Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State, is driven by an End of Days vision. (photo credit: Associated Press)
(Nashville, Tennessee) — Are the leaders and ground forces of the Islamic State driven by an apocalyptic, End of Days theology? If so, does President Obama and his administration understand this?
I was asked these questions on Fox News yesterday. (To watch the video or read the transcript, please click here)
Here’s the short version:
- Yes, ISIS and its supreme leader — Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — is consumed by a Radical Sunni Islamic version of eschatology, or End Times theology.
- No, the President and his senior team do not see this, and this is one of the most serious mistakes they are making. We cannot defeat an enemy we refuse to define. I realize eschatology is a topic foreign — even bizarre — to most political, military and intelligence officials. But to truly understand what ISIS wants, and how far they are willing to go to get it, our leaders absolutely must study and understand it.
One of the most intriguing and disturbing developments of our times is that we now have two nation states — the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic State — driven by adherents to apocalyptic, genocidal forms of End Times theology. The Iranian leaders hold to a Shia brand. ISIS leaders hold to a Sunni brand. But both are driven by a belief that their messiah is coming and judgment with him. The Iranians believe they must lay the groundwork for the messiah (Mahdi) to come and build his caliphate or kingdom. ISIS isn’t waiting. They have launched a jihadist rampage to build the caliphate now, so that the Mahdi will come soon.
At the National Religious Broadcasters convention here in Nashville this week, I will be addressing these issues and the reasons I wrote The Third Target, Inside The Revolution, and The Twelfth Imam, each of which deal with Islamic, Jewish and Christian eschatology, their similarities and their differences. I will blog and Tweet notes from those messages throughout the week.
For now, let me encourage you to read an absolutely spot-on article in The Atlantic magazine on the apocalyptic theology driving ISIS. It was written by a reporter named Graeme Wood. It’s long, but it is excellent. Here is the link to the full article. Here are some excerpts.
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.
- Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers.
- In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.”
- In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.
- The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior.
- Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.
- In broad strokes, al-Qaeda acts like an underground political movement, with worldly goals in sight at all times—the expulsion of non-Muslims from the Arabian peninsula, the abolishment of the state of Israel, the end of support for dictatorships in Muslim lands.
- The Islamic State has its share of worldly concerns (including, in the places it controls, collecting garbage and keeping the water running), but the End of Days is a leitmotif of its propaganda.
- Bin Laden rarely mentioned the apocalypse, and when he did, he seemed to presume that he would be long dead when the glorious moment of divine comeuppance finally arrived. “Bin Laden and Zawahiri are from elite Sunni families who look down on this kind of speculation and think it’s something the masses engage in,” says Will McCants of the Brookings Institution, who is writing a book about the Islamic State’s apocalyptic thought.
- During the last years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Islamic State’s immediate founding fathers, by contrast, saw signs of the end times everywhere. They were anticipating, within a year, the arrival of the Mahdi—a messianic figure destined to lead the Muslims to victory before the end of the world.
- McCants says a prominent Islamist in Iraq approached bin Laden in 2008 to warn him that the group was being led by millenarians who were “talking all the time about the Mahdi and making strategic decisions” based on when they thought the Mahdi was going to arrive. “Al-Qaeda had to write to [these leaders] to say ‘Cut it out.’ ”
- For certain true believers—the kind who long for epic good-versus-evil battles—visions of apocalyptic bloodbaths fulfill a deep psychological need.
- Of the Islamic State supporters I met, Musa Cerantonio, the Australian, expressed the deepest interest in the apocalypse and how the remaining days of the Islamic State—and the world—might look. Parts of that prediction are original to him, and do not yet have the status of doctrine.
- But other parts are based on mainstream Sunni sources and appear all over the Islamic State’s propaganda. These include the belief that there will be only 12 legitimate caliphs, and Baghdadi is the eighth; that the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam’s final showdown with an anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest.
- The Islamic State has attached great importance to the Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It named its propaganda magazine after the town, and celebrated madly when (at great cost) it conquered Dabiq’s strategically unimportant plains. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo or its Antietam.
- Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse.
- After its battle in Dabiq, Cerantonio said, the caliphate will expand and sack Istanbul. Some believe it will then cover the entire Earth, but Cerantonio suggested its tide may never reach beyond the Bosporus.
- An anti-Messiah, known in Muslim apocalyptic literature as Dajjal, will come from the Khorasan region of eastern Iran and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s fighters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem.
- Just as Dajjal prepares to finish them off, Jesus—the second-most-revered prophet in Islam—will return to Earth, spear Dajjal, and lead the Muslims to victory.
- That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfillment of prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our opponent. It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succor if it stays true to the Prophetic model.
- Ideological tools may convince some potential converts that the group’s message is false, and military tools can limit its horrors. But for an organization as impervious to persuasion as the Islamic State, few measures short of these will matter, and the war may be a long one, even if it doesn’t last until the end of time.
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