Islamic State – Page 2

Caliphate in Disarray: Theological Turmoil in the Islamic State

October 3, 2017 by Cole Bunzel 14 Comments

On May 31 of this year, Turki al-Bin‘ali, one of the Islamic State’s foremost religious authorities, was killed in Mayadin, Syria in an airstrike carried out by the U.S.-led coalition. Three weeks later, U.S. Central Command confirmed the death of “Turki al-Bin’ali, the self-proclaimed ‘Grand Mufti,’ or chief cleric, of ISIS.” His supporters online bemoaned his loss, circulating his “last will and testament” from June 2015, and in some cases composing commemorative poems (see here and here). The international media also took an interest in his death, CNN, for instance, reporting that “[o]ne of ISIS’ most important figures has been killed by an airstrike.” The Islamic State’s own media outlets, however, were noticeably silent on the matter. There was to be no official statement regarding the demise of the 32-year-old cleric from Bahrain, let alone any kind of eulogy. The reasons, it now seems, are clear.

At the time of his death, al-Bin‘ali was involved in a highly contentious theological controversy that has been roiling the Islamic State for some time. The dispute concerns the group’s position on takfir, or excommunication—namely, the excommunication of fellow Muslims—and al-Bin‘ali was on the losing side. On May 17, 2017, the Islamic State’s Delegated Committee, its executive council, issued a memorandum setting out the official stance on takfir, and for al-Bin‘ali it was too extreme. Two days later, he refuted the memorandum in a letter to the Delegated Committee, and twelve days after that, he was killed. More such refutations by Islamic State scholars followed, and in at least one other case the result—death by airstrike—was the same. In mid-September, in a highly unusual move, the Delegated Committee rescinded its controversial memo on takfir; al-Bin‘ali seemed to be posthumously vindicated. But before this, the several refutations of the Delegated Committee, including al-Bin‘ali’s, as well as some additional statements of dissent, found their way online. Together, these form an extraordinary window onto the theological turmoil in the Islamic State.

The caliphate’s “mufti”?

The first thing that should be addressed is the question of what role Turki al-Bin‘ali actually played in the Islamic State. As I wrote more than two years ago, there were rumors in late 2014 that al-Bin‘ali had been elevated to the position of chief mufti, and the accounts of certain Islamic State defectors seemed to corroborate that report. In 2016, a U.S. Treasury designation described him as the Islamic State’s “chief religious advisor,” noting that he “provides literature and fatwas for ISIL training camps.” Similarly, the U.S. Central Command statement referred to him as the group’s “Grand Mufti” and “chief cleric.” Some Arabic newspapers had taken to calling him “the mufti of Da‘ish.”

Al-Bin‘ali, as it turns out, was the emir of a body known as the Office of Research and Studies (Maktab al-Buhuth wa’l-Dirasat), which was previously known as the Committee for Research and Fatwas (Hay’at al-Buhuth wa’l-Ifta’), and before that as the Department of Research and Fatwas (Diwan al-Buhuth wa’l-Ifta’). The office has been responsible for preparing the religious texts studied in the Islamic State’s training camps and published by its printing press. At one point, it was also responsible for issuing fatwas. In the summer of 2014, as the Department of Research and Fatwas, it put out the infamous monograph justifying the group’s practice of slavery; in late 2014 and early 2015, as the Committee for Research and Fatwas, it produced a set of fatwas on a range of issues, from foosball to immolation. By late 2015, it was signing its publications as the Office of Research and Studies.

As one can see, al-Bin‘ali’s scholarly unit was demoted from department to committee to office, and in the process stripped of its prerogative of giving fatwas. The fact that al-Bin‘ali was in charge of what was the fatwa-issuing body of the Islamic State did make him, in a sense, the “chief mufti,” but this was never his official title. He was the emir of an office whose name and responsibilities varied over time.

According to a 2016 Islamic State video on the “structure of the caliphate,” the Office of Research and Studies is “concerned with researching shar‘i issues and expounding on any matters referred to it by various bodies”; it is “supervised” by the the Delegated Committee (al-Lajna al-Mufawwada). The Delegated Committee, so named because its members are “delegated” by the caliph, is “a select group of knowledgeable, upright individuals with perception and leadership skills … a body of individuals that supports [the caliph] … communicating orders once they have been issued and ensuring their execution.” It supervises all the Islamic State’s provinces, departments, committees, and offices. The impression given by the documents reviewed below is that the Delegated Committee, increasingly dominated by the allies of uber-extremists in takfir, gradually sidelined al-Bin‘ali and his office—and possibly even had a hand in his death.

“Hazimis” and “Bin‘alis”

As is well known, the Islamic State and al-Qaida are divided over the question of takfir, the former being more takfir-prone than the latter. But within the Islamic State itself there has also been a division, one sometimes described as between the more extreme “Hazimis” and the more moderate “Bin‘alis.”

“The Hazimis” (al-Hazimiyya), or “the Hazimi current” (al-tayyar al-Hazimi), who have been discussed by Tore Hamming and Romain Caillet, among others, are named for the Meccan-born Ahmad ibn ‘Umar al-Hazimi, a Salafi scholar in Saudi Arabia believed to be in his fifties. Though imprisoned by the Saudis since 2015, al-Hazimi is not known for his jihadi leanings, and there is some debate among jihadis as to whether he in fact belongs to the movement. A relatively obscure scholar, al-Hazimi earned a reputation in the jihadi universe only after the 2011 revolution in Tunisia, traveling there to preach on several occasions. In his lectures, he espoused a controversial doctrine known as takfir al-‘adhir, or “the excommunication of the excuser,” which became something of the watchword of the Hazimis.

The notion of takfir al-‘adhir is derived from two concepts in Wahhabi theology. The first is the requirement of takfir; the second is the inadmissibility of al-‘udhr bi’l-jahl, or “excusing on the basis of ignorance.” According to the founder of Wahhabism, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792), it is incumbent upon all true believers to excommunicate—that is, to make takfir of—those deemed unbelievers, as well as to excommunicate those who fail to excommunicate them. As Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab stated—and this is the line around which the Hazimi-Bin‘ali debate revolves—“Whoso fails to make takfir of the polytheists, or has doubts concerning their unbelief, or deems their doctrine to be sound, has [himself] disbelieved.” The duty of takfir is generally accepted in Jihadi Salafism, but there is some debate over al-‘udhr bi’l-jahl, that is, over whether ignorance may serve as a legitimate excuse for holding errant beliefs, and so shield one from the charge of takfir. For al-Hazimi, who follows the traditional Wahhabi view, al-‘udhr bi’l-jahl is categorically invalid, meaning that the ignorant heretic is to be declared an unbeliever; moreover, as he says, anyone who regards ignorance as an excuse for the heretic’s unbelief is also to be declared an unbeliever. Hence the idea of “the excommunication of the excuser.”

When al-Hazimi elaborated this doctrine in a series of recorded lectures in late 2013, he met with a great deal of opposition from jihadis. In mid-2014, Turki al-Bin‘ali denounced al-Hazimi’s concept of takfir al-‘adhir in a strongly-worded tweet, calling the phrase an innovation. Not long after, Abu Sulayman al-Shami, a Syrian-American official in the Islamic State’s media department, authored a scathing critique of al-Hazimi and his ideas. The main criticism leveled against al-Hazimi by his detractors was that his doctrine amounted to takfir in infinite regress (al-takfir bi’l-tasalsul). Takfir al-‘adhir, they said, necessarily entails a sequence of excommunication in which there is seemingly no end. (To put this in terms of Tom, Dick, and Harry: If Tom is an unbeliever and Dick excuses Tom’s unbelief, then Dick becomes an unbeliever; and if Harry excuses Dick’s unbelief, then Harry becomes an unbeliever; and so on and so on ad infinitum.)

The danger of al-takfir bi’l-tasalsul was explicitly warned against in the creedal manuals prepared by al-Bin‘ali’s division (see, for example, here, pp. 30-32, and here, pp. 58-60). The approach taken in these works was to affirm that while ignorance cannot be an excuse for major unbelief, the one who excuses unbelief on account of ignorance should not be immediately declared an unbeliever. Thus the endless series of takfir is forestalled. It was al-Bin‘ali’s role in promoting this relatively more moderate position that led some to speak of “the Bin‘alis” (al-Bin‘aliyya) and “the Bin‘ali current” (al-tayyar al-Bin‘ali) in contrast to the Hazimis and the Hazimi current. The terminology goes back to at least 2014.

Competing statements

In later 2014, the Islamic State’s General Committee (al-Lajna al-‘Amma), presumably the forerunner of the Delegated Committee, issued a statement prohibiting any talk about “the secondary issues” pertaining to al-‘udhr bi’l-jahl, and threatening to prosecute anyone distributing related audio, visual, and written material. The implied target of this threat was of course the Hazimis and their doctrine of takfir al-‘adhir. Certain “ignorant people,” the statement read, have sought to “sow conflict and division among the soldiers of the Islamic State” by raising these issues.

Also in later 2014, the Islamic State rounded up a number of Hazimi activists within its borders. In September, it executed two well-known shari‘a officials, Abu Ja‘far al-Hattab and Abu ‘Umar al-Kuwaiti, accused of adopting the Hazimi view on takfir, and in December released a video highlighting the arrest of a cell of “extremists”; the video was accompanied by an article in English discussing the “disbanding” of this cell. Those rounded up were accused not only of espousing dangerous ideas about takfir but also of plotting a rebellion against the caliphate. This was not to be the end of the Hazimis, however.

The next official statement on takfir came from something called the Central Office for Overseeing the Shar‘ia Departments (al-Maktab al-Markazi li-Mutaba‘at al-Dawawin). Bearing the number 155 and dated May 29, 2016, this statement, like the first, prohibited discussion of the secondary issues related to al-‘udhr bi’l-jahl; it also explicitly warned against al-takfir bi’l-tasalsul and banned the use of the term takfir al-‘adhir. At the same time, in an attempt to compromise with the Hazimis, it affirmed that there is no excuse for hesitation in takfir, and said that this ought to be clear to anyone living in the Islamic State. For whatever reason, this statement was not put into circulation until April 2017, when it was shared online in both written and audio form and published in the Islamic State’s Arabic weekly, al-Naba’.

If the Central Office statement was a kind of overture to the Hazimis, the next statement, the memorandum by the Delegated Committee from May 17, 2017, was even more so. Titled “That Those Who Perish Might Perish by a Clear Sign, and [That Those Who] Live Might Live by a Clear Sign” (a quotation of Q. 8:42), it was addressed “to all the provinces, departments, and committees.” While the memorandum condemned “the extremists” who adopt the “innovative” idea of al-takfir bi’l-tasalsul, the bulk of its venom was reserved for “the postponers.” The latter are those who refuse to acknowledge takfir as “one of the unambiguous foundations of the religion” and so exhibit undue hesitation in excommunicating “the polytheists.” The final three pages of the memorandum counsel obedience to those in authority. The statement was styled “an important memorandum” in a summary published by al-Naba’ in late May and by Rumiyah in early June.

The Bin‘alis strike back—and are struck

Turki al-Bin‘ali and his allies wasted little time in responding. On May 19, al-Bin‘ali addressed a long letter to the Delegated Committee with his critical “observations” of the memorandum. The letter appeared online in late June. While maintaining a mostly respectful tone, al-Bin‘ali complained bitterly that the memorandum was issued in undue haste, not having been subjected to the scrutiny of “the scholars.” This was in stark contrast to the way in which the Central Office’s statement had been carefully crafted with the input of multiple scholars, including himself. The man who organized that earlier statement, he noted, was Abu Muhammad al-Furqan, the Islamic State’s media chief who was killed in an airstrike in September 2016.

Some of al-Bin‘ali’s criticisms were trivial or pedantic—the new statement contained typographical and grammatical errors, and it relied on a few weak hadith—but his main objections were substantial. Everyone is agreed, he said, that the memorandum was intended to appease “the extremists,” i.e., the Hazimis. The extremists were celebrating that “the Islamic State had repented and returned to the truth,” since the memorandum declared takfir to be “one of the unambiguous foundations of the religion.” For al-Bin‘ali, the implication of this phrase was without question takfir in infinite regress. Another concession to the extremists was a line to the effect that professed Muslims beyond the Islamic State’s territory are not necessarily to be regarded as Muslims. What “most people” have taken away from this line, al-Bin‘ali regretted, is that “the Islamic State excommunicates everyone outside its borders.” He then quoted several earlier speeches by Islamic State leaders seemingly contradicting this position. The letter closes with an appeal to the Delegated Committee to revise and correct what it has written. As noted above, al-Bin‘ali was killed on May 31.

On May 23, Abu ‘Abd al-Barr al-Salihi, a Kuwaiti-born Islamic State scholar of lesser renown, had written his own refutation of the memorandum, reiterating many of the points raised by al-Bin‘ali. He likewise lamented the fact that it “has pleased the extremists,” advising the Delegated Committee to withdraw the memo “in its entirety.” According to news reports, al-Salihi was imprisoned for his dissent, and ultimately died, like al-Bin‘ali, in an airstrike.

Next up was an even more obscure author, the Saudi Abu ‘Uthman al-Najdi, who denounced the memorandum in a brief essay. He urged the Delegated Committee to make a retraction, saying, “I am quit before God of this memorandum.” In late June, Khabbab al-Jazrawi, another Saudi describing himself as within borders of the Islamic State, wrote a refutation accusing the Delegated Committee of engaging in “ideological terrorism”: marginalizing, imprisoning, and threatening “the scholars.” He paid tribute to al-Bin‘ali and al-Salihi, whose blood, he said, had been spilt in defense of the truth.

“Shock therapy”

It was not until July and August that there appeared another batch of refutations by Islamic State scholars, these directed against not only the Delegated Committee’s memorandum but also the leadership of the caliphate more generally. The picture that they paint is of a group in utter disarray.

The first of these refutations was written in Mayadin, Syria by a shari‘a official named Abu Muhammad al-Husayni al-Hashimi, a Saudi of Syrian origin. Dated July 5 and titled “The Hashimi Advice to the Emir of the Islamic State,” it takes the form of a letter to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, on whom the author pours out his anger and frustration. The caliphate, he says, “is being eaten up region by region … Those who once feared us are now raiding us, and those who used to flee us, our soldiers now flee them.” The Islamic State has become “an entity in which innovations and extremism have spread,” and in which “the most important positions” are occupied by oppressive and impious men allied to the “Kharijites,” meaning the Hazimis. “O ‘caliph,’” he says, “you are looking on and you are powerless to do anything.” “O ‘caliph,’ where is ‘the prophetic methodology’ in the balance of what has gone before? If it is a caliphate, then certainly it is not a caliphate of the Muhammadan message; it is the farthest thing from the prophetic methodology.” If there is “harshness” in these words, he writes, it is because “the sick patient” is in need of “shock therapy.” Al-Hashimi does not shrink from naming names. There is, for example, ‘Abd al-Nasir (“may God damn him”), the one-time Iraqi head of the Delegated Committee (“may God damn it and curse it”), who put his stamp on the dreadful memorandum; and Abu Hafs al-Jazrawi, a Saudi in the security apparatus who is repeatedly condemned (“may God spread hellfire out for him as a resting place”).

Al-Hashimi reveals that he used to work in the Office of Research and Studies under al-Bin‘ali and his deputy, Abu Muhammad al-Azdi. There he witnessed first-hand its devaluation from department to council to office, and the corresponding decline of its influence in the face of the ever-greater concentration of power in the hands of the Delegated Committee. The latter was waging war on “the scholars,” which was to say al-Bin‘ali and his allies. Al-Bin‘ali’s death, he muses, was no accident: al-Bin‘ali and the other scholars who opposed the memorandum were arranged to die in airstrikes, their coordinates being leaked to “the crusaders.” “Perhaps [the Delegated Committee] has killed some of them and said, ‘the planes of the Crusaders.’” Al-Hashimi also speculates that al-Salihi, along with “more than sixty” of his supporters, perished in this way. Arrested in late June, they were confined to an old prison subsequently obliterated in an airstrike. All of these concerns, he says, are shared by a great many others in the Islamic State. “If you wish, I could name for you more than 30 scholars and judges, all of whom would speak in favor of what I have written or of part of it.”

One of al-Hashimi’s allies was the forenamed Khabbab al-Jazrawi, who in mid-August released a statement on the death of Abu Bakr al-Qahtani. Al-Qahtani, a Saudi scholar in the Islamic State known for his strong opposition to the Hazimis (see his hours-long debate with them on takfir), was himself reportedly killed in an airstrike on August 11. The “murky circumstances” of his death reminded al-Jazrawi of the way that al-Bin‘ali was killed.

Al-Jazrawi goes on in this statement to explain the rise of those he calls the Kharijites. While a few years ago they seemed to have been subdued, it was in reality only one group of them, that led by Abu Ja‘far al-Hattab, that had been put down, and this for excommunicating the caliph and attempting to rebel. It was not for their “extremism” that they were persecuted, but rather for the threat that they posed to the caliphate’s security. This episode notwithstanding, the Delegated Committee sensed that the Hazimis enjoyed considerable popular support, and so drew close to them as a means of protecting itself. “The [Islamic] State started to treat the Kharijites favorably … and [ultimately] adopted the Kharijites’ doctrine in order to hold on to power and out of fear that the Kharijites would turn on them.”

At the end of August, another Islamic State scholar gave voice to the concerns of al-Hashimi and al-Jazrawi in a lengthy statement. This was an open letter addressed by Abu ‘Abd al-Malik al-Shami, in Deir al-Zor, “to all those who care about the caliphate and the establishing of God’s law on earth.” The letter is titled “Sighs from the State of Oppression,” which sets the tone for what follows. Al-Shami, about whom no information seems to be available, describes the current state of affairs in the Islamic State as “a true nightmare threatening to annihilate us.” Events have moved quickly, with one city being lost after another, and now “all that we have left is a small piece of land encompassing Mayadin, al-Bukamal, and some of the villages between them.” The causes of all this misfortune are many, in his estimation, but three in particular: (1) an elite caste of traitorous evil-doers dominating the Islamic State’s leadership; (2) the “Hazimi extremists” protected and empowered by these evil-doers; and (3) a lying and deceitful media constantly reassuring us that all is well.

The caliph, he says, has been out of the picture for some time, the all-powerful Delegated Committee calling the shots in his absence. After Abu Muhammad al-‘Adnani and then Abu Muhammad al-Furqan, its leader was the Iraqi ‘Abd al-Nasir, who gave even more support to the extremists than his predecessors. Al-Furqan, he claims, had set up the Central Office for Overseeing the Shar‘ia Departments “in order to please the extremists”; al-Bin‘ali had raised objections to its statement on takfir (no. 155), but al-Furqan had reassured him. Later, ‘Abd al-Nasir, during his tenure, established something called the Office for Methodological Inquiry (Maktab al-Tadqiq al-Manhaji)—al-Bin‘ali refers to this in his letter as the Council on Methodology (al-Lajna al-Manhajiyya)—the purpose of which was to enforce ideological purity by investigating those accused of holding moderate beliefs. It was a bastion of Hazimis. Then came “the great calamity,” the Delegated Committee’s memorandum, which was intended to affirm “some of the doctrines of the extremists,” and which rightly provoked a backlash.

Al-Shami mentions the refutations by al-Bin‘ali, al-Salihi, al-Najdi, and al-Jazrawi, all of whom, he says, were killed or persecuted after speaking out. The extremists, according to al-Shami, are primarily Tunisians and Egyptians, but also Saudis, Azerbaijanis, and Turks. Indulging in some conspiracy theories, he surmises that the Saudi government dispatched al-Hazimi to Tunisia in order to corrupt the minds of young jihadis who would later emigrate to Iraq and Syria. He also considers the leadership of the Islamic State to have been penetrated by the spies of regional intelligence services working on behalf of the Hazimis.

The media, meanwhile, “is hiding from [the mujahidin] news of losses and withdrawals,” all the while enchanting them with outrageous fantasies and illusions. One such illusion is the claim that we are living in end times, that “this state is the one that will conquer Istanbul and then Rome, and that one of its caliphs will be the one to hand over the banner to the mahdi or to Jesus.” Such talk, says al-Shami, is completely unwarranted. “The establishment of a caliphate does not necessarily mean that we are the ones who will fight in Dabiq, and that we are the ones who will conquer Rome, etc.” Two other illusions are the comparison between the Islamic State today and the early Muslims during the Battle of the Trench, in which the Prophet and his companions prevailed over an extend siege by their enemies, and the suggestion that the Islamic State can somehow “retreat to the desert,” recover its strength, and reconquer everything it has lost. There can be no “state” without territory, he insists.

Al-Shami ends his letter with an appeal to “my mujahidin brothers” to demand that the caliph step forward, state his views clearly on what has happened, and dissolve the corrupt Delegated Committee. “The only one who can put an end to this catastrophe is the caliph.” Yet al-Shami is not hopeful. Expecting to die soon, he writes that perhaps future generations of jihadis can learn from the experience that he has recorded here.

“Returning to the truth”

On September 15, the Delegated Committee put out a new memorandum addressed “to all the provinces, departments, and councils” rescinding the earlier one of May 17. “Observance of the content of the memorandum titled ‘That Those Who Perish Might Perish by a Clear Sign’ … has been annulled … on account of its containing errors of knowledge and misleading and unreliable statements that have given rise to disagreement and division in the ranks of the mujahidin in particular, and the Muslims in general.” The memorandum also reauthorized two books by al-Bin‘ali’s Office of Research and Studies that had been withdrawn by the Delegated Committee in early July. Finally, it reminded its readers of “the virtue of returning to the truth,” a phrase that would be the title of an article in the next issue of al-Naba’. The Bin‘alis seemed to be back on top. What had prompted the reversal?

In early September, there were rumors that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had returned to the scene after an extended absence; in doing so, he had come down hard on the Hazimis, detaining many of them, including two of their leaders, Abu Hafs al-Jazrawi and Abu Maram al-Jaza’iri. Following the September 15 memo, Arabic news outlets corroborated those rumors, telling of Baghdadi’s retaking the reins, his sacking of the Hazimis and their supporters, and his appointment of Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Shami, a veteran Islamic State scholar, to the Delegated Committee (perhaps as its leader). Al-Shami was also assigned the role of clarifying the group’s official doctrine on issues of takfir, which he soon did in a series of audio statements (see here, here, here, and here). In the series, al-Shami denounces the Hazimis in all but name, rejecting takfir al-‘adhir on the grounds that takfir is not part of the “foundation of the religion” (asl al-din) but rather only one of “the requirements of the religion” (wajibat al-din). The general effect of this distinction is to diminish the primacy of takfir, creating room for disagreement on such matters as al-‘udhr bi’l-jahl.

For the Bin‘alis, there is poetic justice in Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Shami’s selection for this role. Not only was he known as a major opponent of the Hazimis; he was, not long ago, investigated by the Office of Methodological Inquiry and imprisoned for his insufficiently extreme views. A three-hour recording of one of his sessions with the Office of Methodological Inquiry was recently made available on Telegram (see here and here). Throughout the interview, the investigators, led by Abu Maram al-Jaza’iri, rudely address al-Shami as Abu Fulan (i.e., “Abu Somebody,” “Abu So-and-So”), and al-Shami repeatedly corrects them, demanding respect: “I am not Abu Somebody. I am Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman … I am Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Shami … I have been a judge with this community since 2005. I am not new.” Indeed, al-Shami is also known as Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Zarqawi, on account of his close ties to the former leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. While he seems to have kept a mostly low profile in the organization, he is known as the author of a lengthy rejoinder to Abu Qadata al-Filastini’s criticism of the Islamic State back in 2015.

With Baghdadi having reasserted his authority and al-Shami in charge of religious affairs, the question now is whether the Bin‘ali-Hazimi divide has finally been overcome, or whether it has simply been swept under the rug. Whatever the case, it is clear from the foregoing that the discontent in the Islamic State goes well beyond the issue of takfir. There is frustration with a corrupt administration, a dishonest media, unmet prophecies, and, most of all, interminable territorial defeat. Whether the Islamic State can manage to keep its theological house in order may be the difference between survival and implosion.

The Video of Anis Amri, the Berlin Christmas market attacker

December 23, 2016 by Nico Prucha Leave a Comment

Via Telegram channels operated by IS, the Amaq Agency released a brief video featuring Anis Amri (his name is in Arabic Anis ‘Amari) pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and vowing for more revenge operations. The video is entitled “testimony of the soldier of the Islamic State who undertook the attacks in Berlin and Milano”, dated to December 23, 2016.
He appears to be standing on pedestrian bridge in Berlin where he filmed himself using is cell phone and headphones. The somewhat three minute long video is a brief but firm statement that he has submitted himself under the authority of IS and the application of sharia rule by the “state”, presented often by sympathizers and propagandists as “proof” of the IS’ theological coherence and sincerity.
Amri cites several theological references justifying revenge for the suffering imposed on Muslims, pledging that we shall drink from the same cup of pain, a popular reference within jihadist writings, statements and videos, while calling on Muslims worldwide to respond to actions, to strike everywhere especially in Europe. “Jihad against the enemies of God” is a divine obligation. He ends the video in a sermon styled supplication.

Jabhat al-Nusra’s Rebranding in the Eyes of the Islamic State

September 22, 2016 by Cole Bunzel 1 Comment

When Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, the leader of al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, announced on July 28, 2016 that he was dissolving his group and setting up a new one, Jabhat Fath al-Sham (JFS, “the Front for the Conquest of Sham”), that would not be subordinate to al-Qaida, he put to rest more than a year of speculation that such a move was in the offing. Jabhat al-Nusra had been, after all, prepared to end its formal relationship with al-Qaida. But in settling one question Jawlani raised two more: Was Jabhat al-Nusra (now JFS) really distancing itself from the terrorist organization? And had al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri really given this separation (real or nominal) his blessing?

The first question is perhaps best left to governments and journalists, but there is at least one reason to see the rebranding as more than superficial. This is that Jawlani’s maneuver alienated a number of prominent Jabhat al-Nusra hardliners who have yet to join JFS. (One rumor puts the number of these “defectors” at well over a hundred.) Presumably these men felt that joining JFS would amount to endorsing an excessively moderate and inclusive political vision.

The second question, whether Zawahiri blessed this rebranding, also remains open. To be sure, Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaida portrayed the move as having al-Qaida’s support—as an amicable separation. But the Islamic State has begged to differ. The true story, in its view, is that the “traitor” Jawlani struck again: having betrayed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Islamic State back in 2013, he turned on Zawahiri and al-Qaida in 2016. Such a view should perhaps be viewed with skepticism, but it also deserves consideration. Understanding both sides of the story requires first revisiting some of the words of Zawahiri that are key to both narratives.

Zawahiri’s mixed message

On May 8, 2016, al-Qaida’s official al-Sahab Media Foundation issued an audio statement from Zawahiri concerning the war in Syria. Coming to the issue of Jabhat al-Nusra’s relationship with al-Qaida, Zawahiri delivered a most mixed message. That it was mixed is shown by the contradictory headlines it generated. “Zawahiri: Syria’s Nusra Free to Break al-Qaeda Links” was the title of an al-Jazeera English article. “Zawahiri Warns Nusra against Separating from al-Qaida” was the title of an article in an Arabic newspaper. Evidently, what the al-Qaida leader had said was unclear.

[Read more…]

Analysis of the current situation in the global Jihad total war

September 13, 2016 by Tore Hamming 4 Comments

This is the first Q&A of the interview series with Ahmed Al Hamdan (@a7taker), a Jihadi-Salafi analyst and author of “Methodological Difference Between ISIS and Al Qaida“. Al Hamdan was a former friend of Turki bin Ali, and a student of Shaykh Abu Muhammad Al Maqdisi under whom he studied and was given Ijazah, becoming one of his official students. Also, Shaykh Abu Qatada al Filistini wrote an introduction for his book when it was published in the Arabic language. The interview series contains contains five themes in total and will all be published on Jihadica.com

Tore Hamming:

Back in 2014, the Islamic State (IS) was winning territory while IS affiliated media and its official spokesperson Abu Muhammad al-Adnani were extremely active propagating its successes. In the meantime al-Qaida (AQ) leader Ayman al-Zawahiri remained quiet. Now, in mid-2016, it seems to be the opposite situation as IS is loosing territory, while al-Adnani is increasingly absent from the media scene. Zawahiri, on the other hand, has lately been very active with several speech series e.g. The Islamic Spring and Brief Messages to a Supported Ummah. What does this development tell you?

Ahmed Al Hamdan:

This is due to several reasons. Firstly, during the period in which Adnani came out several times, there were several successes achieved by this group such as them conquering large areas of Iraq and Syria and the opening of branches outside the region of Iraq and Syria. Normally when commercial companies make any profit, they exploit these profits for strengthening their advertising and marketing. So the multiple appearances of Adnani during that period is a normal thing and in accordance with the circumstances which his group was going through at that time. However as for Zawahiri appearing only rarely, there are a number of reasons such as:

Firstly, Al Fajr centre (the media forum for the Mujahideen) which releases publications of all the branches of Al Qaeda contained within its ranks people who were sympathetic to the Islamic State. And these people would delay any verbal attack that would be launched from any branch of Al-Qaeda…!! And they would delay any correspondence relating to the same matter and would even send it to the leaders of ISIS and then the leaders of ISIS would make preemptive attacks in advance to absorb the effect of the publication of Al-Qaeda that was sent to Al Fajr Centre to be released. An example of this is the seventh interview by As-Sahab Foundation with Sheikh Ayman al Zawahiri which got published under the title “The reality between pain and hope”. They released the speech of Adnani “This was not our methodology and it will never be” before releasing the interview, and also the release of this seventh interview by As-Sahab Foundation with Dr. Zawahiri was delayed for around twelve days, even though the date of this interview by As-Sahab was before the speech of Adnani. But the speech of Adnani got released before it. So Al Fair centre played the biggest role in transforming the sympathy of many in the Jihadi movement to make them support the Islamic State through this manipulation by them, in addition to Al Fajr center turning to be a defence for ISIS.

And when the well known Jihadi researcher, Abdullah bin Muhammad, wrote about the possibility of the ranks of ISIS being infiltrated as had happened in the Algerian Jihad, this centre took an unusual step of issuing an official statement… !!! They falsified this man and accused him of lying..!!!! And so the branches of Al Qaeda began to ignore this centre and they changed their means of publication by using their own two media delegates in the social media sites in a direct manner. For example the account ‘Abdullah al Mujahid’ belongs to Al Qaeda of Yemen, and ‘Abu Mus’ab Ash-Shanqiti’ belongs to Al Qaeda of Khurasan. And so they began to release all the publications directly without having the need for any intermediaries.

And what must be noted is that these are not exclusive information that are known only to those close to these sources, but they are known to anyone who used to follow the Jihadi forums. And the reality is just as a friend had said, that the Jihadi groups and their media establishments were like closed boxes which not even those close to them would know as to what they contained inside them. However the Fitna (tribulation) of ISIS caused every secret to become publicly known..! And I don’t say known only to the supporters of these groups but also to all the people. This relieved the intelligence and the security agencies a lot, and so they no longer have to tire themselves much like how it was in the past in order to know what is inside the house of their enemy..! Thus there occurred polarization between two competitors and each would speak publicly on secret issues causing the other party to be the accused one which would make them want to defend themselves. And so they too would speak publicly about secret issues..!!. Due to this rivalry a lot of secrets became publicly known. And all praise belongs to Allah in every case.

Secondly, another matter is that Al-Qaeda needed to get its internal ranks to be set in order after they got swept by a tide. Previously there had been elements within Al Qaeda who were sympathetic towards the Islamic State but now the matter has developed and these sympathizers began to pledge allegiance to the Islamic state…! And they began to promote it from inside the ranks of Al Qaeda. So it would not be wise at such a time to come out in public frequently and release statements while your internal ranks have become flimsy and shaky. The priority was to rectify the internal ranks and absorb this attack. And in fact because of the stupidity of ISIS in taking the initiative in attacking the leaders of Al Qaeda in their other branches and slandering them and spreading doubtful allegations which would reach to the point of Takfeer upon them, this contributed to the awareness of some of those who were deceived by ISIS previously and they said that yes it is true that we differ with Al Qaeda in some issues, but not to the extent of Takfeer.

Yet despite that, I used to think and still now think that the role of Al Qaeda’s media was negative to some extent because of them continuing to have hopes that ISIS would return back to the right path. Also from the mistakes committed by the media of Al Qaeda in general was to not confront in an official manner the charges made against them by ISIS. For example Abu Ubaida Al-Lubnani who was the former security official of Al-Qaeda before being expelled and giving the pledge of allegiance to ISIS, was one of the members of Al-Qaeda of Khurasan, and he had written his testimony in the official publication of ISIS known as ‘An-Naba’. And then his former friend known as Abu Kareemah wrote an article in refutation to his testimony, but this was done in his individual capacity through the website of “Justpaste”, and he made evident many of the lies and contradictions that were present in this testimony..!

However I ask, which would have a greater impact- when the group Al-Qaeda officially adopts this article and publishes it through a media wing, or when its author publishes it by himself on his own capacity? By this, you will cause people to ask as to what is the evidence that Abu Kareemah is actually a Mujahid from Khurasan?! And what is the evidence that he is the actual author of this article? There is no doubt that the people will take the official publication as being more credible. On the other hand we see that in every issue of Dabiq, ISIS would heap allegations against Al-Qaeda even to the point of saying that they are agents and disbelievers, while the official media of Al-Qaeda represented by their two magazines “Resurgence” and “Inspire” would completely avoid responding to these allegations and would be content with the writings of some of the leaders and soldiers who would publish them in an unofficial manner.

And if I was a simple Jihadi follower, I would interpret the lack of official response by Al-Qaeda as a weakness in their standpoint, and I would not interpret this as a desire to not escalate the matter so as to not cut off the road for ISIS to come back to the right path. Rather I would say “If the talk that is being spread regarding this matter is not correct then they would have responded to it at the earliest”. But this is a mistaken policy which contributed to increasing the number of ISIS followers from amongst the Jihadi supporters.

With regards to the frequent appearances of Dr. Ayman lately, I sat down with my companions and I said to them “Let us think in the way how the men of intelligence agencies think. Can it be reasonable that these speeches are recent ones? That is they are published just a few days after been recorded? Or are they all recorded before some weeks, if not months, and then published gradually? Obviously it is the second one that is correct. And it is never wise in terms of security for the one who is number one in the wanted list of the security agencies to publish his statement in close intervals as this strengthens the chances of getting hold of the link in the thread which will lead towards him. The security official of Al-Qaeda, Abdullah Adam [1] has said “Two people who keep moving will definitely meet each other at some point”. But when you decrease the movement, then there is a greater level for your safety.

Brief analysis of answer:

In the early stage after the Islamic State left the al-Qaida network (or was thrown out depending on the perspective), it won the fight both on the battlefield and in the media. Al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri simply did not respond forcefully enough as the fitna erupted. In this regard, however, it is interesting to consider the position and influence of the Jihadi media foundations. If the account Ahmed Al Hamdan gives of the Al Fajr Centre’s role in delaying Zawahiri’s attempt of responding to the attacks from the Islamic State holds true, this would point to a critical interference of the media foundations. Interestingly, Al Fajr was also accused of refusing to publish Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s response (titled “Remaining in Iraq and the Levant”, 14 June 2013) to Zawahiri’s ruling that the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham should remain in Iraq only. If both stories are true, it shows an ambiguous role of Al Fajr, fighting an internal struggle to choose side.

Al Hamdan’s account also pinpoints another important factor in order to grasp Zawahiri’s initial passivity. Due to the increasing sympathy towards the Islamic State within al-Qaida, Zawahiri needed to get his house in order before publically taking a stance. Had he been too explicit in his critique of the Islamic State at this point, he would have risked to push away many al-Qaida members. This probably happened anyway though as his passive approach was interpreted as weakness by many.

Perhaps al-Qaida did not realise the seriousness of the situation quickly enough. Whereas the Islamic State utilised all channels of communication and propaganda as efficiently as possible, al-Qaida was hesitant and too conservative (well they are Salafis after all) in their communication instead of empowering its followers through the use of official media centres. On this point, Ahmed Al Hamdan is correct.

In summary, as the Islamic State challenged al-Qaida neither Zawahiri nor his organisation were prepared to counter the aggressiveness of its renegade affiliate. Baffled by the context where it found itself abandoned by its media foundations and its followers, al-Qaida was left in the backseat. But the tide is changing. The Islamic State has less and less to brag about, while Zawahiri is taking the position of the old wise man, who is following a long-term strategy, slowly attracting public support and taking back followers from the Islamic State. This is evident from the number of piblic statements from the two organisations’ leaders. While statements from Baghdadi or Adnani (before his death) have become increasingly rare, Zawahiri has released two series of speeches (first “the Islamic Spring” series followed by “Brief Messages to a Supported Ummah”) recently, giving the impression that he is now once again the main authority within the Global Jihadi movement.

UPDATE: Ahmed Al Hamdan responds to analysis and elaborates on the role of the Jihadi media

The release “Remaining in Iraq and Sham” by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi had been previously published by the Islamic State independently, and it is capable of spreading its material quickly and directly. And this is different to the one who has committed himself to method of publishing specifically through Al Fajr Centre. So if this person wants to change his policy it will take him a long time to search for alternative means and he must increase his security before replacing the method of publication. Those who sympathised with the State within Al Fajr Centre took advantage of the fact that the centre was the only source for spreading the material of Al Qaeda to delay or even prevent the arrival of communications between the different branches of Al Qaeda concerning the matter of the Islamic State. And I will give some examples:

The brother Abu Umar al Najdi is a Mujahid from Yemen who wrote under the name “The loyal companion” on twitter and was recommended by the other Mujahideen from Yemen who were present on twitter, for example “Mohamed al Malaki” who is one of the Mujahideen who had previously been in Afghanistan and then went to Yemen. This person published a confidential letter which had been sent from a veteran leader of Al Qaeda who was present in Syria i.e. Muhsin Al Fadli, to the leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He said in it:

Attached with this letter is the letter of Shaykh Abu Khalid al Suri, may Allah accept him, which he sent to Dr. Ayman during the first day of the Fitna, also the statements and the claims of both Al Nusra and The State [IS] which I have previously sent to Dr. Ayman, may Allah protect him, and the audio message of Al Jawlani clarifying the causes of the problem and also the audio witness testimony of (…..) and Abu Azeez al Qatari. And for your information I have sent it to you again despite having sent it before through (…..) who is the representative of the leader of Al Fajr Centre – I sent it to you again to make sure that it would reach you.

Abu Umar al Najdi said, commenting in the margin of this letter about the text:

The attachments and testimonies which the writer of the letter sent at the beginning of the Fitna of the State by way of Al Fajr Centre, never arrived to Shaykh Abu Baseer [Wuhayshi] and only arrived with this letter. And he warned everyone to be careful in dealing with Al Fajr Centre and there are suspicious and frightening dealings which did not come from new members, rather from the senior members within the centre. And Allahs refuge is sought.

This explains why the branch in Yemen stopped publishing articles through al Fajr Centre and instead began publishing through their own representative “Abdullah Mujahid”

So, if the Islamic State had not been able to publish their material in any way other than through Al Fajr Centre and despite that the Centre did not publish their material, then at that time we would be able to have doubt and ask if it was true that those people were really sympathetic to the State?

Interestingly, my opinion matches his opinion regarding the reason why fighters went over into the ranks of the Islamic State. And look what this leader said to Abu Baseer:

Now the third generation of the Mujahideen are influenced by the thinking of the State and this is due to a number of reasons, including the strength of the State media, another reason being the silence of the leaders of Al Qaeda and the absence of clarifying the methodological mistakes of the State, making the youth of the Nation go to them and here the Nation has lost out by the silence of the Jihadi movement about these errors. And may Allah reward you with good for publishing the statement of Shaykh Harith al Nadhari as it clarified and made plain many rulings, however while we have now spoken of the reality, it has unfortunately come too late. And why did you not previously speak out and clarify the ruling about the fake Khilafah of Al Baghdadi. This is necessary for us to restore the confidence of the rational, confident and self-assured youth of the Ummah in Al Qaeda, so don’t postpose the speech beyond its time in order to take a neutral position as this policy is no longer going to work in the face of the behaviour and folly of the state.

“Come Back to Twitter”: A Jihadi Warning Against Telegram

July 18, 2016 by Cole Bunzel 1 Comment

It is hard to avoid a feeling of déjà vu. Back in 2013, an established al-Qaida ideologue lamented the decline of the jihadi web forums, warning users against migrating to social media platforms Twitter and Facebook and calling for a revival of the forums as the “main theater” of internet jihad. The appeal of course failed to persuade, as the platforms, and Twitter in particular, surged in popularity and left the forums in the dust. Fast forward three years, and again things are changing. Now, a jihadi author is lamenting the decline of the social media platforms, warning users against migrating to Telegram, an encrypted messaging service, and calling for the revival of Twitter and Facebook as the locus of web-based jihad.

The al-Qaida ideologue from 2013, while ultimately unpersuasive, was right on one count. He predicted that a day would come when the social media platforms would “shut their doors in our faces.” And indeed, the crackdown on the jihadis of Twitter has finally come. (Even my ghost accounts for following them are being deleted.) Yet those targeted have not gone running back to the forums, as this ideologue would have liked. Rather, they have gravitated towards the new hot commodity, Telegram, which has gradually replaced Twitter as the primary online home for the Islamic State and its supporters. Not everyone, however, is so pleased with the relocation.

The Warner

One of those speaking out is the pseudonymous Abu Usama Sinan al-Ghazzi, a pro-Islamic State writer who authored a short essay last month titled “O Supporters of the Caliphate, Do Not Withdraw into Telegram,” published by the al-Wafa’ Media Foundation (wafa’ meaning “faithfulness”). Al-Ghazzi, whose name suggests a Ghazan origin, has been writing in support of the Islamic State since at least July 2013, when he penned a post calling for greater coordination of media efforts between the Islamic State and its supporters. The importance of the online support network is a running theme in his writings. In his 2013 post, he described the need to fight back against “the greatest campaign of disinformation…history has known,” urging his readers “not to be satisfied with fighting [alone]; rather, confront [the enemies] with both the tongue and the spear.” While not a particularly distinguished author, al-Ghazzi’s work deserves attention for being published by an important media outlet.

Al-Wafa’ belongs to an elite group of semi-official media organizations that promote the Islamic State online, previously by means of Twitter but now mostly via Telegram. (Al-Wafa’s decline on Twitter is captured by the pictures of pears it is currently using to hide from the censors.) The other big two organizations are the al-Battar Media Foundation (Battar meaning “saber”) and the al-Sumud Media Foundation (Sumud meaning “steadfastness”). The three are known primarily for their ideological output in the form of essays, poems, and books, and they often work hand-in-hand with the Islamic State’s official media organizations. For example, al-Battar is responsible for producing the transcripts of Islamic State speeches and videos, and al-Sumud has the privilege of publishing the new poems of the Islamic State’s official poetess, Ahlam al-Nasr, every week or so. When the Islamic State launches a concerted media campaign across its provinces, such as its December 2015 campaign calling for jihad in Saudi Arabia, the semi-official organizations also participate. In the Saudi campaign, they released dozens of essays by dozens of anonymous authors, all encouraging jihad there.

It is unclear how many of these authors, like Ahlam al-Nasr, reside in the lands of the caliphate, but occasionally they claim to be speaking from there, or they seem to possess insider knowledge. Neither is the case with al-Ghazzi, though he certainly speaks for more than just himself on the subject at hand.

The Warning

In his essay, al-Ghazzi bemoans the fact that Twitter and Facebook have been losing members to Telegram. This shift, as J.M. Berger has explained, can be traced to September 2015, when the Telegram service introduced a feature called broadcast channels, which added Twitter-like functionality to an app that was previously much like WhatsApp. For many jihadis, Telegram’s arrival was a welcome development, providing a permissive environment for communicating and spreading their message online at a time when Twitter was deleting their accounts more rapidly. But for al-Ghazzi, it was unwelcome, even disastrous.

The Telegram frenzy began, in al-Ghazzi’s telling, at a crucial time in the online war between the “crusaders” and the Islamic State and its supporters. The two sides were engaged in an all-out war for control of the Twittersphere, a war that al-Ghazzi believed his side was winning. The crusaders were being forced to delete thousands and thousands of accounts, but to no avail. Unable to do anything more, the crusaders had “surrendered to reality.” Then along came Telegram, and the jihadis began abandoning the battlefield.

The allure of Telegram was the security and stability it offered relative to Twitter. The chances of one’s account being deleted were much lower, as they still are. “Many of the brothers preferred Telegram over other [platforms],” al-Ghazzi explains, “in view of the small number of deletion operations to which the supporters were exposed on Telegram.” Another attraction was the ability to hide from those who might report one to the censors. On Telegram, channel operators can “change the channels…into private channels,” so as to avoid being targeted for deletion. Here al-Ghazzi is referring to the two different kinds of broadcast channels that Telegram offers.

For those unfamiliar, here is how Telegram defines channels: “Channels are a tool for broadcasting public messages to large audiences. In fact, channels can have an unlimited number of members.” And here’s its explanation of the difference between public and private channels: “Public channels have a username. Anyone can find them in Telegram search and join. Private channels are closed societies—you need to be added by the creator or get an invite link to join.”

Most of the channels supporting the Islamic State, in my experience, are of the private kind. This means they are not accessible to the broader public. When a new private channel is formed, the other Telegram channels circulate an invitation link that usually expires within hours. The result is that the Islamic State’s supporters on Telegram are a rather isolated community. They create an echo-chamber. (Only some of the private channels maintain parallel public channels, as do al-Wafa’ and al-Sumud, but not al-Battar.)

It is this introverted orientation of Telegram that, according to al-Ghazzi, makes it so unattractive. Among Telegram’s “negatives” he lists the fact that channels are limited to “a specified group and faction determined by the owner of the channel,” and that “searching for channels is not allowed.” “The other platforms,” by contrast, such as Twitter and Facebook, “are open to the masses,” which means they can reach a much larger audience. Telegram, in other words, is bad for outreach.

Al-Ghazzi sums up his warning thus: “Do not withdraw into Telegram.” And he ends with a plea: “Come back to Twitter and Facebook, for our mission is greater than this and deeper. Those we seek to reach, we will not find them on Telegram in the way desired, as we will find them on Twitter and Facebook.”

The Warned

Al-Ghazzi’s essay raises the question whether the Islamic State’s supporters will heed his warning or not. For the moment, the answer seems to be not. His appeal looks to be going the way of the ideologue’s who warned against migrating to Twitter and Facebook back in 2013. Momentum is clearly in Telegram’s favor. The jihadis, it seems, are just not willing to create new Twitter accounts every day when there exists a perfectly good alternative that goes little patrolled.

The more diehard pro-Islamic State Twitter accounts are also, like al-Ghazzi, complaining of a lack of dedication to the platform. “O supporters of the Islamic Caliphate,” a prominent account tweeted a few days ago, “be you warned against laziness and negligence on your battlegrounds!” Less prominent accounts are also complaining. One tweeted two weeks ago: “Where are the supporters, where are their accounts? Where is our power on Twitter that the nations of polytheism were being terrified by?” These are expressions of nostalgia. Twitter has ceased to be the jihadi playground it once was—at least for fans of the Islamic State.

The Islamic State of Decline: Anticipating the Paper Caliphate

June 15, 2016 by Cole Bunzel 28 Comments

It is still too early to predict the collapse of the Islamic State, but it is telling that the group’s own media, which usually keep to a narrative of unstoppable progress and battlefield success, have begun signaling decline. Last week, an editorial in the most recent issue of the Islamic State’s weekly Arabic newsletter, al-Naba’ (“News”), well captured this new outlook. Titled “The Crusaders’ Illusions in the Age of the Caliphate,” it offers a grim view of the future, both for the Islamic State and for those seeking to destroy it. I provide a full translation below.

Much of the editorial echoes the downbeat sentiments expressed by the Islamic State’s official spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-‘Adnani, in his recent audio statement of May 21 of this year. While in that statement ‘Adnani was sure to project a measure of confidence, remarking that the Islamic State is “becoming stronger with each passing day,” some of his comments betrayed the starker reality of a caliphate under siege. This was clear in the following queries: “Do you think, America, that victory will come by killing one or more leaders?” “Do you reckon, America, that defeat is the loss of a city or the loss of territory?” Responding to his own questions, ‘Adnani declared that killing the Islamic State’s leaders would not defeat the greater “adversary”—the group itself—and that taking its land would not eliminate its “will” to fight. Even if the Islamic State were to lose all its territories, he said, it could still go back to the way it was “at the beginning,” when it was “in the desert without cities and without territory.” The allusion here is to the experience of the Islamic State of Iraq, which between 2006 and 2012 held no significant territory despite its claim to statehood. For this reason it was derided as a “paper state.” ‘Adnani is thus suggesting that even if defeated the Islamic State could take refuge in the desert, rebuild, and return anew.

The editorial in al-Naba’ emphasizes the same themes. Like ‘Adnani’s speech, it suggests that the Islamic State could soon degenerate into a paper caliphate bereft of its land and leadership. And yet, it adds, this is no matter, for the cycle of Islamic State decline and revival will simply recur. America’s victory will once again prove illusory. If America seeks to claim real victory, it will have to eliminate an “entire generation” of caliphate supporters the world over.

These prognostications offer a striking contrast with those of the Islamic State’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, from just two years ago. Back then, in an audio address commemorating the start of the holy month of Ramadan, Baghdadi proclaimed the dawn of “a new age,” telling his supporters to “rejoice, take heart, and hold your heads high.” Today, it is Ramadan again, but the once proud and tall Baghdadi is nowhere to be seen. His last audio address was in December 2015. It has been left to ‘Adnani and the editorial team at al-Naba’ to deliver the bad news. The message of these sources could be summed up in the phrase, “brace yourselves for a long and difficult ride.” There remains, however, a hopeful sense that Baghdadi’s “new age” will endure—an age in which the caliphate may rise and fall, but will never truly be erased.

“The Crusaders’ Illusions in the Age of the Caliphate”

The warriors of jihad did not lie against God or against the Muslims when they announced the establishment of the Islamic State. Nor did they lie when they said it would remain, God willing. And they did not lie against God or against the Muslims when they announced the return of the caliphate and chose an imam [viz., caliph] for the Muslims, as they did not lie when they said it would remain, God willing.

The crusaders and their apostates clients are under the illusion that, by expanding the scope of their military campaign to include, in addition to the provinces of Iraq and Sham, the provinces of Khurasan, the Sinai, and West Africa, as well as the Libyan provinces, they will be able to eliminate all of the Islamic State’s provinces at once, such that it will be completely wiped out and no trace of it will be left. In this they are neglecting an important fact, which is that the whole world after the announcement of the caliphate’s return has changed from how it was before its return, and that by building plans and developing strategies in view of a previous reality, they are making plans for a world that no longer exists at present, and will not exist in the future, God willing.

Just as the Iraq war before exposed the truth of the power of the world-dominating crusaders, demonstrating the possibility of defeating them and showing Muslims that jihad is the only way to establish the state and implement the sharia, so the establishment of the Islamic State revealed to them that the return of the caliphate is something possible without first having to adopt the enfeebling ideas developed by factions and parties claiming to be Islamic, which parties with their ideas sowed hopelessness in Muslims’ hearts about the possibility of establishing the religion before the appearance of the Mahdi and the descent of Jesus, on whom be peace.

Therefore, the polytheists everywhere ought to be sure that the caliphate will remain, God willing, and that they will not be able to eliminate it by destroying one of its cities or besieging another of them, or by killing a soldier, an emir, or an imam—we ask God to protect them all and maintain them as a thorn in the eyes of the polytheists and apostates. For the Muslims after today will not accept to live without an imam guiding them upon the prophetic path: an imam around whom they can gather, behind whom they can wage jihad, to whom they can deliver a fifth of the booty and pay the zakat tax, following thereby the practice of the companions, may God be pleased with them, whom the death of the Prophet, may God bless and save him, did not prevent from choosing for themselves someone to succeed him in establishing the religion and implementing the sharia.

They ought to know that after today they will not be able to deceive the Muslims with idolatrous regimes ascribing sharia qualities to themselves, or with wayward parties and organizations claiming to raise the banner of Islam, while these adopt the pagan beliefs of democracy, patriotism, and others, and make war on those who call to God’s pure oneness and seek to unite the community of Muslims.

The State of the Caliphate has shown all mankind what the true Islamic state is like, how the sharia is applied in full and not in part, how polytheism is destroyed from the earth in which God establishes the monotheists, and how “the religion is God’s entirely” (Q. 8:39). It has thus done away with all the myths of popular support, all the lies of gradualism, and all the fears of the revenge of the crusaders.

They ought to be sure that their terrorizing of Muslims will no longer be effective, that their scaring them from establishing the religion will no longer be effective either, and that the jihad warriors have rejected the argument of the unbelievers when they said, “If we follow the guidance that is with you [O Muhammad], we will be snatched away from our land” (Q. 28:57), as they have rejected their fear of those other than God and their dread of them. What their actions have begun to say is: “We will follow the guidance, establish the religion, compel the community, and fight for this till our heads are cracked open and our limbs are torn apart. Then we will meet God, having been deprived of excuse.” There is no greater evidence of this than the pledges of allegiance, one after the other, to the Commander of the Believers, in spite of the vicious crusader campaign against the Islamic State and its soldiers, to which thousands of jihad warriors have rushed from east and west to throw themselves into the furnace of this war, preferring death under the banner of the community to life in the shadow of the ignorance of factions and parties.

They ought to reevaluate and redesign their plans on this basis. If they want to achieve true victory—and they will not, God willing—then they will have to wait a long while: till an entire generation of Muslims that was witness to the establishment of the Islamic State and the return of the caliphate, and that followed the story of its standing firm against all the nations of unbelief, is wiped out—a generation that knew God’s oneness and saw its adherents, that learned how to make of the doctrine of association and dissociation a lived reality, and how to make of the Qur’an, the Prophet’s practice, and adherence to the ancestors a path of life.

They will have to wait till this entire generation is over to reproduce the generation that was raised at the hands of idolatrous rulers, that grew up under the care of wayward parties and at the hands of evil shaykhs and palace scholars. For the generation that has lived in the shadow of the caliphate, or has lived during its great battles, will be able—God willing—to keep its banner aloft, as was the generation that grew up in the shadow of the Islamic State of Iraq able to bring it back in a stronger form than before, after the crusaders and their clients thought that it had been eliminated and that its trace had vanished from the earth.

The Islamic State will remain, God willing, and the caliphate will remain, God willing, upon the prophetic method, “till there is no persecution [viz., polytheism] and the religion is God’s entirely” (Q. 8:39).

The Extremist Wing of the Islamic State

June 9, 2016 by Tore Hamming 12 Comments

[Welcome to Tore Hamming, a PhD candidate at the European University Institute working on inter-movement dynamics within Sunni Jihadism with a special focus on the al-Qaida-Islamic State relationship. You can follow him on Twitter @Torerhamming.]

In a chapter titled “Destructive Doctrinarians,” the author Brynjar Lia describes Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’s critique of Salafi rigidity in doctrinal matters. Suri, a Syrian strategist associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and later al-Qaida, fought in Afghanistan in the late 1980s and was a supporter of the Taliban. Unlike Suri, many of the Arab foreign fighters in the region despised the Taliban, especially the Saudis and Egyptians who considered them religiously deviant.^[1] According to Suri, their extreme focus on correct doctrine became a severe obstacle to successful jihad.^[2]

There is a similar debate today inside the Islamic State, despite the group’s reputation for religious extremism and uniform belief.^{^[3]} The hardline of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is soft in the eyes of some of his followers, and the very doctrine the State uses to justify violence against its enemies is being turned in on itself.

Fragmentation within the Islamic State

In a recent interview this author did with an al-Qaida sympathizer, the interviewee described how the Islamic State ideologically can be divided into two movements: People following Turki al-Bin’ali, the Head of the Fatwa Committee in the Islamic State, and people following Ahmad al-Hāzimi, a Saudi Salafi sheikh imprisoned in the kingdom since April 2015.^{^[4]} Because of the rivalry between al-Qaida and the Islamic State one always have to be careful with accusations made by one group about the other, but when looking further into the debate and discussing it with Islamic State supporters,^{^[5]} it is clear that a dispute is ongoing between the two factions.

The dispute has to do with whether someone can be excommunicated if they are ignorant of a religious requirement. The Hāzimis, as the followers of Ahmad al-Hāzimi are referred to, adopt the position that ignorance is no excuse and argue that those who excuse the ignorant are themselves infidels. This position eventually led one of the trend’s most prominent figures to excommunicate Abu Bakr al-Baghdādī. The dispute has now spread to include senior theorists within or at least affiliated with the Islamic State and has filtered down to its rank-and-file members who discuss the matter intensively on platforms like Twitter and Telegram. The initial response of Islamic State was to handle the issue by executing the proponents of the Hāzimi trend.

In September 2014, the Islamic State executed one of its Shari’a judges Husain Rida Lare (aka Abu Umar al-Kuwaiti) under mysterious circumstances. Originally from Kuwait, Abu Umar allegedly entered Syria in 2012 where he established the Soldiers of the Caliphate battalion, which developed into Jama’at al-Muslimin before finally pledging allegiance to the Islamic State.^{^[6]} Already before joining the Islamic State, the vocal Abu Umar became infamous for his takfīri inclination when he pronounced takfīr on Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria.^{^[7]} As a Shari’a judge in the Islamic State Abu Umar also argued in favor of pronouncing takfīr on Ayman al-Zawahiri because the al-Qaida leader was unwilling to make takfīr on the Shia as a group; he claimed that Zawahiri was subscribing to the principle of ignorance as an excuse.^{^[8]}

Abu Umar finally proclaimed al-Baghdadi to be an infidel. The Islamic State responded by executing him for his “excessive takfīri tendencies”.^{^[9]}

Abu Umar al-Kuwaiti was a follower of the so-called Hāzimi trend within the Islamic State, which refers to followers of the Saudi sheikh Ahmad al-Hāzimi. The currently-imprisoned Hāzimi is not officially part of the Islamic State, but many of his followers are. Hāzimi is the main proponent of the principle that ignorance is not an excuse and he claims furthermore that if a person does not excommunicate a Muslim who merits it then he becomes an infidel himself.^{^[10]} Based on this principle, Zawahiri is considered an infidel because he does not excommunicate the Shia and Baghdadi is an infidel because he did not excommunicate Zawahiri.

A member of the Islamic State told me that the “al-Hāzimi manhaj [methodology] ideology is forbidden within Dawlah [the Islamic State] due to its extremism and wrong understanding of the 3rd nullifier of Islam”.^{^[11]} In the words of the former Saudi mufti Abdelaziz bin Baz, the third nullifier of Islam refers to “Whoever does not hold the polytheists to be disbelievers, or has doubts about their disbelief or considers their ways and beliefs to be correct, has committed disbelief.”^{^[12]} To say that this Hāzimi ideology is forbidden within the Islamic State is probably a too formalistic way of looking at it as – at least to the author’s knowledge.

No official ruling or communication has been issued on the matter by Islamic State officials. However, it is clear that the Hāzimis are not being tolerated within the movement. When I first asked an Islamic State source whether he knew of “al-Hāzimi”, he answered “Hāzimi the takfīri?” This sums up how al-Hāzimi and his followers are perceived even within the Islamic State.

Ahmad al-Hāzimi himself has not commented on the dispute between his followers and the Islamic State. This is partly because he has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia since 28 April 2015 and thus prevented from any public comments; it’s also because he tries to abstain from engaging in this kind of discussion. Hence you will not find lectures of Hāzimi pronouncing takfīr on anyone or commenting on tangible disputes. He is rather providing the interpretations, or tools, that his eager followers can then apply. Another example of such ‘facilitation’ is when Hāzimi argues that everyone can proclaim takfīr on a group or an individual and that it is not a privilege of religious scholars,^{^[13]} thus enabling his followers to attack people they do not consider to follow the correct manhaj (methodology).

The Islamic State leadership’s clamp down on proponents of the Hāzimi trend did not stop with the execution of Abu Umar al-Kuwaiti. In August 2014, the month before Abu Umar was executed, a number of second rank Islamic State leaders and members were arrested also charged with accusations of excessive takfīr. The most prominent were Abu Jāfar Al-Hattab and Abu Musāb Al-Tunisi. Al-Hattab, a former member of the Shari’a Committee of the Tunisian Ansar al-Shari’a group, had released an audio recording declaring his view on takfīr including his rejection of ignorance as an excuse to excommunicate other Muslims. Some supporters of Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State accused al-Hattab of issuing a fatwa stating that all opponents of the Islamic State are infidels, much like the GIA fatwa from 1996^{^[14]} that proclaimed takfīr on the entire Algerian population. Al-Tunisi was emir in Deir ez-Zour, but became unpopular within the Islamic State ranks when he allegedly called the Taliban and former al-Qaida leader Usama bin Laden infidels.^{^[15]} Although al-Tunisi himself dismissed the takfīr charge as hypothetical, he clearly falls into the Hāzimi trend. He also pronounced takfīr on AQIM and Ansar al-Shari’a in Tunisia.^{^[16]} Like al-Kuwaiti, al-Hattab and al-Tunisi were executed by the Islamic State^{^[17]} although little information seem to exist on al-Tunisi’s death. Other supporters of the doctrine were arrested.

Takfīr on Twitter

The dispute within the Islamic State has recently erupted again online. Since the start of May this year, several long debates between Bin’ali supporters and the Hāzimis have taken place on Twitter,^{^[18]} with each side accusing the other of extremism and deviance. Supporters of the Bin’ali trend frame Hāzimis as khawārij and ghulāt (extremist) while claiming their methodology results in “chain takfīr”. The Hāzimis retort that Bin’ali’s supporters are murji’a (“postponers” who accept the principle of ignorance as excuse) and that their loyalty is to people rather than to God.

The recent resurgence of the dispute has not gone unnoticed in official Islamic State circles. On 12 May 2016 an Islamic State affiliated Telegram channel^{^[19]} (re-)published several pieces on the issue of takfīr as a critique of the Hāzimi trend. First, it re-published an explanation titled “Details regarding the questions of takfīr on al ‘āthir” by the Saudi sheikh ‘Alī Al Khudayr, originally from March 2016, in which he gives his interpretation of the third nullifier of Islam.^{^[20]} This was followed by a piece on the Ansaru Khilafah website on the same topic, but attached with the Islamic State’s official interpretation of the third nullifier as it is taught at their military camps.^{^[21]} From this document it is clear that the Islamic State’s position on takfīr follows the interpretation of Turki al-Bin’ali rather than the Hāzimis.

This is not the first time that the Islamic State feels the need to engage in the dispute. Al Ghuraba Media Foundation, which is an unofficial Islamic State communication channel, previously published four articles and one book criticizing the methodology of Ahmad al-Hāzimi.

The Islamic State also continues to crackdown on followers of the Hāzimi in its ranks. A Hāzimi source, who does not consider himself part of the Islamic State, told me that the Islamic State recently executed another 15 Hāzimi supporters and that many have been put in prison. This raises the question, why are the Hāzimi joining the Islamic State in the first place and why do they not leave the movement when they come under attack? This there are no clear answers when talking to both Bin’ali supporters and Hāzimis. Perhaps it’s because the Islamic State is the Jihadi-Salafi movement that comes closest to the doctrine and manhaj of the Hāzimis. Perhaps many Hāzimis joined the Islamic State before they were influenced by the teachings of Ahmad al-Hāzimi. Or perhaps leaving the Islamic State is not as easy as one may imagine. As another Hāzimi source told me, they are often not welcome in their countries of origin and, the Islamic State will kill them if they try to leave. But as it is now, staying within the Islamic State but sticking to their belief seems just as dangerous for the Hāzimis.

A Path to Self-Destruction?

In her book ‘The Jihadis’ Path to Self-Destruction’, Nelly Lahoud argues that jihadis’ reliance on the concept of al-walā’ wa-l-barā’ (loyalty and disavowal) will eventually lead to the movement’s fragmentation and destruction. When the latter part of the concept, disavowal, is taken to its extreme it results in groups or individuals excommunicating one another. This was what happened with some Kharijite groups during Islam’s second civil war and the Islamic State confronts the same problem today.

So far, the confrontation between supporters of the Bin’ali and the Hāzimis has not destroyed the Islamic State as an organization. The Hāzimis are a small minority within the organization and are not represented on a leadership level – especially not after the string of executions in 2014 when the Islamic State killed or imprisoned the leading proponents of the trend.

But excessive takfirism does run the risk of severely fragmenting a movement that is already showing signs of decay in some aspects. Twitter is now full of debates between the two trends, which extend far beyond the organization. The dispute is not about tactics, strategy, or power ambitions, which characterize the conflict between the Islamic State and al-Qaida. Rather, it is a doctrinal dispute over the acceptable boundaries of Muslim belief and practice. As an Islamic State supporter argues, “The dispute between the followers of Hāzimi is deeper than Dawla’s [Islamic State] dispute with JN [Jabhat al-Nusra]”. Although it will not cause the downfall of the Islamic State, the group’s leaders can no longer focus solely on the enemy outside. Its own extremism has bred a new enemy within that may one day challenge it just as ISIS challenged al-Qaeda.

^{^[1]} A survey conducted by jihadis in Afghanistan in the late 1980s shows that members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad believed “nothing is to be hoped for from the war in Afghanistan, nor will there arise an Islamic State there, on account of doctrinal/ideological defects among the leaders and the masses.” Paul Cruickshank, “Al-Qaeda’s New Course Examining Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s Strategic Direction,” IHS, May 2012.

^{^[2]} Brynjar Lia, “‘Destructive Doctrinarians’: Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri’s Critique of the Salafis in the Jihadi Current,” in Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement, ed. R Meijer (London: Hurst & Company, 2009), 281–300.

^{^[3]} Ayman Al-Zawahiri, “March Forth to Sham!,” As-Sahab Media, May 2016, www.justpaste.it/u576.

^{^[4]} Author’s interview with Ahmad al-Hamdan, May 2016.

^{^[5]} Based on several interviews the author did with Islamic State supporters through Twitter, April-May 2016.

^{^[6]} Abdallah Suleiman Ali, “IS Disciplines Some Emirs to Avoid Losing Base,” Al Monitor, September 2, 2014, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/security/2014/09/is-takfiri-caliphate.html.

^{^[7]} Jérôme Drevon, “How Syria’s War Is Dividing the Egyptian Jihadi Movement,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 9, 2014, http://carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/?fa=54139.

^{^[8]} Abdal Wahid Al-Ansari, “انقلب السحر.. «داعش» يكفّر بعضه بعضاً .. والبغدادي يَعتْقِلُ رجاله لـ«المناصحة»!,” Al-Hayat, 2014, http://www.alhayat.com/Articles/4257230/انقلب-السحر—-داعش–يكفّر-بعضه-بعضاً—-والبغدادي-يَعتْقِلُ-رجاله-لـ-المناصحة-. See also the following debate forum on this issue: http://www.dd-sunnah.net/forum/showthread.php?t=173503

^{^[9]} “ISIS Executes One of Its Sharia Judges,” Middle East Monitor, March 10, 2015, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20150310-isis-executes-one-of-its-sharia-judges/.

^{^[10]} For Hāzimi audio on ignorance as excuse, see Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oURlSSItr4I

For Hāzimi audio on the pronouncement of takfir on a person who do not make takfir on a kāfir, see Youtube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuJkKXeivps

^{^[11]} Author’s interview with Islamic State supporter on Twitter, May 2016.

^{^[12]} For explanation of the Nullifiers of Islam, see Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Baz, “The Nullifiers of Islaam”: https://theclearsunnah.wordpress.com/2007/05/05/10-nullifiers-of-islam/

^{^[13]} See Ahmad al-Hāzimi, “Takfir is not a boogeyman,” [Youtube Video], 2016, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuJkKXeivps [Accessed May 11, 2016].

^{^[14]} Middle East Monitor, “ISIS Executes One of Its Sharia Judges.”

^{^[15]} Ali, “IS Disciplines Some Emirs to Avoid Losing Base.” and https://justpaste.it/el0d

^{^[16]} For Abu Musab al-Tunisi’s takfir on AQIM and Ansar al-Shari’a, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvHnfeaBQ9E

^{^[17]} Raniah Salloum, “Streit Über Scharia-Auslegung: IS Lässt Eigenen Richter Hinrichten,” Spiegel Online, March 12, 2015, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/islamischer-staat-koepft-seinen-schaerfsten-richter-a-1023127.html.

^{^[18]} For Twitter debates examples, see https://twitter.com/LaysalGhareebM/status/729713368550932481 and https://twitter.com/Wideyed90/status/727028979593523200

^{^[19]} Link to the Telegram channel https://telegram.me/constantsofjihad7 [worked on 13/05/2016]

^{^[20]} Alī Al Khudayr, “Details Regarding the Masā’il of Takfīr on Al ‘Āthir,” Published on March 17, 2016, https://justpaste.it/AliAlKhudayrAthir.

^{^[21]} Ansary Khilafa, “The Talk Regarding the Third Nullifier – a Light on the Matter,” May 11, 2016, https://ansarukhilafah.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/the-talk-regarding-the-third-nullifier-a-light-on-the-matter/.

Has al-Maqdisi Softened on the Islamic State?

May 11, 2016 by Cole Bunzel 11 Comments

Two months ago, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, the leading Jihadi-Salafi scholar known for his fierce opposition to the Islamic State and support for al-Qaida, released an essay that was widely interpreted as a softening of his position toward the Islamic State. As Hassan Hassan recently pointed out, al-Maqdisi has made other pronouncements of late that would seem to point in the same direction, including a December 2015 tweet in which he said: “There is nothing to stop me from reassessing my position towards the [Islamic] State and enraging the entire world by supporting it…”

But is al-Maqdisi really ready to reassess his position? The answer is no, though he has added a little nuance and hope to it over the past year. In the same tweet, al-Maqdisi conditioned his potential reassessment on “the Islamic State reassessing its position toward excommunicating, killing, and slandering those Muslims who oppose it.” He knows that this is not in the offing.

Al-Maqdisi has actually always been a bit softer on the Islamic State than some of his peers in the jihadi scholarly community. The differences between them and himself come out clearly in his most recent essay, but have actually been on display in his writings for almost a year now. The differences center on two key questions: Should the Islamic State be considered a group of Kharijites (in reference to the radical early Islamic sect by that name)? And should it be fought proactively or only in self-defense? Al-Maqdisi is against labeling them as Kharijites, and he is against fighting them proactively. It is a position with potential implications for the future unity of the Jihadi-Salafi movement—or so he would like to think.

Four scholars and a fatwa

In assessing al-Maqdisi’s position, it is helpful to view him in the company of three other jihadi scholars of like mind, age, and stature: Abu Qatada al-Filastini (b. 1960), Hani al-Siba‘i (b. 1961), and Tariq ‘Abd al-Halim (b. 1948). Like al-Maqdisi (b. 1959), Abu Qatada is of Palestinian origin and lives openly in Jordan; al-Siba‘i and ‘Abd al-Halim are Egyptians living openly in London and Canada, respectively. In September 2015, in the first installment of his (very boring) six-part audio series on “the Islamic Spring,” al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri singled out these four for praise, describing them as strong supporters of al-Qaida amid the controversy surrounding the Islamic State. Yet while Zawahiri lauded these “scholars of jihad” for remaining “steadfast upon the truth,” they were not all on the same message when it came to confronting the so-called caliphate.

The differences between them began to surface in the aftermath of a fatwa issued jointly by al-Maqdisi, Abu Qatada, and several others in early June 2015. Al-Maqdisi had already, a year earlier, denounced the Islamic State as a “deviant” group that should be abandoned in favor of al-Qaida. This fatwa was his first public statement on the permissibility of fighting the group. It was prompted by the Islamic State’s assault on certain Syrian Islamist groups in the Suran area of Hama, Syria. Describing the Islamic State as “the Baghdadi-ists” (al-Baghdadiyyin), it authorized repelling their assault on the grounds that doing so was legitimate “defense of the assault of those assailing Muslim lands.” Whether the assailants were Muslim or not was beside the point, the fatwa stated. The Islamic State was oppressive, aggressive, and flawed in methodology.

For al-Siba‘i and ‘Abd al-Halim, however, the fatwa did not go nearly far enough in condemning the Islamic State. Responding on social media, the two Egyptians decried the term “Baghdadi-ists”—a weak insult and an offense to Baghdad—and called for a more proactive approach. Al-Siba‘i wrote that fighting the Islamic State should not be limited by the principles of defensive warfare, as this would all but ensure further aggression by the group. Its fighters would retreat to safety only to return once again “to cut off heads and blow things up in homes, mosques, and markets.” ‘Abd al-Halim made the same argument, adding that the Islamic State should be fought so as “to root them out” and that its members ought to be described as Kharijites. The spat attracted some media attention, with one site making a collage of the four scholars.

Resisting the Kharijite label

The battle lines seemed clear enough. Al-Maqdisi and Abu Qatada were on one side, al-Siba‘i and ‘Abd al-Halim on the other. But there was also a minor difference between al-Maqdisi and Abu Qatada concerning the appropriateness of pronouncing the Islamic State Kharijites. Al-Maqdisi refrained from doing so, while Abu Qatada did so liberally. The difference, however, as both have admitted, was only surface deep.

In late June 2015, following the jointly issued fatwa, Abu Qatada issued another fatwa on the same subject, which al-Maqdisi endorsed. Titled “A Fatwa Concerning Defending Against the Assault of the Kharijites,” it came in response to some Libyan questioners facing a conundrum. Jihadis themselves who were fighting the Islamic State, they had qualms about wishing ill on the “the Kharijites” (i.e., the Islamic State) when they came under aerial attack by the forces loyal to General Khalifa Haftar, leader of one side in Libya’s civil war. Abu Qatada assured his correspondents that their wishes were appropriate, but he reminded them that these “Kharijites” were still preferable to the “apostates” constituting Haftar’s forces. He clarified that by “Kharijites” he did not mean all those fighting on behalf of the Islamic State, but only “its leaders, commanders, and overseers.”

As his endorsement indicates, al-Maqdisi’s views were the same. But he resisted using the Kharijite label even with Abu Qatada’s qualification.

In a short essay written about the same time as Abu Qatada’s fatwa, titled “Why Have I Not Called Them Kharijites Even Till Now?” al-Maqdisi explains his reasoning. He begins by noting that many jihadis who oppose the Islamic State, which he describes as “the State Group” (Jama‘at al-Dawla), have lambasted him for refusing to use the Kharijite label. Some have even purportedly told him “that many men and scholars have temporized in fighting them, using the fact that I do not call them Kharijites as evidence.” But al-Maqdisi says it is wrong for anyone to see in his reluctance to use the term any indication of “praise or accommodation.” For, he affirms, some of the group’s members are “worse than Kharijites.” To illustrate the point, he relates part of the story of his attempted negotiation with the Islamic State for the life of the Jordanian pilot Mu‘adh al-Kasasiba, who was immolated in a well-known video released in February 2015. That the negotiation was a hoax dawned on al-Maqdisi when the group sent him a password-protected file containing the video, the password being “al-Maqdisi the cuckold…” (This confirms the Guardian report with similar details.) Al-Maqdisi holds Islamic State leaders Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and Abu Muhammad al-‘Adnani personally responsible for the slight. They are Kharijites through-and-through.

Yet for al-Maqdisi, the fact remains that not all of the Islamic State’s members are Kharijites. He does not fault Abu Qatada for using the label with qualification, but he will not use it himself since “most people do not know and do not understand this qualification.” The Kharijite label might lead people to fight the Islamic State “in order to root them out,” which would only serve “the interests of the idolatrous rulers,” the West, and the Shia. One must, he says, still hope that the Islamic State prevails against these enemies, notwithstanding its deviations. One cannot “support the apostates against them.” He also suggests that declining to call the group Kharijites could help in reaching out to certain of its fighters and in encouraging them to repent.

Not to be rooted out

In mid-March 2016, al-Maqdisi released the essay mentioned at the top of this post. It is mostly an extended justification of his position toward the Islamic State. He notes that “most of [the Islamic State’s] enemies” find his position “oppressive” but that he is going to stick to his guns, defending “the State Group” against the charge of Kharijism and criticizing those who fight it “in order to root it out.” According to his own account, al-Maqdisi delayed releasing the essay several times lest it appear at a “bad time” and be interpreted as justifying the Islamic State’s crimes. But with many in the Syrian opposition cooperating with the West and Turkey to fight the group, even accepting Western arms and directing the airstrikes of the U.S.-led coalition, he decided the time was finally right. The Islamic State, for all its faults, is still in al-Maqdisi’s opinion preferable to groups fighting on behalf of democracy—a form of polytheism in his opinion—and seeking the help of nonbelievers against Muslims—the Islamic State’s members still being Muslims in his view.

Al-Maqdisi reiterates his view that the Islamic State is not to a man a group of Kharijites, and argues that, even if it were, this is irrelevant. For even the Kharijites were still Muslims, he says, claiming the support of the majority view of Sunni Muslim scholars throughout history.

What has upset him in particular is the use—or misuse—by certain opposition groups in Syria of two Islamic texts concerning the Kharijites. The first is a statement attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, who says of the Kharijites that “if I could reach them, I would kill them as the the ‘Adites were killed.” The ‘Adites, as described in the Qur’an, were a recalcitrant Arabian tribe who rejected the preaching of the Prophet Hud, one of Muhammad’s prophetic predecessors. The importance of Muhammad’s statement lies in its suggestion that he would fight the Kharijites aggressively, not just in self-defense. The second text is a fatwa to the same effect by Ibn Taymiyya, the fourteenth-century Hanbali scholar from Syria whose writings form the theological backbone of Salafism. Ibn Taymiyya describes the Kharijites as worse than mere political “rebels,” ruling that they should be pursued until destroyed. Both texts thus suggest a “rooting out” approach to the Kharijites.

Al-Maqdisi argues that such texts are inapplicable to the case of the Islamic State. He rejects the comparison of the group with the early Kharijites for the reason that the Islamic State has good intentions—indeed better intentions than many of its opponents in the Syrian theater—while the early Kharijites did not. In his view the Islamic State is seeking, however misguidedly, to implement God’s law, and so possesses “an exculpatory interpretation” (ta’wil). This is in contrast with the early Kharijites, who rebelled against God’s law.

Al-Maqdisi also expresses hope that the Islamic State can reform itself, noting the potential for more moderate elements in the group to take over. “I know,” he says, “as the Shaykh [Abu Qatada al-Filastini] knows, that in the [Islamic] State are those who oppose al-‘Adnani and even hope that he and those extremists like him will fade.”

As was to be expected, the Islamic State’s opponents censured al-Maqdisi for allegedly softening his position toward it. In early April, he responded with a statement printed in the Jordanian press, avowing that he had not changed his mind at all: he still condemns the Islamic State’s actions in terms of spilling Muslim blood and believes that Muslims should fight it in self-defense.

An eternal olive branch

In considering al-Maqdisi’s hopeful outlook, one should recall just how wrong he has been about the Islamic State before. In early 2014, he thought he could bring about a reconciliation between the Islamic State and al-Qaida. He wrote to al-Baghdadi and one of his chief religious authorities, Turki al-Bin‘ali, only to be spurned. A year later, he was duped by the group for a whole month into thinking he was negotiating for the pilot al-Kasasiba, only to be spurned again. His read on the Islamic State does not appear to be very good. The optimist in him cannot help but ceaselessly extend the olive branch.

It is also important to note that al-Maqdisi has failed to set the tone of al-Qaida’s messaging vis-à-vis the Islamic State. Just this week, Ayman al-Zawahiri deployed the Kharijite label against the group for the first time, describing it as “neo-Kharijites.” Zawahiri still called for unity among jihadis in the face of the “crusader” aggression, but the hardening of his rhetoric seems at odds with al-Maqdisi’s more hopeful expressions. The Syrian al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, meanwhile, has long referred to the Islamic State as Kharijites, even using the Prophet’s statement about the ‘Adites. The jihadi civil war is nowhere near over.

ISIS and Israel

November 6, 2015 by Will McCants 4 Comments

[Jihadica is pleased to welcome Dana Hadra. You can find her on Twitter @dhadra20. -ed.]

On October 23, 2015, ISIS released its first video in Hebrew addressing “the Jews occupying Muslim lands.” “Not one Jew will remain in Jerusalem,” a masked ISIS member warns. “Do what you want in the meantime, but then we will make you pay ten times over.” This video is the latest in a string of statements made by ISIS threatening to invade Israel and slaughter its citizens.

Does ISIS’s rhetoric match its strategic reality? Does it really have its sights set on Israel?

To be sure, Israel has seen an uptick in ISIS activity along its southern border in recent months. In July 2015 ISIS’s Egyptian affiliate “Wilayat Sinai” claimed responsibility for three rockets that exploded in southern Israel. The Gaza-based jihadist organization Sheikh Omar Hadid Brigade, which might have ties to ISIS, launched a rocket attack on the Israeli port city of Ashdod in May 2015.

ISIS itself makes the occasional threat. In February 2008, for example, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, then leader of the al-Qaeda affiliated Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), announced his intention to oversee “the liberation of Al-Aqsa,” stating, “…we ask God and hope that the [Islamic State of Iraq] will be the cornerstone for the return of Jerusalem.” In widely circulated videos released in June 2014, an ISIS member states that Anbar is “only a stone’s throw away from Al-Aqsa Mosque.” In another video message released in July 2015, ISIS members threaten to “uproot the state of Jews,” which will be “run over by our [ISIS] creeping crowds.” More recently, ISIS released a series of videos encouraging Palestinians to engage in lone wolf attacks against Jews. “Bring back horror to the Jews with explosions, burnings, and stabbings,” says one ISIS militant in a propaganda video, circulated with the hashtag “#The_slaughter_of_ Jews.”

Despite its threats, ISIS tanks won’t be rolling into the Holy Land anytime soon. Overthrowing the Israeli government is not a pressing priority for the ISIS high command. It’s more interested in taking over Sunni lands where state authority has broken down. Dabiq, ISIS’s English-language magazine, summarizes its strategy: weaken Muslim governments through terrorism, thereby creating security vacuums (literally, “chaos” or tawahhush). ISIS fighters will move in and establish new state-like structures (idarat). So far, ISIS has stuck to this plan; its fighters are most active and successful in areas where there is a security void. Israel, which has one of the mightiest militaries in the Middle East, is the opposite of a security void.

Theologically, the defeat of Israel is also a low priority. Unusual for a Sunni group, ISIS is motivated by Islamic prophecies of the End Times—or at least pays a lot of lip service to them. Those prophecies envisage the conquest of Jerusalem and a war with the Jews as the final act in the End Times drama. ISIS is still in the first act, the reestablishment of the caliphate. It still has to spread the caliphate throughout the world and defeat the Christian infidels.

So despite its combative messaging, ISIS’s threats to storm Israel are empty, meant to recruit Muslims angry about the occupation rather than signal an invasion. ISIS is focused on consolidating its state and expanding it into Sunni Muslim lands; its gaze will remained fixed on Jerusalem but it won’t try to plant its flag there anytime soon.

Bin‘ali Leaks: Revelations of the Silent Mufti

June 15, 2015 by Cole Bunzel 2 Comments

To all appearances Turki al-Bin‘ali, the 30-year-old Bahraini scholar presumed to be the Islamic State’s top religious authority, has been silent for nearly a year. Within weeks of being profiled on Jihadica in July 2014, Bin‘ali suddenly went dark, letting his Twitter account go inactive and discontinuing his incessant online writing. Overnight the Islamic State seemed to lose its most prolific protagonist.

Yet Bin‘ali has not actually kept mum over the past 11 months, rather being hard at work in more important—if less prominent—capacities, his responsibilities expanding notwithstanding his withdrawal from the limelight. Meanwhile, pro-al-Qaeda jihadis have stepped up attacks on him as the symbol of all that is wrong with the Islamic State: overzealous, contemptuous of seniority, and lacking in religious knowledge. In May 2015 some of them circulated embarrassing stories about him using the Arabic hashtag #Bin‘ali_leaks. They are not the only revelations of the past year.

Silenced

As will be recalled, Bin‘ali, who moved to Syria around February 2014, was the most high-profile voice within the Islamic State during its run-up to the caliphate declaration of June 2014. He authored glowing biographies of leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and official spokesman Abu Muhammad al-‘Adnani, as well as stinging refutations of big-name jihadi critics like Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, Abu Qatada al-Filastini, Abu Basir al-Tartusi, and Iyad Qunaybi, among others. Defending the Islamic State’s every move and castigating its every critic, Bin‘ali’s disappearance from the internet marked a dramatic change.

What accounts for the change is not entirely clear, but most likely is that Bin‘ali was silenced by the Islamic State leadership just as he was promoted into it. In November 2014 the Twitter account @wikibaghdady, which periodically leaks Islamic State secrets, noted the group’s new prohibition against its scholars’ writing online without receiving prior approval. Accordingly, Bin‘ali and his cohort seem to have removed themselves from the internet. Rival scholars in Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, by contrast, including Sami al-‘Uraydi and Abu Mariya al-Qahtani, maintain Twitter accounts. The Islamic State’s scholars, for whatever reason, speak not to the outside world.

Promoted

Also in November 2014, @wikibaghdady informed of Bin‘ali’s elevation to the post of chief mufti of the Islamic State, and circumstantial evidence would seem to corroborate the claim. (Contrary to what the Guardian recently reported, “scholar-in-arms” is not Bin‘ali’s official position. And contrary to widespread rumors, it is highly unlikely that Bin‘ali is in Libya, though he did visit there in 2013 and may play a special role in outreach to the country.)

The most detailed information about Bin‘ali’s role in daily Islamic State operations came in a recent four-part special (see here, here, here, and here) for Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat by journalist ‘Abd al-Sattar Hatita, who interviewed five former Islamic State shari‘a officials. In each installment Bin‘ali plays the role of supreme shari‘a authority.

The former officials, all young men in their 20s, described Bin‘ali as “the head of the apparatus for commanding right and forbidding wrong.” They also described him as charged with providing “books, pamphlets, and fatwas” for Islamic State training camps, literature that is published by “the Council for Research and Fatwa Issuing.” Much of this, they said, is written by Bin‘ali himself, and some of the works are for some reason exclusive to the training camps, including three booklets on theology, jurisprudence, and governance, respectively. The latter, titled “Informing the Flock about Public Law,” is almost certainly written by Bin‘ali. (I managed to obtain a copy only when a low-level Islamic State member on Twitter uploaded it in a series of photos in February.)

Policing extremism

In addition to his work as mufti and author, Bin‘ali appears from Hatita’s account to be intimately involved in settling religious disputes in the fledgling caliphate: namely, toning down some shari‘a officials’ more extremist tendencies.

In one instance last summer, Bin‘ali summoned several of the shari‘a officials in question from their battlefield posts in Aleppo to Raqqa for a talk. The men stood accused of spouting views too extreme for the Islamic State on certain doctrinal matters, particularly takfir—the excommunication of fellow Muslims. The young officials deemed al-Qaeda leader Zawahiri an unbeliever and considered al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra a group of unbelievers through and through. On a more theoretical level, they adopted an uncompromising stance on the theological principle of al-‘udhr bi’l-jahl (lit. “excusing on the basis of ignorance”), whereby Muslims can be excused certain errors of belief on account of not knowing better. These officials went so far as to insist that anyone engaged in such “excusing” was himself an unbeliever. In a two-and-a-half hour conversation in Raqqa, Bin‘ali, “anger and malevolence pouring from his face,” failed to make any headway with his interlocutors.

Ultimately the shari‘a officials reached the point of excommunicating the Islamic State itself and very carefully escaped to their home countries. Not all officials of their bent have been so fortunate. As Hatita relates from his sources, dozens of these Islamic State uber-extremists have been imprisoned, and some even executed. One of those killed was the prominent Tunisian scholar Abu Ja‘far al-Hattab, who penned the first extensive defense of Baghdadi’s expansion to Syria in 2013. Twitter jihadis were discussing rumors of his death back in September 2014.

All in the family

None of this is to downplay the extent of Bin‘ali’s own extremism. Indeed, the radical tendency seems to run deep in his branch of the Bin‘ali family in Bahrain (though the larger Bin‘ali clan seems to be moderate and close to the government.)

In late January 2015 Bahrain issued a decree stripping 72 Bahrainis of their citizenship, citing numerous reasons all to do with jihadism. On the list were four Bin‘alis, including Turki (#17) and two of his full brothers, ‘Ali (#50) and Muhammad (#60). On the backgrounds and whereabouts of the two brothers there seems to be little information, though the second brother is on Twitter and clearly supports the Islamic State. So too do Turki al-Bin‘ali’s father, Mubarak, and a third full brother, ‘Abdallah.

In April 2015 Bahraini authorities arrested the third brother, who is also on Twitter, at Bahrain International Airport attempting to flee the country for the Islamic State. (Ahlam al-Nasr, the so-called “poetess of the Islamic State,” wrote a poem to mark the occassion.) Upon learning the news, Bin‘ali père himself started a Twitter account, from which he began decrying the arrest, even complaining that the Bahraini kingdom was preventing his son from “emigrating for the sake of God.” The father’s caliphal sympathies are manifest in other Tweets as well. On April 25 he wrote: “May God reward you well, my sons, for your honorable stance”—i.e., the four sons’ stance on the Islamic State.

In March Turki al-Bin‘ali was pictured holding what is assumed to be his infant son, thus apparently beginning the third generation of Bin‘ali extremism.

Making a peep

On Feburary 15, 2015 Bin‘ali broke his silence, releasing a short, angry refutation of his former teacher, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, written under the pseudonym Abu Khuzayma al-Mudari (on which more below). While Bin‘ali had inveighed against Maqdisi before in a lengthy essay from mid-2014, the friendly ties between the two had not yet completely unraveled. In fall 2014 Maqdisi had reached out to Bin‘ali in hopes of securing the release of American hostage Peter Kassig, as the Guardian reported, and although the effort failed the pair seemed to enjoy a “warm exchange” over the phone.

Not to be disheartened, Maqdisi again reached out to the Islamic State in January 2015 in an effort to secure the release of Jordanian pilot Mu‘adh al-Kasasiba, whose plane had gone down over Raqqa in late December. As Joas Wagemakers discussed in detail, Maqdisi proposed a prisoner swap: Kasasiba for failed female suicide bomber Sajida al-Rishawi. In the course of these efforts Maqdisi dispatched a voice message to someone in the Islamic State, subsequently made public, hoping that there remained a semblance of “brotherhood” between himself and Bin‘ali. “I still expect there to be mutual esteem between us,” he said, “notwithstanding the severe criticism and exchange of words that has gone before.”

But when the Islamic State released the video of Kasasiba’s immolation on February 3, an infuriated Maqdisi took to Jordanian airwaves to denounce the Islamic State yet again. “They lied to me,” he complained. “They are beheading (lit. slaughtering) mujahidin!” He continued: “Immolation!? The Prophet said: ‘No one punishes by fire except the Lord of Fire.’” “Jihadi-Salafism is innocent of these acts!” “What caliphate is this?” “They have distorted the jihadi current.”

12 days later Bin‘ali issued his response, a five-page polemic titled “Maqdisi: Falling in the Mud and Abandoning the Religion.” The take-down is intensely personal, the author at one point addressing Maqdisi with the name Abu Muhammad al-Sururi, associating Maqdisi with an early teacher of his, Muhammad Surur Zayn al-‘Abidin, notorious for opposing the jihadis. The rest of the refutation is concerned with Maqdisi’s failure to condemn the title of the television program on which he appeared—“Pilot Mu‘adh al-Kasasiba the Martyr”—and with the merely “legal matters” of ransoming apostates, beheading, and immolation.

On the subject of ransoming and immolation, Bin‘ali’s opinions are nearly identical to those given in the fatwas that I translated in March (see no. 52 and no. 60). In short, his argument is that ransoming apostates (i.e., Kasasiba) is only permissible when absolutely necessary. Punishment by immolation, he says, was approved by the Hanafi and Shafi‘i schools of law in addition to being approved by all four schools in the case of reciprocal punishment. As to beheading, Bin‘ali cites the standard prooftexts invoked by jihadis supporting the practice, including the Prophet’s statement, “O people of Quraysh, by God, I have come to you with slaughter,” and several reports in which the Prophet seems to approve of those carrying severed heads.

A month and a half later, a member of the Shari‘a Council of Maqdisi’s website published a 30-page critique of Bin‘ali’s refutation, subtitled “a refutation of the lying shari‘ia official of the [Islamic] State hiding behind ‘Abu Khuzayma al-Mudari, and a defense of our Shaykh Maqdisi in the matter of the Jordanian Pilot.” The work is too detailed to summarize, but the author makes two noteworthy charges. One is that Bin‘ali is the author of the essay in question and is “hiding behind” the pseudonym Abu Khuzayma al-Mudari, which information he says came from “two reliable sources” close to Bin‘ali. Second is that Bin‘ali’s subtitle, “abandoning the religion,” unmistakably amounts to takfir, or excommunication, of Maqdisi. In other words, the chief shari‘a authority for the Islamic State has excommunicated Jihadi-Salafism’s most preeminent ideologue. Two counter-refutations (see here and here) supporting Bin‘ali appeared in the succeeding months. Neither disputed either charge.

The Other pseudonym

Oddly enough, Bin‘ali’s critics failed to mention that he had written under the name Abu Khuzayma al-Mudari before. Searching online, I found 12 essays under the name from the period March-May 2014, and in terms of style and content (and even formatting) they are unmistakably his work. Their appearance furthermore coincides with the period in which the Bahraini was extraordinarily active online, writing under two other pseudonyms and also under his own name.

In April 2014 Bin‘ali confessed to being behind the two pen names Abu Human al-Athari and Abu Sufyan al-Sulami but did not mention Abu Khuzayma al-Mudari. Perhaps he wanted to leave one name unacknowledged for future use. At all events, what further confirms the pseudonym’s belonging to Bin‘al’i is his statement that he only chooses pseudonyms that accurately reflect who he is. And according to his biography, he descends from the Mudar clan (Mudari is the ascriptive).

Adding Mudari to the count, one finds that Bin‘ali wrote some 45 works between October 2013 and May 2014 (see the “Inventory of Bin‘ali Writings” below.) In some cases he published more than one work on the same day. Possibly he wanted to give the impression that more jihadi scholars supported the Islamic State than was actually the case. Thomas Hegghammer has observed “how single media-savvy individuals can dramatically increase the perceived size and strength of [a jihadi] organisation.”

The 12 Mudari writings are not otherwise particularly noteworthy. Here Bin‘ali is occasionally more pointed than usual (he identifies 16 grammatical errors in a statement by Jabhat al-Nusra scholar Abu Mariya al-Qahtani), but generally they are just more of the same: the Islamic State is great, al-Qaeda is flawed, the Taliban is flawed, Jabhat al-Nusra consists of traitors, etc

Dreaming about Hani al-Siba‘i

In May 2015 a certain jihadi opposed to the Islamic State released 19 emails from Bin‘ali to jihadi scholar Hani al-Siba‘i, dated between 2009 and 2012. Siba‘i, a London-based Egyptian in the top tier of jihadi scholars along with Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Abu Qatada al-Filastini, has like his peers stood firmly opposed to the Islamic State and supported al-Qaeda.

According to Siba‘i, who later spoke about the email affair in a recording, Bin‘ali sent him some 40 to 50 emails over the years, using various pseudonyms. Siba‘i had circulated 19 of these to fellow jihadi scholars, one of whose students subsequently posted them to Twitter without permission. Though surprised, Siba‘i did not regret the leaks, using #Bin‘ali_leaks to poke fun at his one-time pupil. Most of the emails were mundane, with Bin‘ali flattering “my teacher” and calling himself “your pious student.” Several bore requests for Siba‘i to contribute forwards to his books.

Others were stranger. In one from October 2011, Bin‘ali said that he recently dreamed about Siba‘i. “I dreamed about you several days ago,” he wrote. “I dreamed that I had traveled to you intending to study under you. I came to London and arrived at your house. I went inside, seeing there a great verdant garden, and I proceeded till I came to you. I sat with you and spoke with you at length.” In the same email Bin‘ali asked Siba‘i to send him personal photographs, “like you behind your desk and the like.” In his comments Siba‘i, laughing, admitted to sending one photograph. He also said that there were other emails with some “very personal things” that “I did not publish.”

In addition to jeering at him, Siba‘i expressed serious regret about Bin‘ali, a mere “youth” who was soliciting fatwas from his seniors just years ago and now deigns to “give fatwas to the entire Muslim community.” “I hope that he turns in penitence to God,” he said, but unfortunately “he cannot come back. He would be shot.” Indeed, the Islamic State does not permit its members to leave.

Siba‘i went on: “This community is the graveyard of extremists…and only the truth shall prevail…You will know, succeeding generations in the future will know, that what I am saying is right.” Yet in all likelihood it is Siba‘i and his ilk who are headed for the graveyard first. Perhaps symbolically, Siba‘i’s once-acclaimed website was permanently deleted within days of his comments. Impressively, the silent mufti seems to be quietly winning.

Inventory of Binʿalī writings since August 2013:

The name used by the author is indicated in parentheses. Binʿalī=Turkī ibn Mubārak al-Binʿalī, Atharī =Abū Humām Bakr ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Atharī, Sulamī=Abū Sufyān al-Sulamī, and Muḍarī=Abū Khuzayma al-Muḍarī.

August 5, 2013 Mudd al-ayādī li-bayʿat al-Baghdādī (Atharī)

October 16, 2013 al-Maʿānī qabl al-tahānī (Sulamī)

November 13, 2013 Nawāfidh ʿalā ʿālam al-jinn (Binʿalī)

November 17, 2013 al-Mutaʿassir fī kalām al-munaẓẓir (Sulamī)

November 25, 2013 al-Ikhṭiṣār fī ḥukm qaṭʿ al-ashjār (Sulamī)

December 4, 2013 Ruʾyā gharība fī mawāṭin ʿaṣība (Binʿalī)

December 11, 2013 Rafʿ al-labs fī ḥukm madḥ al-nafs (Binʿalī)

December 15, 2013 Khaṭṭ al-midād fī ʾl-radd ʿalā ʾl-duktūr Iyād (Atharī)

December 22, 2013 Taḥbīr al-dawāh ḥawl ḥadīth “wa-mā lam taḥkum aʾimmatuhum bi-kitāb Allāh” (Sulamī)

January 5, 2014 Risālat naṣh wa-ʿatb li-ahl Ḥalab (Atharī)

January 8, 2014 al-Thamar al-dānī fī ʾl-radd ʿalā khiṭāb al-Jawlānī (Atharī)

January 19, 2014 Tabṣīr al-maḥājij biʾl-farq bayn rijāl al-Dawla al-Islāmiyya waʾl-Khawārij (Atharī)