#82 — The End of the World According to ISIS
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Summary
Graham Wood is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a former Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of the book, The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State, and he teaches in the Political Science Department at Yale University. In this episode, we talk about his experience reporting on ISIS, the myth of online recruitment, and how to challenge the theology of ISIS's propaganda. We talk about the identity of the most important American recruit to ISIS, and we spend a long time talking about the surprising significance of Jesus and the anti-Christ in Islam under Islam. We don t run ads on the podcast and therefore, therefore, are made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a subscriber. You'll get access to all kinds of premium features, including ad-free versions of the Making Sense Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and access to our most up-to-date episodes of Making Sense podcasts wherever you consume your favorite podcasting apps and social media platforms. Thanks for listening to the podcast! Sam Harris and I really appreciate what you're listening. - The Making Sense Team - To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to makingsense.podcatcher.me/sponsorships/websites/tweetme/tftr/tweets/p&t=1&referenced=a&qid=3q&q&ref=t&qref=3&q=3s&q_t=3 And thank you for the support the podcast? Thank you so much for the podcast, Sam Harris and I'll be looking forward to hearing the first part of this episode of the conversation, on the second half of this conversation, making sense to you're making sense of this podcast. Timestamps: 1:00: 2:00-7 3: 4:30- 5:40-7:00 - The Way Of The Strangers? 6:15-8: 7:20- 8:30 - What's Yours? 9:00s-9:30s- 11:40s-12:00 13:00+ 15:30+ 16:15s-15:00 + 17:15+ 17 :00s+ 18:00% 19:00&16:00 & 17:00_ 21:30
Transcript
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Graham is a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine.
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He has written for The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
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He was the 2014-2015 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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And he teaches in the Political Science Department at Yale University.
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And he's the author of the book, The Way of the Strangers, Encounters with the Islamic State.
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And we get deep into his book, and into the worldview of ISIS.
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We use ISIS and the Islamic State interchangeably.
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And we talk about his experience reporting on ISIS, the myth of online recruitment, how to
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We talk about the quality of ISIS's propaganda.
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And Graham reveals the identity of the most important American recruit to the Islamic State.
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And we spent a long time talking about the surprising significance of Jesus and the Antichrist
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And Graham is an amazing authority on these topics.
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And it was a great pleasure to finally get him on the podcast.
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So, without further delay, I bring you Graham Wood.
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You have written this wonderful book, The Way of the Strangers, which is all about the Islamic
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State, its rise, and you get right up to the point where its fall seems plausible.
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Things have moved on a little bit since you published the book.
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But it's just a really entertaining and deep introduction to this phenomenon of just global
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But you get into the details in a very accessible way.
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The book is structured around some very engaging profiles of people and also fairly amusing
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profiles of people who you have spent some time with.
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So my first question for you is just, as a journalist, did you feel that you were taking
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I always worried a little bit about what might happen, because especially meeting someone for
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the first time, you never know what he or she is going to do or what friends that
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But ironically, reporting on the Islamic State has been one of the safer assignments I've
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Being in war zones where you don't know where the bullets are going to be coming from, you
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don't know who you're talking to, is often a very dangerous thing.
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But talking to ISIS supporters is often an experience of subjecting yourself to proselytization
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So it would be weird for them to attack me if I came to them and said honestly and verifiably,
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And so they, in general, are pretty happy to talk.
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You have these really adorable encounters with people who just have endless disposable time
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And then you describe their apparent loss of enthusiasm once it's clear that you are not
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But they clearly want to get their message out.
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And I guess we should say that you are reporting these stories not from ISIS-held territory.
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Well, it can't be taken for granted that someone won't do something horrible to you in Australia
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or in Egypt or in Turkey or in the United States, for that matter.
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And most of the people I spoke to did say, I should go to Syria.
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They said, you know, we understand you'd be afraid to go there, that you think you might
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But if you went there with permission, unlike how James Foley went, you'd be okay.
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So the most dangerous encounters that I had were probably in places that we don't otherwise
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think of as terribly dangerous, like maybe Norway or Australia or the United States, where
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you're going to a cafe in a part of town that you don't know.
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And you never know if there's going to be a van that pulls up next to you and pulls you
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But in the end, I was mostly just in danger of being overfed by these people.
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That's an interesting point, this idea that if you went to Syria or Iraq and spoke to ISIS
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directly, you'd be safe if you did it through the appropriate channels.
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I was amused and slightly alarmed to see that John Walker Lind from his prison cell was somebody
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To remind people, John Walker Lind was the, often referred to as the American Taliban.
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He was this young man from Marin County, as everyone should know, a bastion of privilege,
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who decided to go fight with the Taliban very early on, I mean, before September 11th.
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And in the aftermath of September 11th, he was caught fighting for them, was quickly prosecuted
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and has disappeared into the bowels of our prison system.
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It sounds like he's still there, quite full of faith and happy to advise you to go talk
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Yeah, the way that I interacted with John Walker Lind was as follows.
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I wrote to him and said, look, there seems to be this phenomenon called the Islamic State,
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and a lot of people who in some ways are kind of like you have gone over there.
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So given that you're still on American soil, and given that you're reading this letter
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that I've sent you in prison, apparently you can be reached.
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So do you have anything to tell me about what you think is motivating people and what the
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And the letters that he wrote back were friendly, maybe a little bit officious, but were saying
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in essence that the Islamic State would respect its covenants, he believed, if I went to them
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Can I go over there and have a kind of guided tour of the caliphate?
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And yeah, I told him, that's not going to happen.
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I'm not going to go over there and just take their word for it that they're not going to
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And he said, well, you know, it's really the only way to find out.
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And trust me, they seem like men of their word.
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So it appears that these 16-odd years that he's spent in prison has not disabused him
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of the jihadism that he had pursued with the Taliban.
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Instead, if anything, he's gone from being a Taliban supporter to perhaps an Islamic State
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Now, have there been journalists who have followed that path?
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I know there's the one German journalist, I think, who crossed into ISIS territory and met
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some people, although I can't remember if he did that with any permission.
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Yes, and it's been so far verified in 100% of the cases, which is one case.
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The guy is Jürgen Todenhofer, who's an elderly German magistrate, kind of an amiable weirdo,
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very interesting political figure who's interviewed Bashar al-Assad and who wrote to a bunch of
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German jihadis who were in ISIS territory and said, I'd love to go over there.
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They brought him over, showed him the city of Mosul under ISIS control.
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And from the sounds of it, I spoke to him about this once.
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Up until the very last moment that he crossed the Turkish border to safety, he wondered whether
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And even while he was over there, they said, look, we will respect the permission that we
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gave you from the office of the caliph himself to come over here and keep you safe.
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But we promise you, eventually we're coming to Germany and your name will be on our list.
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I will keep you safe here, but I'm coming to kill you where you live.
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So just to rewind here, just to give people a little context, because I will have introduced
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you in my intro to this episode, but you initially got into this research.
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You wrote a cover article for The Atlantic magazine about ISIS a couple of years ago.
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And that, at the time, I believe was the most read article in the history of the magazine.
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It may still be, although I imagine you've had a little competition in the last couple of
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You and I actually did, before I had a podcast, you and I did a long interview where I interviewed
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That covers territory that I don't think we'll really cover again in this conversation.
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So people can go seek that out on my blog if they're interested.
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And then I think we're going to get into current events pretty quickly here.
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But the birth of this group is fairly astonishing.
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You report on how ISIS conquered Mosul with a force of something like 500 or 1,000 men and
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It was almost a proof of their divine aid in some way.
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I mean, it was just like this miraculous display of cowardice on the part of an army that we had
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I believe I was the last American reporter to be in Mosul.
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And my experience of the city even then, and remember, this is like a year and a half before
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ISIS took control of the city, was that everybody was afraid of what they were then calling al-Qaeda.
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They were saying that shopkeepers would be extorted.
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And if I, as an obvious foreigner, was spotted on the street, there's a really good chance I
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So even back then, there was the sense that there was no law except al-Qaeda's, except
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And there was definitely no respect for the Iraqi army.
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So when ISIS came to town and actually took over the city with, you know, four or five
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hundred guys, a bunch of pickups, machine guns, and so forth, it was like, yeah, this
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was a city that was anarchic before, and they were almost just making it official.
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But didn't thousands of troops just flee outright when these 500 men showed up?
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And the troops who were there when I was there in 2013 was, they were garrisoned in just a
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They were considered tools of a Shia sectarian government.
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And so it wasn't as if they were doing foot patrols, winning hearts and minds.
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They were considered just those people in a barracks over there who we never see and we
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So just imagine a bunch of Sunnis come to town.
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They say, we represent your interests, you, the Sunnis of Mosul.
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And those soldiers over there, we will let them run away, most of them, and we'll control
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And a lot of people in Mosul just said, well, that might be better than the status quo.
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So I think that explains how they were able to take over so much so fast.
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Now, how many people at this point have emigrated to join ISIS?
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They, in the middle of last year, told people not to come anymore.
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So you can expect that the numbers haven't risen too much.
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But yeah, from overseas, from countries that are not Iraq and Syria, usually the number
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Now, one of the things you do in your book, which many people decline to do, is you get
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into the heads of these guys in a way that allows you to see the world from their point
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And when you do that, the behavior of these people becomes fairly logical.
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The mysteries begin to evaporate once you begin to take people at their word, when they
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tell you over and over again what they care about, what motivates them.
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I mean, this is something that has now astonished me for going on 16 years, since September 11th.
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People just find this virtually impossible to do.
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Scholars of religion, or seeming scholars of religion, decline to do this.
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Political scientists routinely prove themselves unable to do this.
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And you have a quote here, I think it was fairly early in the book, that I loved, which is,
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when someone says something too evil to believe, one response is not to doubt their sincerity,
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but to expand one's capacity to imagine what otherwise decent people can desire.
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That, I concluded, is the proper response to the Islamic State.
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And your encounters with these people just become this exercise in accepting their account
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You pressure test it in a variety of ways, because no account is free of internal contradictions.
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But it's just, from my point of view, a very satisfying excavation of a worldview, which
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you tackle, again, through many of these profiles you do with jihadists of various commitment.
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You know, you gave a list of a few disciplines that have been neglectful in their duty to explain
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some of these things, religious studies, political scientists, and so forth.
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And in some ways, I've taken to heart messages that they've given about Muslims in other contexts
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that they seem not to have applied themselves in this one, which is that we in the West,
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non-Muslims, secular academics, we have taken it upon ourselves to speak on behalf of people
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from far-off lands for brown people, for Muslims.
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And so part of what I was doing was just heeding the call to instead listen to them, let them
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It's not as if I, by examining their socioeconomic status or the political circumstances of where
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they come from, can expect to just understand what they believe about the world.
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I will be able to understand some things, but why not talk to them?
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And so what I ended up doing was, I think, an exercise that was as much anthropological
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It was trying to describe a culture, a mindset, a view of the world, and to describe it in a
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way that the people who were speaking would recognize as accurate or at least interesting.
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One thing that is, I think, surprising or will be surprising to many of our listeners is
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that this myth of purely online recruitment is, in fact, a myth.
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There's this picture that has emerged, which is that people get recruited entirely on the
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basis of online contacts, and they have no affiliates in the real world that could explain
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I'm sure there must be some pure cases of that where it really is an internet phenomenon.
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The idea that people will just go on Twitter and be told ISIS is the way to go, read these
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websites, read Dabik magazine, and get a ticket to Turkey and you're on your way.
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That is not how it goes in, as far as I can tell, almost any cases of men.
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Usually for people who go over there, they know somebody who's already gone.
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Obviously, there was a first mover, someone who went over and told his buddies, hey, it's
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There's a house that I got as soon as I arrived, and that kind of thing.
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But in general, there's someone who you've met outside the mosque or in a cafe or on a
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sports team, and that person has done something important in showing you that a human being
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It's not gods who have gone over, but people like you and me.
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And that changes everything, and everything flows from that.
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Now, in the case of women, a little bit different.
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You could look at the women who were recruited to al-Qaeda, and first of all, there aren't
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It was very male, and it mostly thought of women as encumbrances because they wouldn't
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Whereas with ISIS, they're trying to create a society, and so they need men, they need
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And so they've had to reach out in different ways.
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And for that, online recruitment has been really, really valuable.
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They've been able to talk to people who otherwise would be in very conservative milieus where
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it's not like they could go talk to some stranger, leave the house whenever they wanted.
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And so online, you can find people who are purely online recruited and who eventually made
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So focusing on the men for a second, the impulse for a woman to join the Islamic State, I must
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And at one point, you talk about what jihadists in general do, and ISIS has taken this to the
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point of perfection, is that they, and this is a quote from you, they weaponize a fanatical
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sense of shame by declaring that jihad is the only absolution.
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Talk about this notion of shame for a moment, because it probably doesn't have a reference
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When I was being recruited to an ISIS-like organization, this was before the time of ISIS, I was in Cairo
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speaking with a guy I could only describe as a master recruiter.
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And one of the first things that he would try to emphasize to me was that I had done horrible
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He would ask me, wouldn't ask me to confess details of, say, my sexual history or whether
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I'd use drugs or alcohol or my failings, but he would point out, God has requested that
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you not do these things, and there will be punishment for you in the hereafter for the
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So he was really trying to emphasize this sense of deep, deep sin, which I think is familiar
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ISIS says exactly the same thing, that God is watching you, he is nearer to you than your
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own jugular vein, is one of the most famous lines from the scriptures that ISIS likes to
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And so when they say to someone, especially someone who has an especially sinful past as
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a rent boy or drug addict or what have you, then part of their appeal is that they can absolve
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You know, if you die in battle, you don't have to pay the bill when it comes to Judgment
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Day because you're a martyr and you get fast-tracked straight to Paradise, whereas people who die
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comfortably in their beds, they do have to go through an absolution process, a purification,
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a kind of burning limbo before they enter the gates of Paradise.
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Yeah, don't their ribs get crushed together and cracked at the moment of the Day of Judgment?
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The recruiters love to talk about the lurid punishments.
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And yeah, there's something called the punishment of the graves.
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This is part of a fairly orthodox reading of the idea of the hereafter in Islam, that when you die,
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like, you get trash compacted within your grave and you scream as your ribs crack and eventually
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And the only ones who can hear this screaming are animals and genies.
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So there's all sorts of bad things that happen to you after you die, unless you are one of
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two categories, a martyr, someone who dies in the course of jihad or in a few other categories
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So if you have a sense that you've got a steep, steep bill to pay in the hereafter before you
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go through the pearly gates, then you have all the more incentive to die faster and more
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I feel like I'm paying that bill on the jujitsu mats.
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No one hears my screams, not even the genies, when I get crushed.
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You can't tap out when the creator of the universe is doing it to you.
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No, not when he's got you in a rear naked choke.
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This is something you keep confronting throughout the book.
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You continually bump into the problem of arguing against the Islamic State's theology.
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It's a problem that, as I said, many scholars and many mainstream Muslims shirk.
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I guess the pun on the Arabic term for polytheism should be intended there.
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So many so-called moderate Muslims and their apologists just lie about the doctrines from
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which the Islamic State is drawing its inspiration.
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At one point, you quote the head of CARE, the Council of American-Islamic Relations, claiming
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that there are no end-time prophecies in Islam.
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I hear people like Reza Aslan say that the Koran abolishes slavery, right?
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Countless people have said that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam.
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President Obama quite famously said this over and over again.
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And one reason why I think Hillary Clinton lost is that she seemed inclined to follow
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And rather than talk about the actual link between specific doctrines with respect to
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martyrdom and jihad and apostasy and blasphemy and all the rest and this death cult behavior,
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people reflexively talk about U.S. foreign policy and the Ba'ath Party and bad people who
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This is just religions being used as a pretext.
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They claim that ISIS has no theological justification for its actions.
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At one point, you quote somebody, I think it was a Guardian writer, who even argued that
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ISIS drew its actual inspiration from the French Revolution and from the scientific enlightenment.
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You have people like Tariq Ramadan saying that ISIS is not a religious phenomenon.
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I mean, there's just this tsunami of obscurantism that rises up every time a person attempts
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to talk about the theological roots of this phenomenon.
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And were you taken in by that initially and then gradually deprogrammed through your encounter
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What was that like for you in terms of disabusing yourself of that myth?
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I had the fortune or maybe misfortune of encountering ISIS-like beliefs or jihadist beliefs abnormally
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I was about, let's see, 20, I was 22 years old when I first met someone who was a follower
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I was just a backpacker passing through, but there was a conference going on, so I was curious
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And it was basically a bunch of jihadists who were getting together, and they were in fact
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And from that early stage, I already had a sense that there was more to jihadism than just political
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grievance or any of the other things that you listed.
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And there was certainly, among the people who were part of that group, an absolute devotion
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to Islamic scriptures and to interpretations of those scriptures that have been around for
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a long time and are not made up out of thin air in the 20th century or 21st century.
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And some of the apologetic efforts hit my ears well after, and well after I knew what the responses
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were from the jihadist side, for me it was so, the response was so ubiquitous.
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Every side was saying, especially in this country, that ISIS was not a religious phenomenon,
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that ISIS was best understood in ways that had little to do with the history of Islam,
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except for some extreme Islamophobes, of course.
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So that sentiment was so constant that, for me, what was much more interesting was to
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find the Muslims who were actually opposed to ISIS and who, unlike the ones who would
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say, hey, slavery's been abolished in Islam permanently and forever, or that ISIS has no
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knowledge of its scriptures, was to find the ones who didn't have that level of ignorance
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or willingness to lie about the history of the religion.
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And there turned out to be a lot of them who had arguments against ISIS that came from an
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Islamic perspective, sometimes a very conservative, possibly even jihadist Islamic perspective, and
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to ask them where they got those ideas as well.
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Much has been made of the fact that some recruits to the Islamic State were found to buy books
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like, with titles like Islam for Dummies, as though this proves that religion played no
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real role in their behavior, because they obviously didn't understand their religion all that well,
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or that in some ways their claims of a religious motive must be insincere if they're buying books
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And again, this is precisely the sort of point that I've heard someone like Reza Aslan make
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I noticed you dispatched that idea at some point in the book.
00:27:57.540
Dispatch it here, because that has always struck me as a fairly crazy and, in many cases, insincere
00:28:05.280
Yeah, there were a couple guys from Birmingham, England, who were trying to get to ISIS territory
00:28:10.160
and had in their Amazon.co.uk shopping carts the Koran for Dummies and Islam for Dummies.
00:28:18.160
And ever since then, you hear this invoked as evidence that these people know nothing about
00:28:25.220
Islam, have no interest in Islam, and it's obviously just not so.
00:28:30.880
Well, the idea that, first of all, that someone who is reading books about Islam has no interest
00:28:44.240
But beyond that, you have to understand that the amount of time that someone has spent as
00:28:50.660
a devoted jihadist or pious Muslim is not correlated with the intensity of their feeling
00:29:01.740
I think a lot of people think that how do you judge whether someone is a believing Muslim?
00:29:09.240
How long has this person been identifying as a Muslim?
00:29:12.560
And the answer for many ISIS supporters, it's true, it's rather short.
00:29:19.400
And so you find people like Mehdi Hassan, now of Al Jazeera, who will at any chance invoke
00:29:33.360
Yeah, I think he's Al Jazeera and The Intercept now.
00:29:36.240
And any time you talk about this, you're likely to hear someone, not always Mehdi, say, look,
00:29:42.920
this is an example of how foolish these people are.
00:29:48.500
I would just point out that educating yourself, reading books about Islam, is the sign of someone
00:29:56.600
Now, the other point that people will make about someone who's reading the Quran for dummies is that this person is not a learned Muslim.
00:30:06.400
He's not a sheikh or an al-Azhar trained theologian.
00:30:13.000
What I think people miss from this, though, in their zeal for denigrating the followers of ISIS, is that in any human population, you would find some people who are novitiates and some people who are a small fraction of people who are learned scholars of the faith.
00:30:34.000
You know, you could go, as Rukmini Kalamaki once said to me, if you went to a small town in Italy and you approached people coming out of mass on a Sunday and you asked them about obscure doctrines within Catholicism or canon law, the average person would have no idea what you were talking about.
00:30:50.640
Would you then conclude that that person is not Catholic or has no interest in Catholicism?
00:30:56.560
No. The person just came out of mass and probably identifies very closely with Catholicism, just happens not to be someone who is tremendously learned.
00:31:06.660
And that's the case, of course, with the majority of Islamic State recruits as well.
00:31:12.080
Yeah, yeah, it's a very important point, this time and grade illusion that I think you've aptly named, because the point gets made another way quite frequently, too, which people will say that the person has no background in a madrasa, for instance, right?
00:31:29.080
This is someone who had a fairly secular background and then all of a sudden has changed his worldview as though no sudden change could be sufficient to count as a real religious conviction.
00:31:43.360
But, of course, people have awakenings to one or another religion all the time.
00:31:48.540
And when you trace people's connection to the rest of the community, what you find rather often is not necessarily jihadism, but you find a religious context which is fairly conservative by any comparison even with Christian fundamentalism in the West.
00:32:09.380
And as you find throughout the religious landscape, you find that religious ideas are systematically protected from criticism.
00:32:20.760
So the belief in paradise is endemic to planet Earth in one or another form, and it's certainly incredibly well-subscribed throughout the Muslim world among Muslims who have varying degrees of commitment and knowledge about the faith.
00:32:39.380
And so people who can seem quite secular still live, in many cases, their entire lives in a context where I believe in paradise and the legitimacy of martyrdom and the divine origin of the Quran and all the building blocks of this worldview are in place, whether they've taken a real interest in it or not up until that point.
00:33:03.280
I can give you an example of how some of these ideas go from being dormant to being active.
00:33:09.380
A lot has been said about the apocalyptic side of ISIS.
00:33:13.660
ISIS officially believes that the end of the world is coming, and it's coming at ISIS's instigation at their hand, and it's not going to be pretty, and it's going to cause the Antichrist to come back, and great battles and so forth.
00:33:27.720
These are not things that are generally spoken of in mosques.
00:33:32.320
If you go to your local mosque, you're very unlikely to find an imam screaming about the end of the world, just like if you go to your local church.
00:33:41.280
This is probably not going to be the favorite topic of a sermon at any megachurch, although there will be a kind of understanding that these ideas are out there.
00:33:51.860
And in the case of Muslims, as one scholar told me, this is the kind of thing that is told to Muslim kids when they go to bed at night.
00:34:02.080
It's stories to make them be good kids, to obey their mom and dad, to think about good and evil and try to develop a moral sense.
00:34:16.300
They're not stories that are necessarily going to be weaponized into ISIS.
00:34:21.580
They're just part of the folklore of a culture.
00:34:26.000
Now, ISIS, it finds people who have been told these stories, and these are largely benign stories, I think, and then it comes to them and says,
00:34:35.560
all right, all those stories you've heard that were not emphasized by your religious authorities, they're real.
00:34:43.320
And since people have been hearing them over and over again, it's a fairly simple action to wake them up to the idea that these great battles are happening right now,
00:34:54.060
and you better get there soon, otherwise you'll be thought of in the hereafter as someone who ran away.
00:35:00.000
Yeah, well, I want to talk about the end times prophecies in some detail, because they really are the goofiest stories ever told,
00:35:06.720
and the fact that anyone believes them literally is fairly astonishing.
00:35:10.680
But before we get there, so you said that in the course of reporting this book,
00:35:16.740
you encountered people who were not mere obscurantists with respect to ISIS, but still disagreed with them.
00:35:23.960
So you found scholars who, rather than play hide-the-ball with the articles of faith,
00:35:30.460
they dealt with the theology of ISIS in a more honest way.
00:35:34.540
I mean, they would acknowledge, for instance, that the prophet had sex slaves, right?
00:35:39.660
Rather than condemn slavery, or even sexual slavery, the prophet practiced it, right?
00:35:45.860
This is unambiguous in his biography, and it's not an accident, therefore, that ISIS thinks they can do this,
00:35:53.140
and therefore the challenge is for honest critics of this sort of faith to find a theological basis from which to criticize it.
00:36:04.400
Did you find people who were offering a counterpoint to the theology of ISIS that you felt could sway potential jihadists?
00:36:17.460
There are a few different categories, especially from believing Muslims, of believing Muslims who were opposed to ISIS.
00:36:24.860
There would be some whose main effort was to make Muslims look good.
00:36:31.120
I would put, as an example, CARE would probably be one organization that was involved in that,
00:36:42.840
They are also, though, very willing to say things that are false about Islam,
00:36:49.040
and about the history of the beliefs that Muslims have had over the years.
00:36:54.980
Another category is of people who would, they would not lie about Islam, but they would lie about ISIS.
00:37:01.460
They would claim that ISIS is not, doesn't believe what it believes, doesn't say what it says.
00:37:07.340
That's maybe a slightly easier to deal with category.
00:37:12.120
And then you'd find others whose knowledge of their own tradition is extensive enough
00:37:20.340
that they couldn't possibly simply deny the reality of slavery in Islam,
00:37:26.800
or amputation of hands of thieves, or beheading sorcerers and apostates.
00:37:33.100
And that last category was what I found to be the, it was, first of all, a diverse category.
00:37:38.180
There were many different Muslim scholars, Muslims within it.
00:37:42.120
But it was also the most interesting, because, as you say, they were not playing hide the ball.
00:37:46.700
They were instead engaging in a very complicated and sincerely felt battle within the faith.
00:37:55.840
And, you know, they would, to take the issue of slavery specifically,
00:38:00.700
one of those earlier categories might have, they might have said slavery has been abolished in Islam.
00:38:05.680
That is true if you think Islam is the governments of Muslim-majority countries.
00:38:14.940
It is not true of the tradition of Islam, which has, for most of its existence,
00:38:20.440
recognized the legitimacy of slavery and codified the institution.
00:38:25.440
So you'd find one of the most distinguished living Muslim jurists, Taki Yusmani, a Pakistani,
00:38:33.360
who said of this argument that slavery has been simply abolished by the consensus of all Muslims,
00:38:38.980
to be, he said, so ridiculous it would make a grieving mother laugh.
00:38:44.580
That's the person I wanted to talk to, was someone who was aware of the place in the tradition,
00:38:50.880
and yet was able to give me an explanation of why ISIS's version of this was not okay.
00:38:57.820
Before we go further in that direction, I just want to comment on this impulse that so many Muslims
00:39:04.520
and their apologists feel to, above all, make sure that Islam doesn't look bad
00:39:10.920
or that Muslims don't look bad in the aftermath of a terrorist attack
00:39:20.080
I mean, few things make the community of Muslims look worse
00:39:29.480
They're lying about the existence of dangerous doctrines
00:39:36.820
And so whatever the motive for these lies, it can't help but appear sinister.
00:39:41.860
And this ritual is now so widely repeated that it's just, it's become a caricature of itself.
00:39:50.680
You know, in the aftermath of an event like Manchester or London, which just happened,
00:39:54.960
you have Muslims jumping on the airwaves, either representatives of care
00:40:02.940
And in fact, in many cases, certainly are secular.
00:40:06.240
You've got people like the comic Dean Obadala, you know, who's got a post on CNN
00:40:10.800
and they jump on television and they essentially say, what do you want from us?
00:40:20.640
Why is the burden on Muslims to condemn terrorism every time something like this happens?
00:40:25.880
This is, I've hit this before, but I just, I view this as like a public service announcement.
00:40:30.500
The issue is not that Muslims don't condemn terrorism.
00:40:34.920
Condemning terrorism is a trivially easy thing to do.
00:40:38.920
And I, and I, it goes without saying that most Muslims don't support the activities of
00:40:45.880
a man who shows up at an Ariana Grande concert and massacres children, right?
00:40:51.300
That need not be said, but what is altogether lacking is an honest acknowledgement that this
00:40:59.000
violence is arising out of sincere belief in the truth of specific religious doctrines.
00:41:10.540
They have to condemn the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad, which is a much heavier lift, right?
00:41:17.560
Theologically and, and socially, and they, they need to condemn all of the triumphal bullshit
00:41:29.860
And that's what has to be confronted head on by honest, secular, liberal, or otherwise conservative,
00:41:40.320
And that is something, I mean, I feel like I can count on one hand, maybe two hands at most,
00:41:50.040
And it's someone like Majid Nawaz who gets on CNN and just, you can actually track through his statements
00:41:59.020
So anyways, this is my hobby horse, but it just, you know, every time there's a new terrorist
00:42:04.440
event and we see the same shills for delusion jump on television, it really is just crazy
00:42:12.720
I'm largely in agreement with what you just said.
00:42:15.200
I will say, I do get the question all the time.
00:42:17.820
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