Men of blood and iron
by Michael Cook
If you have a chance to read the fourth issue of Dabiq, the official English-language magazine of the Islamic State, don’t. It will make you very ill.
Dabiq is a reasonably slick publication circulating as a PDF on the internet. It has lots of colour images; an historical feature; an interview with John Cantlie, the captive British journalist who features in ISIS videos; a letter from another captive, journalist Steven Sotlof, to his mother pathetically pleading for his life; followed by an double-page spread of his bloodied head lying on his corpse. And so on.
The 56 blood-soaked pages are meant to inspire Western “crusaders” with terror and ISIS followers with zeal to kill the infidels. “Every Muslim should get out of his house, find a crusader, and kill him,” reads a typical paragraph of religious fanaticism – which is followed by a shrewd marketing tip on branding: “It is important that the killing becomes attributed to patrons of the Islamic State who have obeyed its leadership. This can easily be done with anonymity. Otherwise, crusader media makes such attacks appear to be random killings.”
Most repugnant of all is a learned theological justification of enslaving Yazidi women and children captured when ISIS overran the province of Sinjar. The Yazidis follow an ancient religion related to Zoroastrianism, and are thus despised by Islamic extremists as pagans. According to Dabiq, “Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Shari’ah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State” (after handing a fifth of their booty over to the Caliph as stipulated in the Qu’ran).
A few girls have escaped and confirmed these boasts.
The editors of Dabiq and the generals of ISIS are obviously intelligent men (all men, apparently). They have conquered vast swathes of territory and are conducting a clever public relations campaign. So how can they possibly defend selling women in a slave market? Slavery is the pinnacle of dehumanisation. It is a denial of the universal brotherhood of man, of the universality of human rights, and the reduction of human beings to commodities.
Blaming Islam is not the answer. ISIS claims to be reviving slavery in pious obedience to the Qu’ran. But outside of a few pockets of like-minded extremists, the Muslim world no longer practices it.
The answer is that ISIS has abandoned reason, except in the pragmatic sense of mastering technology and tactics for war. The Qur’an is their only law, a book written in the 7th Century for feuding desert tribes. They have no theology, for that involves the application of human reason to divine realities. As Benedict XVI said in his landmark speech in Regensberg in 2006, terrorists believe in "a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God."
For the new atheists, the atrocities committed by ISIS prove that “religion poisons everything”, in the words of the late Christopher Hitchens. But if that is true, why is there no Christian counterpart of ISIS?- See more at:
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