What An ISIS Dude Wants
What those of us who have read in Islam -- as I have been doing since 9/11 -- know is that the terrorists who murder for Allah are not "perverting" Islam's teachings but following them.

The fact that many Muslims live peaceably does not change the fact that Islamic ideology is violent totalitarianism masquerading as religion (to the rest of us).

For example, there is the myth that Islam is incompatible with terror:

Islam does prohibit killing innocent people. Unfortunately, you don't qualify.

Although many Muslims earnestly believe that their religion prohibits the killing of innocent people by acts of terrorism, the truth is certainly more complicated. This is why Muslims on both sides of the terror debate insist that they are the true believers and accuse the other of hijacking Islam. It is also why organizations that commit horrible atrocities in the name of Allah, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, receive a significant amount of moral and financial support from the mainstream.

In fact, the definition of "terrorism" in Islam is ambiguous at best. And the definition of an "innocent person" in Islam isn't something that Muslim apologists advertise when they say that such persons aren't to be harmed. The reason for this is that anyone who rejects Islam by refusing to convert is not considered to be innocent according to Islamic teaching.

Consider that a great deal of the Quran is devoted to describing the horrible punishment that awaits those who refuse to believe Muhammad. How then can Muslims say that the subjects of divine wrath are innocent people?

...Islam is not intended to co-exist as an equal with other religions. It is to be the dominant religion with Sharia as the supreme law. Islamic rule is to be extended to the ends of the earth and resistance is to be dealt with by any means necessary.

Apologists in the West often shrug off the Quran's many verses of violence by saying that they are relevant only in a "time of war."

To this, Islamic terrorists would agree. They are at war.

Dexter Filkins writes in The New York Times about Graeme Wood's new book, THE WAY OF THE STRANGERS -- Encounters With the Islamic State:

In the years since, ISIS' breathtaking lust for anarchy -- temple-smashings, beheadings, crucifixions -- has inevitably prompted the question: What do these people want? The usual answers -- money, power, status -- do not seem to suffice. Graeme Wood, a correspondent for The Atlantic and a lecturer at Yale, believes he has found something like an answer, and that it can be located in the sacred texts, teachings and folklore of early Islam. In "The Way of the Strangers," Wood, through a series of conversations with ISIS enthusiasts, shows that many of them claim to want the same thing: a theocratic state without borders, ruled by a leader who meets a series of strict qualifications, and who adheres to a brand of Islam that most people -- including most Muslims -- would find stifling and abhorrent.

The most novel aspect of Wood's book is that he shows, convincingly, that the stifling and abhorrent practices of the Islamic State are rooted in Islam itself -- not mainstream Islam, but in scriptures and practices that have persisted for centuries. There's no use denying it. "For years now, the Islamic State and its supporters have been producing essays, fatwas, . . . films and tweets at an industrial pace," Wood writes. "In studying them we see a coherent view of the world rooted in a minority interpretation of Islamic scripture that has existed, in various forms, for almost as long as the religion itself." That goes for the most barbarous practices as well: "Slavery has been practiced by Muslims for most of Islamic history, and it was practiced without apology by Muhammad and his companions, who owned slaves and had sex with them."

Wood has obviously studied the old Islamic texts. And he makes clear, in the conversations he has with Islamic State supporters, that they have, too. The value of "The Way of the Strangers" is that it gives the lie to the notion, repeated so often in the West as to become a cliché, that ISIS zealots are betraying Islam, and that their practices are un-Islamic. They are Islamic, and in that sense, the end-state of their murderous program is not hard to discern.

via JG