Why did Prohibition in America fail? The Pakistani Islamic scholar Abul Ala Mawdudi argued that it was because the law “required people to accept human rather divine reasoning.” What was needed was a harsh and absolute divine mandate to root out evils like alcohol. As the Ottoman empire was being swept away and national-independence movements were about to overrun the Muslim world, men like Mawdudi began articulating a new ideology that would meld medieval and modern concepts. That ideology, Salafi-jihadism, now represents one of the West’s greatest security challenges.
Al Qaeda and the Islamic State may be today’s two most infamous outgrowths of the Salafi-jihadist movement, but they both arose from a wider intellectual history, Shiraz Maher writes in his new book, “Salafi-Jihadism: The History of an Idea.” Mr. Maher, a senior research fellow at King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalization, sets out to provide “an explanatory backstory accounting for how we got to where we are” and presents it in a highly readable and incisive overview.
According to Mr. Maher, Salafi-jihadists all adhere to five ideological pillars, and learning to identify them will help us understand an enemy that has shown itself to be highly adaptable. The first of these pillars is jihad, the method by which the Salafi-jihadists’ millenarian vision is to be realized, upending the existing world order and creating a utopia. Liberal interpreters of Islam would explain jihad as an internal struggle or an overcoming of the self. But to Salafi-jihadists, it is a military matter and an obligation second only to accepting the faith itself, and must continue until the end of time.
In order to endure, however, revolutions must define an in-group. Jihadists do this through adherence to the pillars of tawhid (the oneness of God) and hakimiyya (God’s sovereignty), which define the limits of belief and the nature of legitimate authority. Those who don’t belong to the in-group must be shunned, according to the pillar of al-wala wa-l-bara, based on the concepts of al-wala (devotion to god and his believers) and al-bara (the disavowal of and severance from the disbelievers). The final pillar identifies internal corrupters, who must be subject to takfir, or excommunication.
As for Salafism, it is a religious reform movement that seeks to return the practice of Islam to the way it was during the first three generations of Muslims, when the faith was supposedly at its purest. Saudi Arabia is governed by a version of Salafism imposed through an 18th-century pact between the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (hence “Wahhabism”) and Muhammad ibn Saud, a local tribal leader who founded the modern kingdom. The concepts of tawhid and, especially, al-wala wa-l-bara, have notable Wahhabi roots.
Other ideas—hakimiyya specifically and the yearning for a caliphate—originated in political Islam between the 1940s and 1960s, with Mawdudi’s works translated from Urdu to Arabic by the forgotten revivalist Abu al-Hassan al-Nadwi. It was then dispersed by Sayyid Qutb, one of the founding ideologues of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. “Qutb’s work has inspired more than a generation of Islamists,” Mr. Maher writes, “and informed the theoretical framework—in one form or another—for most of the Middle East’s radical movements.” Indeed, Qutb was the one who called on Muslims to fight against their secularized, unbelieving rulers.
The hybridization of Salafism and Islamism that produces Salafi-jihadism is an important takeaway from the book, as is Mr. Maher’s insistence that all the ideas used by the jihadists are recognizable well beyond the fringes of Islamic tradition. The main difference is that the Salafi-jihadists have “interpreted and shaped them in unique and original ways,” and seek to reshape the faith completely over the long-term.
Mr. Maher’s focus on what binds the disparate groups under the Salafi-Jihadi banner sacrifices some granularity, and this matters most in the continued schism between al Qaeda and Islamic State. The two groups’ differences might have been worth closer scrutiny, not least because, as the author repeatedly emphasizes, war is the great spur to innovation and revision within the movement. Even if Islamic State’s divergences had been purely tactical, they have now utilized scripture to justify atrocities in a way that will be codified and emulated in the future.
And while it is true that, as Mr. Maher notes, Islamic State is better-known for its grisly videos and simpler messaging, senior Islamic State clerics such as Turki al-Binali have been producing significant written output on the group’s creed. This has been further expanded in audio recordings of sermons and lectures by, above all, Abu Ali al-Anbari, the caliph’s deputy, recently killed in a U.S. raid in eastern Syria.
Mr. Maher deserves praise for producing a book that is the first of its kind, synthesizing work that has been done on the individual components of Salafi-jihadism. Readers looking for a rigorous but lucid account of Islamic State’s ideas will be well-served by Mr. Maher’s book. The author makes liberal use of the Arabic terms that jihadists use, but never lets this weigh down the text. For readers with more background in the subject, the book is equally useful in pulling together a smooth and wide-ranging narrative with a wealth of sources that can be followed up for more depth.
Mr. Maher concludes with a grim prognosis. As Iraq and Syria burn, Salafi-jihadists continue refining their strategies to make their version of Islam more widespread and durable. Should Islamic State totter, a number of Salafi-jihadist groups wait in the wings to fill the vacuum? An ideology that appeals to absolutely divine authority will outlast any individual group.http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-intellectual-roots-of-isis-1471260593
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