TheThree Scholars Fueling Islamic State’sHate
Like its predecessors, Islamic State reads Islam’s history and its foundational texts selectively, choosing the parts
and thinkers who fit into its vision of Sunni dominance, brutality and constant war with everyone else
fter Islamic State militants
claimed responsibility for last
week’s terrorist attacks in Brus-
sels, a now common debate
ensued on social media and
elsewhere: does Islam condone violence
against civilians?With its extreme vio-
lence and nihilistic mindset, Islamic
State seems a death cult bent on sense-
less destruction. But the group justifies
its violence, especially against civilians,
with selective interpretations of Islamic
texts and scholars that are rejected by
the vast majority of the world’s 1.6 bil-
lionMuslims. According to a long-term
survey by the Pew Research Center, at
least three quarters of the Muslims reject
terrorist tactics such as suicide bombing
or other attacks on civilians.
Like other militant movements, espe-
cially al Qaeda and its offshoots, Islamic
State is inspired by a group of religious
scholars across Islam’s history who ad-
vocated the idea of declaring other Mus-
lims as infidels or apostates, and
justifying their killing. This notion of tak-
fir is central to the ideology of most con-
temporary Islamic militant groups, who
have killed far more Muslims than non-
Muslims. Islamic State’s leaders cherry-
pick the sources and scholars they
choose to imitate, so they end up with
austere interpretations of Islamic texts
that run counter to a millennium of
moderate understandings, including tol-
erance for other faiths. Three scholars, in
particular, have had an outsized influ-
ence on Islamic State’s religious ideology.
The first dates back to the 13th cen-
tury, a period when Islam’s early empires
began to decline after five centuries of
expansion. As the Mongols swept across
Asia and sacked Baghdad, the Mongol
warrior Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis
Khan, threatened to overrun the Levant,
an area of the easternMediterranean
centered around modern-day Syria and
Lebanon.While many Muslim scholars
at the time lined up to support the Mon-
gols, one jurist forcefully rejected the in-
vaders. Ibn Taymiyya, an Islamic scholar
fromDamascus, issued several fatwas
(religious rulings) against the Mongols –
and al Qaeda, Islamic State and other
militants still quote those rulings today.
After Hulagu, some Mongol leaders
nominally converted to Islam, but Ibn
Taymiyya considered them infidels. He
also argued that it
was permissible for
believers to kill
other Muslims dur-
ing battle, if those
Muslims were
fighting alongside
the Mongols. Ibn
Taymiyya is the in-
tellectual forefather
to many modern-
day Islamic militants who use his anti-
Mongol fatwas – along with his rulings
against Shi’ites and other Muslimmi-
norities – to justify violence against civil-
ians, including fellowMuslims, or to
declare them infidels, using the concept
of takfir. Islamic State often quotes Ibn
Taymiyya in its Arabic tracts, and occa-
sionally in its English-language propa-
ganda, as it did in its magazine, Dabiq,
in September 2014.
Ibn Taymiyya also inspired the father
of theWahhabi strain of Islam that is
dominant in Saudi Arabia today, the
18th century cleric Muhammad ibn Abd
al-Wahhab, who decreed that many
Muslims had abandoned the practices of
their ancestors.Wahhab believed Islamic
theology had been corrupted by philos-
ophy and mysticism. Many of the prac-
tices he banned were related to Sufism
and Shi’ism, two
forms of Islam he
particularly ab-
horred.
Wahhab dis-
missed analogical
reasoning and the
consensus of
scholars, two
other sources that
had helped Is-
lamic law evolve and adapt to new reali-
ties over time.
The Saudi regime has also used its oil
wealth to exportWahhabi doctrine by
building mosques and dispatching
preachers throughout the Muslimworld.
But radicalism needs more to breed
than just rhetorical and religious inspi-
ration. As Arab nationalist leaders and
military rulers rose to power in parts of
the Middle East in the 1950 and 60s, they
violently suppressed Islamic move-
ments, including peaceful ones. In
Egypt, the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser
clamped down on the populist Muslim
Brotherhood, and that helped lay the
ideological foundations for the emer-
gence of violent Islamic movements in
the following decades.
The most militant thinker that
emerged from that period was Sayyid
Qutb, a Brotherhood leader who was
swept up in Nasser’s crackdown. After
enduring nine years of prison and tor-
ture, Qutb published a manifesto in
1964, Milestones Along the Road, in
which he argued that the secular Arab
nationalism of Nasser and others had
led to authoritarianism and a new pe-
riod of jahiliyya, a term that has particu-
lar resonance for Islamists because it
refers to the pre-Islamic “dark ages.”
Qutb declared that a newMuslim van-
guard was needed to restore Islam to its
role as “the leader of mankind,” and that
all Arab rulers of his time had failed to
apply Islamic law and should be re-
moved from power. Qutb argued that it
was not only legitimate, but a religious
duty for “true” believers, to forcibly re-
move a leader who had allegedly strayed
from Islam.
Nasser’s regime executed Qutb in
1966, but his ideas lived on and they in-
spired a new generation of militant lead-
ers, especially Osama bin Laden and his
deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is now
the leader of al Qaeda after bin Laden’s
death. And while Islamic State’s ideo-
logues do not quote Qutb as frequently
as al Qaeda’s leaders have, he clearly in-
spired the group’s rejection of contem-
porary Arab regimes and its effort to
create a transnational state in parts of
Syria and Iraq.
Like its predecessors, Islamic State
reads Islam’s history and its founda-
tional texts selectively, choosing the
parts and thinkers who fit into its vision
of Sunni dominance, brutality and con-
stant war with everyone else.
– Reuters
A
Mohamad
Bazzi
Journalism
Professor
New York University
tarting next month, the govern-
ment of India will require that
cigarette packs be largely covered
in graphic warning labels. That’s
smart; in other countries, such warnings
have effectively pushed smokers to quit.
The trouble is that cigarettes aren’t India’s
biggest tobacco problem.
Most Indians who smoke, smoke a
much cheaper, unfiltered product called a
bidi: shredded tobacco wrapped in a
“tendu,” or ebony, leaf and tied with a
string. Popular among the poor -- a pack
can cost as little as 10 cents -- bidis in 2009
accounted for 85 percent of smoked to-
bacco in India. Bidis have lower tobacco
content than cigarettes, but more nicotine,
tar and carbonmonoxide. Stick for stick,
they’re deadlier.
Yet, successive governments have shied
away fromdiscouraging bidi smoking. The
new law requires warning labels on only
one side of bidi packs. And bidis are barely
taxed. As of 2013, the excise burden on
bidis barely topped 5 percent; theWorld
Health Organization recommends 70 per-
cent. (National excise taxes on cigarettes,
at less than 40 percent of the retail price,
could stand to be somewhat higher, too.)
Handmade bidis are taxed even less than
machine-made ones are, and those made
by the smallest producers are exempt alto-
gether. This encourages a sprawling rural
industry in which
women roll bidis at
home for little pay.
Defenders say
higher taxes would
make bidis unafford-
able to the poorest In-
dians. But that’s
precisely how a tax
would benefit public
health. India has the
world’s second-largest
population of smokers
after China -- more
than 100 million peo-
ple -- andmore than a million tobacco-re-
lated deaths each year. In 2011, the
Ministry of Health and FamilyWelfare esti-
mated that the economic cost attributable
to tobacco use had reached $22.4 billion,
more than the central and local govern-
ments spent on health care that year.
Yet in India, unlike in the U.S. and Eu-
rope, the number of smokers continues to
grow. And fewer than 5 percent of adult
smokers in India ever quit.
To get them to kick their habit, two
things need to change. First, bidis need to
be brought out of the shadows tomake
themmore easily taxable. Eliminating the
distinction between handmade andma-
chine-rolled sticks would drive production
into factories, where output could be more
accurately measured. And tobacco growers
should be required to report sales, and
bidi-makers to report purchases. Un-
branded bidis -- which account for more
than half of production -- should be
banned outright.
Then, taxes on bidis should be raised
drastically. Studies suggest that a 10 per-
cent rise in prices could cut bidi consump-
tion by more than 9 percent. Raising bidi
taxes to 98 rupees (around $1.50) per 1,000
sticks could prevent more than 15 million
premature deaths, theWorld Health Or-
ganization estimates. Those are savings
India can’t afford to pass up.
CigarettesAren’t India’sReal TobaccoProblem
S
Bloomberg View
Editorial
Opinion
3
News India Times
April 8, 2016
