ISIS Confronting the West

Barbarians At the Gates of the Infidels

Janet Daley, writing in The Telegraph shows that she just does not get it.  In considering and evaluating the Enemy, she draws the conclusion that the soldiers and irregulars of ISIS are insane.

Whatever this is, it is not a clash of civilisations. The concept of “civilisation” scarcely comes into it. Nor is it a struggle between competing sets of values, or a religious war, or a battle with an alien culture. There is no debate here – as there was in the Cold War – about how it is best for men to live: the enemy has stated explicitly that it does not revere life at all. On the contrary, it is in love with self-inflicted death, which it sees as the highest moral achievement.

This is not even war in any comprehensible sense. Where are the demands, the negotiable limits, or the intelligible objectives? It is not the modern world versus medievalism, or the secular enlightenment trying to deal with fundamentalist religion. It isn’t anything that can be encompassed in the vocabulary of coherent, systematic thought in which we are now accustomed to describe the world. This is just insanity.

By insanity, we expect that she means the Caliph of the Caliphate, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is without reason and quite mad.  We also expect that she thinks all his followers likewise are insane.

In fact, Daley is arguably the one deluded and living in a make-believe world.
  By his lights and theological framework, Baghdadi is both sane and completely understandable--even predictable.  The Chattering Classes and the Western Commentariat will make little progress until it makes it its business to understand the Islamic teachings and doctrines which Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his followers believe with all their hearts.

Herein, of course, lies a problem for Western minds.  The mind of the Commentariat is bifurcated.  On the one hand it is desperately working to convince itself that ISIS does not represent in any sense the Islamic religion (hence the allegation that Baghdadi and his followers are insane, not Islamic).  Rather ISIS is a distortion of Islam.  This is necessary to buttress the just-so narrative that all the Islamic folk now living in the UK and throughout Europe are really first class European citizens, who welcome all the secularism and atheism now regnant and celebrated in the West.

On the other hand, Western condescension is such that it constructs a nominal version of Islam, and shuts its ears to any serious study or reflection upon historical Islamic doctrines, teaching and practice.  This would be like someone claiming that Christianity is a wonderful religion, but that Augustine or John Calvin or the Apostle Paul were insane.

The fact remains that for anyone with a modicum of understanding Islamic tradition, teaching and doctrines, the actions and policies of ISIS are perfectly rational, understandable, tactically sophisticated, and consistent.  Take odious actions like the enslaving of young to middle aged captive women as sex-slaves.  It's part of jihad as taught by Muhammad, consistent with mainstream Islamic practice through the centuries.  Take the slaughter of older Yahzidi women captives.  They were offered the opportunity to convert to Allah: their refusal justified a death sentence.  This, also, is at the core of Muhammad's laws of jihad, and consistently practised down through the centuries.  It is part of the justice of the Caliphate, the reign on Muhammad  upon the earth. 

No doubt these truths are deeply uncomfortable to the modern Western mind which struggles even to  conceive of such brutality, let alone practise it.  Yet, this is just effete nonsense.  Go back a few decades to the horrors of the Ultimate Solution in Nazi Germany, or the Gulags in Russia.  Or think of the systemic murder of thousands of defenceless, innocent children in the wombs of their mothers every day in the West--a ritual sacrifice to the god of secularist rights.  The West has been, and is far, far more bloody than ISIS ever will be.

One understands the confusion of the secular mind towards ISIS.  The core stumbling block to secular Westerns figuring out ISIS is the belief that there is no way Baghdadi and his followers can ever win.  At best they are rejected by most fellow Islamic adherents.  At worst they simply cannot defeat Western military technology.  Therefore (and this is where Daley's charge of insanity arises) to continue the armed struggle is a form of madness.

Except that it is not at all by the lights of ISIS.  Baghdadi and his Caliphate take Islamic eschatology seriously.  They believe that the end of the world is nigh, and that the Last Great Battle is about to be fought in the next couple of decades or so.  It will centre in the Levant.  Allah and his prophet will come to fight, and all infidels will be destroyed.  Therefore, provoking the West to fight against ISIS makes the triumph of Islam over the world more sure, as Graeme Wood's article in The Atlantic demonstrates  ["What ISIS Really Wants. The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it."]

ISIS is not mad.  It is not insane.  It is as deadly serious as it is wrong.  The secular West, for its part, is equally wrong, but not nearly as serious.  It's too busy killing its own babies and celebrating homosexual marriage and gender-bending to worry about a few stray bombs.  Only when the West repents of its gross sinfulness and bows before its Lord--the King of all kings--will it have the light of understanding and the gravitas of truth to wage war upon ISIS, and overcome.