“They had me at free healthcare,” says a British woman in a hijab in a recent laugh-out-loud BBC2 sketch called The Real Housewives of Isis. Another woman swans in, modelling a suicide vest. “What do you think?” she asks her fellow jihadi wives. “Ahmed surprised me with it yesterday.” One wife immediately posts a picture on Instagram, saying: “#OMG. #Jihadi Jane. #Death to the west, Isis emoji.”
Ridicule has been one response to Isis. Repulsion is another: what else can one feel for throat-slitting fanatics who post videos of virgins burnt alive or buckets of severed heads hashtagged #headmeat?
How then, though, to explain the attraction of Isis for the three straight-A girls from Bethnal Green Academy who left for Syria in 2015? Or the 12 members of the Mannan family from Luton, aged from one to 71, who travelled there the same year, writing an open letter saying they had made their journey “by the command of the Khalifah [caliph] of the Muslims”?
In this intriguing book, American journalist Graeme Wood wants us to neither laugh nor look away from Isis, but to examine its theological underpinnings. The rise of Isis is usually explained as the consequence of bellicose American foreign policy, the power vacuum created by the invasion of Iraq, and the identity issues of young Muslims in secular societies attracted by the idea of an Islamic utopia. Yet, as Wood says: “Since 2012, tens of thousands of men, women and children have migrated to a theocratic state, under the belief that migration is a sacred obligation and that the state’s leader is the worldly successor of the last and greatest of prophets.”
Could there actually be a religious justification? Wood argues that it makes no sense to say that Isis is not really Islamic, as many Muslims do, horrified by what they see as their compassionate, tolerant religion being hijacked by bloodthirsty fanatics. As he points out, Isis rationalises almost every decision by what it refers to as “the Prophetic methodology”, which means following the prophesies and example of Muhammad in the strictest way.
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Wood’s way of understanding Isis is by searching out its chief apologists and discovering how they justify their brutality. Ideally, this would mean going to Raqqa to meet the leadership. But for a western journalist that would almost certainly be fatal. Instead, he undertakes what he calls a journey into “the mental world of the Caliphate”.
There is no dearth of material. These are selfie-generation jihadists who post copiously online. Isis even produces a slick online English magazine called Dabiq, showing how to carry out a Nice-style truck attack in between photos of fighters posing with kittens. Yet almost no western professors of Islam can quote Isis scholars, or even name them. To Wood this is “as if a scholar of Marxism turned out to be unfamiliar with the names Trotsky or Lenin”.
He starts his search in Cairo, a long-time centre of Islamic thought, before moving on to London, at the time “the world capital for loudmouth jihadists” exiled from their home countries, and less likely locations such as Melbourne, Japan and Dallas. The people he finds seem only too happy to talk, proffering meals of chicken, pizza and lamb while describing the coming apocalypse, and smilingly telling him they hate him as a non-Muslim. They explain how the demand for a caliphate to unite all Muslims in a borderless nation had been growing long before Isis emerged with its declaration of one. They also explain why Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is qualified to lead it, being from the Prophet’s tribe and “physically intact”, unlike the late Taliban leader, the one-eyed Mullah Muhammad Omar.
Yet Wood’s interviewees are also full of contradictions. Musa Cerantonio, Australia’s most famous terrorist who is now on trial but was then living with his mum in a Melbourne suburb, talks to him about the need to purify the world of non-Muslims, but admits to blanching at Isis videos of beheadings. Cerantonio might want to go back to the seventh century and the time of the Prophet, but he is also a Monty Python fan and bristles at the idea of anyone thinking jihadis are backward, insisting: “There are Isis fighters wearing Nike Air Jordans.”
I am not sure how this book is “revolutionary”, as its publicity exhorts, but there is no doubt that it is important — and fascinating in a way that is highly readable yet often almost as horrifying as watching an Isis video. It is published at a time when the group has lost much of its caliphate and, over the coming year, is likely to lose a lot more. But what is scarily clear from the zeal of the people Wood talks to, is that this will not be the end. Indeed, the nightmare facing the intelligence services is what happens when all these jihadists are driven out of Iraq and Syria and spread into new places.
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I would have liked the book to have discussed the rivalry and theological differences between al-Qaeda and Isis, which after all sprang from al-Qaeda in Iraq. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al-Qaeda leader who had previously called for the two to unite, denounced the Isis leader al-Baghdadi as a liar in his most recent speech.
I would also have liked Wood to have made a trip for the book to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where this jihad started, and which were the learning grounds for many, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who started the Iraqi al-Qaeda group from which Isis spawned. Yet Wood mentions this only in passing.
That aside, the western military with its superior firepower can bomb Isis out of existence in Raqqa and Mosul as much as it likes, but we won’t destroy the ideology if we don’t understand what it is. This book goes a long way towards filling that gap.
Read the first chapter on the Sunday Times website
Allen Lane £20 pp352
