common components include the purposeful attempt to influence policy or politics through

attacks on citizens and the disruption of civilian life. This polarization happens naturally in

Western society, as existing tropes of the violent (brown) Arab boogeyman are embedded deep

within the Western psyche. The image of the non-white horde reaching into the white, western

world, killing untouchable white bodies (as opposed to the brown bodies invisibly killed and

dismantled by the thousands outside the West) terrifies the masses and crystallizes the divide

(Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks). There is a reason Donald Trump’s ‘wall’ has a following; it

suggests a barrier to keep out the threatening brown body. There is a similar logic behind turning

back refugees, behind watch lists and visa restrictions. The brown body is at fault here, and the

brown body is not Western, and it is not European (despite the huge number of non-white

Americans and Europeans, and the United State’s demographic classification of Middle Eastern

people as white). The Islamic State is purposefully pursuing such polarization, and negative

reactions against Middle Eastern refugees play right into its “politics of fear” (Schanzer and

Kirk).37

Of course, the logic of the Islamic State undoes these conceptions even as it capitalizes

on them; it wants the Western populace to fear it, to polarize against it and crystalize the divide.

35 For instance, the February 2015 issue of Dabiq following the Charlie Hebdo attack boasted that the Islamic State had ‘eliminated the grayzone,’ and was using polarization as an intentional strategy. 36 See Chapter 2 on the Clash of Civilizations and Orientalism37 For a nuanced discussion of the topic in the context of the American political backlash against refugees, see David Schanzer and Robin Kirk, “Barring Syrian refugees from NC gives ISIS exactly what it seeks.”

133

At the same time, it uses individuals capable of moving beyond those bounds to continue its

projection of violence and fear, (only sometimes) brown (and sometimes markedly white) bodies

already inside the West. It is not constrained by national boundaries; its fighters are not ‘foreign.’

Their nationality is in flux; they are part of the Islamic State. They are Belgian when they need to

be, but when they attack in Belgium, they are not attacking their home, and they are not

returning. They are enacting the vision of a different world they now dwell in on another world

they are not (and in their minds were never part) of.

Blind Spots

What policymakers and individuals alike do not see with regard to the Islamic State and

their reaction to it may have as much impact as what they do see. There have been many studies

suggesting that singling out the Muslim-American community as a target for de-radicalization

programs is counter-productive, and that such programs should also focus on other communities.

As Drs. Kurzman and Schanzer’s recent research for the Triangle Center on Terrorism and

Security attests, more terror attacks have been carried out by right wing groups in the United

States than Muslim extremists in the years since 9/11, although these numbers have shifted

slightly since San Bernardino (Kurzman and Schanzer 7-8).38 Although more research needs to

be conducted on the topic, outcry over the optics of recent terror attacks (the global response to

Paris and Brussels vs. basically non-existent coverage of Turkey, Iraq, Indonesia, and Pakistan39)

38 In their suggestion that police partnerships with Muslim-American communities might be a way to stop homegrown attacks, Kurzman and Schanzer emphasize that Muslim Americans should be treated like any other constituents and the outreach should not focus solely on terrorism; their study has a similar optics of care which I am suggesting is necessary in this case39 Attacks in Turkey, Iraq, and Pakistan by IS and its affiliates have already occurred in a mere week since Brussels, each killing more individuals. If I fall prey to the same fault of ignoring these attacks, it is partially by design; Brussels speaks more directly to the Western imagination as an example of the Islamic State’s virtual reach than places in or

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may suggest a similarly alienating impact. Western publics and governments might have to be

just as careful about reactions born out of empathy as they are reactions out of fear, when those

empathetic reactions are not equal in all cases. While they pay little or no attention to brown

bodies dying, even to the civil wars raging in the very same spaces, and at the same moments, in

which they fight the Islamic State, they can be sure that IS does pay attention. After all, these

bodies are the physical components of its virtual reality, both the canvases upon which it is

written and the tools through which it is manifested, both by its actions and the Western world’s

reactions to it.

Limitations: Under Construction

It is easy to be critical of a general body of literature and policy that has failed to prevent

attacks or stem the flood of violence. Yet part of the problem, as I have been saying, is the habit

of the Western rational culture that has largely constructed the nation-state order, and I am no

less part of that culture than those I have been critiquing. Thus, I would like to close by

suggesting some limitations of my own work.

First of all, the Islamic State is a constantly transforming entity, and I fear that it has been

transforming through and past my own discussion of it. In Chapter 2, I wrote about the

component pieces of the Islamic State’s ideology and how they are mobilized into a discourse.

Yet it seems to me that this ideology is still in flux, and that it is being re-interpreted by the

Islamic State itself in order to justify strategic and tactical shifts (here I humbly follow McCants’

argument). For example, the shift in media emphasis from the expansion of the state to the reality

of the utopic vision suggests an ideological shift along those lines (Farwell 4). Thus, while

certain aspects may stay constant or seem to require definition, it is dangerous to codify or

bordering the Middle East.

135

solidify IS ideology because it is continually under construction as the Islamic State opens and

closes new fronts.

Similarly, the actual tactics the Islamic State deploys are in motion. The media effects of

beheading have a shelf-life. Already, from the initial impact back in 2009, they have diminished

into canonized techniques, and the Islamic State is turning towards other techniques to make

intimate contact with the world, as in the latest bombings. Thus, my analysis of beheadings is in

some ways already passé. However, I believe it is still important because it points to the larger

goals and underlying techniques of the Islamic State’s deployment of intimate violence.

Conclusion: The Need for Continued (Re-)Imagining

My contestation is not that every scholar and every policy-maker and every nation-state

and every individual has the wrong conception of the Islamic State (although incomplete or

flawed perceptions are certainly part of the problem). Following this wave of attacks, indeed

during it, policy-makers around the globe will and have been constructing new strategies for

dealing with the Islamic State, racing to react to new tactics and new manifestations of the threat.

My fear is that these new policies and strategies are a reaction to a specific manifestation of the

Islamic State. Once again, to construct them, policy makers are fixing the Islamic State as a

particular entity. Yet as soon as they have adjusted to that entity, or even before they have, it will

shift again. In some ways, this is unavoidable. On the other hand, awareness of the possibility of

transformation, even its likelihood, can’t hurt.

This is not to say that my own treatment has been any less flawed, as it is impossible to

conduct an analysis without picking a particular point upon which to focus, or to do so without a

particular point of view. Yet one point of this thesis has been to acknowledge the inherent

136

difficulty of trying to understand the Islamic State in the first place, given the link between the

current nation-state system and rationalist Western tradition, with its emphasis on structured

understanding. In defiance of this tradition, the Islamic State straddles the divide between logic

and chaos; it employs smart tactics, but its ultimate goal is an apocalyptic dissolution.

Undoubtedly I have failed in some regards, yet it is my hope that I have accomplished at

least this much: that the reader is under no illusions that they, or I, have achieved a final

understanding of the Islamic State, or a fixed vantage from which to perceive it. This thesis is

only the beginning. Analysis of the Islamic State cannot be static in order to be effective. As I

have mentioned, in some ways, this analysis is already historical; much of it (indeed, all of it

before the conclusion, and even some of the conclusion) was written before the attack on

Brussels and the Easter Sunday attack on Lahore that followed. Yet the history of the Islamic

State is itself one of transformation.

There cannot be one single arrived solution, which is the downfall of so much Western

analysis. As soon nation-states muster all of their resources around a particular problem, to stop a

particular eventuality from occurring, the situation shifts, partially because of what they’ve done

and partially in reaction to it. This is not a linear pathway; it is an endless cycle. There is no

single state, no single element, and no single entity at work. In the end, the ability of the current

order to deal with the Islamic State will be confined by its ability to imagine it, in all its variety,

in all its possibility. And this problem is not limited to the Islamic State itself. Rather, it is

exemplary of the problem of modernity, that the realities of technology and migration and social

media and global capital stretch beyond the bounds of conventional wisdom, and conventional

structures, to manage or imagine them. Modern states, businesses, militaries, security

apparatuses, and even media apparatuses are not beyond the projection of fear for control, or the

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construction of ideologies in service to a utopic vision, meant to shape both a state and a state of

mind, which so many condemn in the Islamic State. If any good can come out of this conflict,

perhaps it is that the lessons learned from dealing with the Islamic State can be applied to

understand and deal with other imagined, transformative, unbounded aspects of modernity.

New models and theories are needed which can account for improvisation and ideological

flexibility. Many of the most commonly used analytical tools today were created and popularized

in the Cold War era, and are premised upon more stable entities and more binaristic terms than

define the world today. This is only natural; these tools were valuable in analyzing their own

contexts. But as the context changes, so too must the tools used to describe it.

138

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Appendix

Word Cloud Analysis of Issues 1-13 of Dabiq

Translations of common Arabic words: (translation by the author).

kufr = disbelief, nonbelievermurtadd = apostatetawaghit = crownedsahwa = awakeningkhilafah = caliphatewilayat = statemujahidin = fightersjihad = struggleKhurasan = KhorasanSharia = Islamic lawSamma’in = listenersBay’ah = allegiance, obedienceUmma = Islamic communityDimashq = DamascusUmar = one of the first caliphsSahih = correctSallam = peaceTawhid = unityJama’ah = community

Issue One: “The Return of Khilafah” Issue Two: “The Flood”

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Issue Three: “The Call to Hijrah” Issue Four: “The Failed Crusade”

Issue Five: “Remaining and Withstanding” Issue Six: “Al Qaidah of Waziristan: A Testimony from Within”

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Issue Seven: “From Hypocrisy to Apostasy” Issue Eight: “Shar’i’ah alone will rule Africa”

Issue Nine: “They Plot and Allah Plots” Issue Ten: “The Laws of All or the Laws of Men”

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Issue Eleven: “From the Battle of al-Ahzab Issue Twelve: “Just Terror”to the War of Coalitions”

Issue Thirteen: “The Rafidah: From Ibn Saba’ to the Dajjal”

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