ISIS and the Sectarian Political Ontology: Radical Islam,Violent Jihadism and the Claims for Revival of the Caliphate

Introduction

The year 2011 had come as a horizon of hope to the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. But when the fruits of transformation were to be reaped by its anxious and optimistic populous, they seem to be struck by a sort of post-apocalyptical horror that rendered the Arab spring, which manifests the fourth phase of Islamic revival in the region, to merely become an empty signifier. Known as the ‘soft revolution’, this revival was brought about by the forces of globalisation, and it had drastically transformed social imaginaries in the MENA. The fundamental feature of this change was the acceptance of modernity with all its secular rationalities by the wider populous of the polities in the region. By virtue of these transformations, the interference of religion in issues of public sphere was considerably restricted (Hefner, 2001, pp. 493–494).

Such a political current in the MENA has been called as modernism or the third way that considerably reduced the role of Islam in its textual, juridical and liturgical forms, in the everyday public life of the region’s communities. The third way or modernism drew upon Islam for general ethical and legal guidelines and offered programmes for socio-economic and governmental reforms. This current is in the mainstream of reformist Islam and intervened between two extremes, conservatism and radicalism. Conservatism upheld the values of property, hierarchy, authority and family with reference to the supremacy of religion in its canonical form, as opposed to radical Islamism that aimed at the overthrow of infidel Governments by force and impose an Islamic State (IS) (Zubaida, 2001, p. 224). In this context, it may be noted that Islamic resurgence, like Islam itself, is both a religious and a political phenomenon that emerged as a response to global issues of modernisation and development, in all its complex and unsettling dimensions (Marsot, 1992, p. 156).

The trends today in the region, however, tend to indicate a move towards regression, impelled by the divisive forces of totalitarianism and religious extremism. Such an anticlimax has emerged in the region due to the deepening political vacuum, owing to the return of despotic regimes, ethno-nationalistic civil wars, cataclysmic sectarian divides, and most crucially, the resurgence of transnational terrorism and religious extremism that is ideologically driven by radical Islamism. Anyhow, no part of the region is undergoing through an immensely scabrous phase of political instability, religious extremism and sectarian violence, as has been the case with Iraq and Syria. Both the countries have emerged as the centre stage of the most barbaric violence committed in the name of institutionalised religious dogma, sectarian ontology of identities and fanatic methodologies of political action. Owing to all this, these countries have been turned into a laboratory of Islamism/Jihadism of the most egregious form.

Since the first Gulf war of 1990–1991, Iraq has merely witnessed brief episodic stages of peace and stability, with the rest of its contemporary history symbolising a montage that portrays unremitting international conflict, political disorder, social chaos and a profound humanitarian crisis. The 2003 US invasion and the subsequent socio-political and economic crisis have acted as a catalyst in arresting any hopes of the country’s recovery. On its part, the optimism of Syria’s translation into a stable democratic political order that was engendered by the Arab spring met a premature death as the country descended into a horrendous civil war in 2011 against the repressive Assad regime. As a product of such socio-political void, a kind of stagnation has been induced in both the countries, which opened capacious social spaces for the radical forces to capture the empty ravines. The gap also created a sort of intellectual/rational vacuity and science/innovation inertia, the consequences of which have been obvious. The values of democracy, liberal society and secularism were pushed into a state of oblivion, paving the way for an extreme form of Islamic radicalism which is tinged with exclusionary notions of sectarian identity, driven by an ardent political motif. To accomplish narrow political ends, the contours of Islamic theology, philosophy and culture were twisted and bended to concoct violent notions of Islamism. Such a scenario manifested in the resurgent Al-Qaeda after being dismantled from Afghanistan in 2001 which emerged with full vigour in Iraq and Syria, in addition to its deep influence in Libya, Lebanon and Egypt.

Most crucially, with the State collapse in Iraq and Syria, the central concern of identity politics claims to power, and political mobilisation has shifted to assertion of an exclusionary sectarian identity, which is decoupled from nationalistic ideologies, the idea of State and also national interest (Kaldor, 1999, p. 6). Such schismatic articulation of identities is invented under circumstances where political legitimacy of the nation state is eroded and conditions are created in which sub-State actors can opt out of the State altogether (Cerny, 2005, p. 5). Owing to all this, the imagined community of a United Arabia, bound by a sense of Arab nationalism that evolved during the early years of the region’s postcolonial history, seems to be imploding. The feeling of an organic communion that was generated by the first phase of Islamic revival, exemplified by pan-Arabism is now giving way to violent notions of sectarian political ontology represented by the radical exclusionary groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (called here after as the ISIS). These developments have not only engendered a new phase in the political topography of the MENA region but also opened a fresh chapter in the diachronic history of global jihadi movements.

ISIS, Third Wave of Jihadism and the Prognosis of Imminent Entropy

The emergence of the ISIS that is motivated by a paranoid sectarian political ontology and a megalomaniacal fantasy for establishing the hakimiat-e-ilah (rule of god over the earth) and ghlaba-e-islam (supremacy of Islam) epitomises the sectarian foundations of identity politics that germinate and thrive in situations of State collapse and drastic erosion of the State’s capacity to govern. The ISIS emerged to be the largest and richest terror challenge, flourishing out of unremitting civil wars in an unstable post-conflict Iraq and Syria under a severe domestic tumult. Both countries exemplify conditions of total breakdown of the State structure and the ensuing social anomie. Being bred in this fertile ground, the ISIS has heralded the beginning of the third wave of jihadism which forms part of a continuum of the first and second waves that occurred during the 1980s and the 1990s, respectively. Currently, ISIS has acted as the catalyst in jeopardising the structural formulations of both State and society in Iraq and Syria and also spread sectarian fire in the region. It is a creature of accumulated grievances of ideological and social polarisations and mobilisations. As a non-State actor, it represents the transformative movement in the politics of the Middle East, one that is qualitatively different from the Al-Qaeda centrals (Gerges, 2014, pp. 341, 342–343).

With this, the trail of Islamic revival seems to have entered a dreaded new phase that threatens to pulverise whatever the Islamic civilisation has achieved till today. Providing a foil to all this is Islam itself as a religion and ideology that has the world’s wealthiest financers. The region has seen decades of assistance by the rich Sunni monarchies, such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf to create, nurture and use Islamic extremist groups to bolster the imperial grand strategy of the USA, Britain and France, coupled with the surreptitious role of their petrodollars in spreading wahhabism. As a result of this, wahhabism and Islamic extremism seems to have struck an unholy alliance wherein wahhabism has completely enveloped the mainstream Islamic teachings.

The genealogies of this development are largely rooted in the Afghan conflict that began in 1979 with what has been termed as the first wave of jihadism. The Saudi export of Wahhabism as a terror ideology into Afghanistan became the main ideological instrument of this wave (ibid., p. 341). For Saudi Arabia, the goal that impelled their involvement in Afghan war against the Soviet Union was the necessity to counter the rise of Shia Iran (Barnett, 1997, p. 179). However, the instrumentalisation of Islam and the sponsorship of the propagation of radical interpretations of its sacred texts proved to be perilous. Saudi’s oil wealth facilitated the global infection of an obscurantist and contaminated version of Wahhabism, a kind of Wahhabism that would not even be endorsed by its philosophical father, Abd al-Wahhab. He had not approved of any form of pre-emptive violence, but today, thanks to Saudi nourishment, multiple versions of horrendous terror methodologies are being espoused by groups such as the Al-Qaeda and the ISIS (Hussain, 2015).

This version of extremist Wahhabism seeks to promote the facade of puritan Islam, by imposing a linear singularity to the meanings of the canonical precepts of the medieval prophetic mission. Such an imposition is bolstered by a rigid monovalent literalism that advocates death penalty to all violators of this very dogmatic doctrine. However, the target of this extremist exclusionary norm is not merely non-Muslims of the Middle East like the Christians, Jews or the Yazidis. Rather any Muslim, be it Sunni, Shi’a or Sufi who do not confirm to this nefarious ideology, have been traumatised by its protagonists (Crooke, 2017). Such a distorted variant of wahhabism lies at the ontology of the existence of several radical Islamic groups, constituting the foundational ideology that determines their motto and actions and acts as an emblem of their identity (Carranca, 2018). The ISIS has also emerged as an extension of the global jihadist movement that is rooted in this ideology which is a concoction of radical Islam and wahhabism. Through a theology of takfirism (forceful imposition of religion and declaring Muslims as apostates), and a non-secular political agenda, the ISIS has committed violent excesses not only against non-Muslims but also the believers of Islam of Arabia in particular and of the world in general (Adang, Hassan, Maribel, & Sabine, 2016, p. 12). The underlying agenda that is beneath such philosophy of violence has been ISIS’s aim to impart a metastatic impact to its divisive ideology. This ideology itself rests upon a deviant political motif that advocates the creation of the Ummah (community of believers) and the Caliphate (the Islamic conception of the State), which the ISIS considers as the essential pillars of puritan Islam (Stanford University, 2017).

Besides this ideological bedrock, the worldview and social origins of the ISIS are also considerably influenced by specific context of the domestic turmoil in Iraq and Syria. While Al-Qaeda’s central organisation emerged from an alliance between ultra conservative Saudi Salafism and radical Egyptian Islamism, ISIS was born of an unholy union between an Iraq-based Al-Qaeda and the defeated Iraqi Ba’athist regime which has proved to be a lethal combination (Gerges, 2014, p. 339). The ISIS is largely a jihadi organisation that claims to practise pure Islam. In pursuit of this, it engages in transnational terrorism for the creation of god’s rule through a violent struggle (jihad) and defends the Muslim community (Ummah) from infidels and apostates (ahl-e-Kufr-o-shirk). Through a politico-military and excessively impious interpretation of Islamic doctrines and practices, the ISIS seeks to promote Islam as a discourse of armed jihad, rather than as a religious and moral guideline to enlighten humanity in the path of spirituality and faith.

The ISIS emphasises upon interpreting jihad from the dimension of its meaning as armed fight (qital), entirely obliterating the larger and true meaning of jihad which refers to a struggle for inviting people to the path of god (dawah) (Stuart & Ali, 2014, pp. 11–12, 51–52). Implying that the instrumentalisation of the term jihad into a code of violence by the IS has distorted its actual connotation and eclipsed its inner spiritual significance (Nasr, 1987, p. 28). Militant jihad for the ISIS is both a collective responsibility (Fard-e-kifayah) and also an individual duty (Fard-e-Ayn) which all able Muslims must perform like prayer and fasting during the month of Ramadan. Most significantly, the agenda of ISIS is not merely to target the near enemy (al-Adou al-Qarib) or the far enemy (Al-Adou Al-Baid). Rather its motif of establishing an IS (the Caliphate) under the Government of Allah guided by the Sha’ria and its subsequent promise to deliver what it calls as the pure Mohammadan Islam makes it different from other radical Islamic movements (Gerges, 2016, p. 28). In keeping the spirit of this agenda, ISIS leader Ibrahim Awwad Al-Badri (Alias Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also known as Abu Du’a declared himself as the Caliph in June 2014).

The ISIS then appealed to all the Muslims of the world to extend their allegiance to the new Caliphate and declared that making migration(hijrah) to its territory is an individual obligation of all Muslims (Dabiq, 2014, p. 11). As a result of this, the number of extremist organisations that have declared allegiance (bayat) to the ISIS has been exponentially multiplying, enhancing their global traction. The group went on to receive pledges of allegiance from terrorist organisations from Egypt, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya (Muir, 2017). The primary motivation that impelled ISIS to make such an appeal is its ideology that delineates a plan for revival of the era of classical Islam that existed during the period of prophet Muhammad. This appeal is also predicated upon ISIS’s conviction that it is the catalyst to bring in the realisation of the prophecies made in Islamic eschatology pertaining to qayamat (the day of judgement) and ma’ad (resurrection). In accordance to this view, the ISIS itself is the agent that would lead towards the fruition of the prognostication pertaining to the end of the world, and hence, its declaration of the Caliphate and a bid to establish pure Islam is a kind of teleological culmination of this prediction (National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies [NCEIS], 2016). In this way, the rationalist perspectives to Muslim life advocated through a sociology of knowledge is being attempted by ISIS to be subordinated to a canonised form of religion which is driven by conservative dogmas and atavistic beliefs.

Further, the ISIS has sought to accomplish its goals by opposing what has been called as diluted Islam (iltiqati), democracy (Government of the people, by the people and for the people) and aims at making the entire world Muslim by cleansing (tanzif) all other religions. Through this, the ISIS claims that world peace would be created because then, there would be no division between the house of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the house of war (dar al-harb). The ISIS, in this sense, resembles the seventh century Kharijites, specially its radical wing the Azraqites, the followers of Nafi al-Azraq. It is attempting to emulate what the Azraqites did in the early period of the emergence of Islam, that is, to terrorise people with their barbaric acts. This is done to establish pure Islam and induce among people, a kind of fear of god (Hitti, 1937, p. 247). The ISIS has also adopted the Azraqite practice of istirad that is to compel people to make their belief explicit and the option here is either ISIS’s own view of Islam or death. In this manner, the ISIS practices takfirism, even as the Qur’an clearly prohibits such a practice (Abubakar, 2014). It has derived the theology of takfirism from its foundational ideologue and progenitor Abu Musab al-Zarqawii, whose Jihadi agenda was rooted in fierce anti-Shi’a sectarian ontology and a violent ideology to define as to what is apostasy (NCEIS, 2016). Deviating from the authentic epistemic tropes of classical exegetic scholarship on Islam and following its mere pedantic interpretations, the takfiri theology of ISIS has declared as apostates (Murtadd), all those Muslims who tend to reject its Caliphate (Dabiq, 2016, pp. 28–43; Jackson, 2002b, p. 113).

In pursuit of such a political motif of barbarism, it advocates a doctrine of total war with no restraints (Gerges, 2014, p. 342). It aims at a regressive enforcement of the practices of the medieval era. Through modes of killing and the use of punishments like stoning and crucification, engaging in gory acts such as beheading, amputation and burning to death and carrying out of slave trade and forceful marriages, it seeks to overturn the civilisation to the premodern Dark Age. It may be stated here that by doing all this, the ISIS seeks to transform religion into what philosopher Bertrand Russell called as ‘the source of fear, cruelty, and partly the terror of the unknown’. The conception of god promoted through such means cognates with the ideas of the same, expounded under oriental despotisms, unworthy of free men and their self-respect (Russell, 2005, p. 18).

More crucially, as the substance of the actions of ISIS embodies a dominant tilt towards an emphasis on a sectarian political ontology; the IS has emerged as an enemy of the spirit of tolerance and pluralism that Islam incarnates (Bunzel, 2015, p. 11). This is demonstrated by its hostility against those Muslims whom it regards as being not the followers of pure Islam. In the name of pure Islam, it has not only targeted the Shias and the Sufis but also attacked those Sunnis whom it considers as not practising pure Islam (Nawaaz, 2016). Paradoxically, the ISIS also vows to create a Caliphate to govern over the entire Muslim Ummah. Such a contradicting vision, rooted in a sense of sectarian religiosity, is bolstered by the epistemology of terror that seeks to curtail all dissenting voices and merely valorise fragmented articulations of a fringe. Overall, ISIS is a terror organisation of the digital age with its psychology mired in the pre-Islamic Medieval Arabia.

Genealogies of Contemporary Transnational Jihad and the Coming of ISIS

External intervention and the subsequent radicalisation of Islam in Iraq and Syria can be regarded as merely one factor that has led to the mushrooming of the extremist jihadi organisations and also accentuated the current sectarian predicament. Although it played as a vacillating agent, external intervention cannot be assigned the role of being the sole progenitor and a seminal force in engendering this morass. Hence, we should go beyond the trappings of a US-centred explanation of the current Middle East disorder and concentrate on the internal dynamics within the region that exposed themselves to the arbitrary meddling by external forces. It needs to be recognised that contrary to the conventional thinking, the crisis of the territorial State in countries like Iraq and Syria did not begin with the US military engagement in the region (Canefe, 1996, p. 100). The crisis rather is rooted in the turbulence that marked the postcolonial transition and the subsequent internal socio-political developments.

The domestic tumult which was ontological to the conditions of postcolonial transition got intensified with the fall of Saddam regime in Iraq and the civil war in Syria. Due to this, the socio-political and ideological contradictions in these countries resurfaced, portraying itself in the current climacteric juncture. One major source that provoke these contradictions can largely be attributed to the conflicting stalemate between the Sunni and the Shia militias which have emanated out of a process of crystallisation of politicised religiosity, leading to pressing problems of the territorial State in Iraq and Syria (Hazran, 2010, p. 521). Most significantly since the Gulf crisis, leading to the current circumstances, neither Iraq nor Syria can claim to possess a unitary polity or a cohesive national community (Tibi, 1999, p. 94).

Several circumstantial compulsions have factored deeply in the fructification of the contemporary Middle East conundrum. First, after the era of pan-Arabism that witnessed interweaving of States in the Middle East into organic ensemble attenuating critical contrapuntal interests, the region seems to have declined into a disparate in cohesive whole, characterised by a violent anarchy. The anarchy itself is marked by a transition from the first phase of Islamic revival that exhibited the organisational capacity of Islam to the second phase that demonstrated its disruptive capabilities as a violent ideology. This phase brought in with it, a sort of people regime divide in which there has been an increasing behavioural and attitudinal radicalisation against the legitimate State authority. Another feature of the transmogrification in the phases of Islamic revival has been the establishment of primordial local attachments as the leading mechanism of identity politics, a process determined by a transition from problem ideologies to political sectarianism (Hazran, 2010, pp. 540–541). The process of identity formation in such scenario gets stagnated into mere emphasis on the ascribed identity formation model. Individuals in such circumstances are engaged in very little critical reflection regarding the meaning of their being Muslim because religious identity was taken for granted as part of their everyday lives. Thus, there remained little space for cognitive conception of their religious identity (Peek, 2005, pp. 224, 226, 230).

In this regard, it must be understood that the adherence of the conflicting sectarian groups to their primordial loyalties has been the defining factor of contemporary politics of Iraq and Syria. This is important to fathom as to how the non-State terror organisations like the ISIS have gained adequate space to shape their terror methodology in the doctrinal framework of Wahhabi political ontology and allowed them to emerge as the prime catalyst in deepening the Middle East sectarian conundrum. It should also be comprehended as to how the ISIS distorts the semantic implications of Wahhabism and euphemistically uses its semiotic meanings to construct an obscurantist concoction of an ideology of violence that cannot be subjected to interrogation under any proper cannons of philological analysis and principles of hermeneutic reinterpretation. In addition to this, the ethnological factors that have profoundly contributed to sustain the sectarian void in the contemporary Middle East must also be reckoned with. In this context, what we need to understand is the ways in which the Shia/Sunni unrest that demonstrated apparent signs of disturbance at a metaphysical level since centuries but was in a state of political hibernation, got abruptly fomented. Most crucially, this has not happened through any pan-Sunni/Arab sentiment that cohered together multiple State actors, but by the distorted concoctions of violent Islamism and sectarian political ontology done by radical Islamist groups like the ISIS. In other words, there was a shift from State-led pan-Arabism that characterised the politics in the Middle East during the decades of the 1950s and the 1960s, to a societal political sectarianism, rising from an Arab-Islamic public (Valbjorn & Bank, 2012, p. 17). Such a transition from a modern notion of State-sponsored Arabism embedded in the principle of balance of power, towards a focus on the non-State societal resurrection of sectarianism, finds its inspiration not in modern politics but in the primordialist cultural links which has structurally influenced the workings of modern international politics in the Middle East.

If we attempt at exploring the roots of Shia Sunni schisms, the event that can be taken as the first decisive phase of history is the crisis of succession that occurred after the death of Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD. Shiaism was born as a refusal to let go the charismatic moment of Muhammad’s prophetic mission, and the Shias have sought to perpetuate that charismatic moment by transferring it from the prophet to their imams and then from the imams into the doctrinal institution of the Imamah, and from there, personified in the present absence of their last Imam. Due to this thrust upon the charismatic moment, the Shias believe that a grave injustice was perpetrated when their charismatic Imam (leader) Ali, the son in law of the prophet, did not succeed the prophet as the legitimate leader of all the Muslims. On the contrary, the institution of Caliphate was established under Abu Bakr by the majority of Muslim community who went on to be called as the Sunnis, the followers of Sunnah (the ways of the prophet). They did not believe in the principle advocated by the Shias that the members of prophet’s family had the legitimate claim to become the leader of all Muslims. Rather for Sunnis, succession had to be based on the prevalent tribal custom of electing the most respected elder of the community as the leader, based on consultation (shura) and consensus (ijma/jama). After these contested notions regarding the mode of succession were interplayed, the Shias emerged as the minority for whom the inaugural charismatic moment was first to be represented by the figure of the prophet himself and later in the paradoxical institution of the Imamate, as against the Sunni belief in the Caliphate established through a more democratic process (Dabashi, 2000, pp. 481, 484, 487).

The second defining moment in this history of paradoxes has been called as Karbala paradigm that is the remembrance of the martyrdom suffered by the third Imam HusaynIbn Ali and his followers in an extremely uneven battle against the army of Caliph Yazid of the Umayyad dynasty on the tenth day (Ashura) of the Muslim month of Muharram in ad 680. Husayn was the son of Ali, the fourth Caliph and grandson of the prophet, and his martyrdom forms an intrinsic part of the succession debate between the Shias and Sunnis. As for the Shias, Husayn had the legitimate claim for leadership which was forcefully suppressed by the Caliph Yazid, who then emerged as the emblem of oppression and the Karbala battle itself turned out to be a living narrative of the injustice meted out to the Shias (Ram, 1996, pp. 67–68). Since then, the Karbala paradigm has acted as a metaphor that represents the collective memory of Shia suffering, coupled with an enduring anti-Sunni rage.

The two decisive episodes of Islamic history discussed earlier, generated a disenfranchised Shia community that faced serious existential predicament under powerful Sunni Islamic empires. This became fertile ground for Shia and proto-Shia sentiments and movements. The inspirational source for these reactions has been an agitative memory of the inaugural moment which has been deeply engrained in the Shia ethos. In the modern times also, Shiaism, as a conscience collective, remained persistent on the insurrectionary birth beat of Islam and its defining moment (Dabashi, 2000, p. 487). Due to this, the medieval sectarian hostilities got rekindled which currently manifests in the political rivalries among the States of the Middle East. First, this happened through the Shia Islamic revolution in 1979 and its protracted conflict with a Shia majority Iraq having a Sunni regime under Saddam Hussein.

The Iran–Iraq war has been the longest conflict in the history of modern Middle East (Takeyh, 2010, p. 365). Although the conflict was engendered by politico-military causes, it assumed sectarian overtones. It was played out on the turf of the deep-seated cultural enmity between Iran and Iraq, premised upon a sense of incompatible and imminently hostile societies, characterised in the Shia/Sunni sectarian divide. The Iran–Iraq conflict, thus, got constructed as one crucial episode in this 1,400-year-old history of dynastic feud between the two sects of Islam (Al-Khalil, 1989, pp. 262–264).

Iran’s revolutionary Shia Islamism and Iraq’s Sunni Arab nationalism became central to the conflict (Karsh, 2002, p. 13). The Iranian discourse on the war and enduring rivalry was woven around the rejuvenation of the injured self (Shiite Iran) and the oppressive other (Sunni Iraq). It often involved the annulment of chronological time and entering into a mythical time which is at once both contemporary and primordial. As a result of this pulling down of time space barriers, the twentieth-century Iran–Iraq war emerged as the seventh-century battle of Karbala (Ram, 1996, p. 79). Thus, Iranian campaigns against Iraq during the 1980s were also named as Karbala-I, Karbala-II, Karbala-III and so on (ibid.). Such a mobilisation was nurtured through a theocratic populism based on Islam that was xenophobic in character (Afrachteh, 1981, p. 16).

The Iraqi regime’s domination by the Sunni Arabs and the treatment of the country’s Shia majority population as an underclass provided considerable steam to this conflict of ideologies (ibid.). At this juncture, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini also called the Iraqi Shias to overthrow the Ba’ath regime and bring in a Shia revolution (Karsh, 2002, pp. 13–14). As a result of all this, at the end of the war, Iran’s Shia Islamic revolution had been strengthened, and also it got highly radicalised (Nasr, 2007, p. 140).

At the other end of this kaleidoscopic spectrum stood Iraq which underwent through a lamentable state of socio-political clutter. The war with Iran had considerably weakened the socio-economic architecture of Iraq which was further enfeebled during the first Gulf war and the subsequent economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought all this to a fruition point. The ensuing socio-political vacuum that it generated contributed significantly to the radicalisation of sectarian political ontology and widened the gulf between the Shias and Sunnis (Editor, 2007, p. 1). After the toppling of the Saddam Regime, there was an immediate rise of popular institutional and political Islam on both sides of the Shia/Sunni divide. Iraq then began to tread the path of entropy, descending from a secular Ba’athist rule towards a socio-political structure driven by sectarian interests (Jabar, 2003, p. 12).

Such a scenario was heralded by a horrendous civil war which began in 2004 as a primarily urban guerrilla struggle by Sunni insurgent groups. These groups through their insurgency hoped to regain the power held by the Sunnis under Saddam Hussein (Fearon, 2007, p. 5). This was the time when Afghanistan was witnessing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda leaders and cadre being forced to go on a run owing to the US military intervention. Abu Musab al-Zarqawii, who had fought in Afghanistan, was one such Jihadi. The politico-military turbulence in Iraq, provided Zarqawi with an opportunity, and he fled to Iraq and joined the Ansaral-Islami, a militant Kurdish organisation. Zarqawi and his militants initially participated in the Iraqi insurgency under the name Jama’at al-TawahidWa’al-Jihad. By 2004, Zarqawi extended his allegiance to the Al-Qaeda and waged a battle against the USA and its local allies in the name of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The Al-Qaeda which was considerably decimated in the 2001 Afghanistan war found a fertile ground for its own recuperation, and it exploited the tumult in Iraq by aggravating the civil war until Zarqawi was killed by a US Air Strike in 2006 (Patterson, 2016; Weaver, 2006).

Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who took over the leadership of the al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), sought to affect a paradigm shift to the organisation, functioning and objectives of the group. In a bid to magnify the local appeal of the group, he changed its name as the IS of Iraq and also appointed an Iraqi, Abu Umar al-Baghdadi as the group’s leader in Iraq. In a way, for the first time, an extremist organisation had attempted at defining itself in terms of bounded territoriality. This was unprecedented as the hitherto transnational Jihadi groups endeavoured at the globalisation of their radical activities to make their presence felt. Masri, for the first time, provided a thrust on definite territoriality, thus laying the foundations of what we know today as the IS. The objectives behind the naming of an extremist organisation as a State were apparent. Masri intended to convince the local populous that the AQI was still the potent organisation to fight the USA and the coalition forces, gain recognition from other global jihadi organisations and advance the process of State formation and State construction to take charge of Iraq after the withdrawal of the US and the coalition forces. This was also to state that the AQI was all set to fill the political void that had set in the post-Saddam Iraq. In 2010, both Masri and Umar al-Baghdadi were killed in a joint US-Iraqi operations, and the group which was in total disarray was taken over by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. However, until the US remained in Iraq, the activities of the group were quiescent (Stanford University, 2017).

The USA retreated from Iraq in 2011, albeit leaving the task of democratic transition through military means unfinished. A post-Cold-War foreign policy ideal, rooted in the normative Wilsonian tradition of Victorian America, now appeared as a miscalculated romantic fascination. Iraq’s misadventure was also considered as a Wilsonian nightmare (Anthony, 2008, p. 240). A sustained sectarian political unrest that continues till date, tend to provide credence to this phenomenon. The sectarian conundrum provided steam to the process of revitalisation of the IS of Iraq and facilitated its emergence from a dormant state. The subsequent US intervention of Syria in alliance with Saudi Arabia, amidst a raging civil war during the same year, brought the entire process into a full circle. In Syria, the internal turmoil, aggravated by US interference on the pretext of Syria’s chemical weapons, provided with a great opportunity to the Syrian Sunni extremists, who were major stake holders in the civil war. For the IS of Iraq, which was galvanised by a reductionist sectarian ideology, motored by a dogmatic interpretation of Jihad, this was an ideal occasion to partner in the spoils of Syria. Hence, it began to collaborate with the Syrian Sunni extremists to establish the Jabhat al-Nusra which declared its allegiance with the IS of Iraq making the latter the unquestionable leader of the Jihadi groups in the region (Lister, 2014). In 2013, the IS of Iraq changed its name to the ISIS and was also begun to be called as the IS of Iraq and the Levant or, the IS of Iraq and al-Sham. The al-Qaeda attempted at restricting the expansion of ISIS beyond Iraq and to accomplish this objective, it opposed the merger of ISIS with the Jabhat al-Nusra. However, al-Qaeda failed in its endeavours, leading to the complete severing up of its ties with the ISIS by early 2014.

Subsequently, the ISIS came to be known as the IS, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He had proclaimed himself to be the Caliph in June 2014 by declaring the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate. The IS’s Caliphate in its height of success, covered parts of Iraq and Syria controlling a territory almost the size of Britain and a population that approximated nearly 10 million. However presently, the IS is imploding. With the loss of strong fortresses like Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria and with most of its top rank leaders being killed, the Caliphate ceased to exist and the ISIS is reduced merely to an extremist fringe. It is now controlling only 3 per cent of Iraq and 5 per cent of Syria and the number of foreign fighters who are coming to defend the Caliphate has also considerably shrunk (Chaulia, 2017).

Though the fighting power and the ability of the ISIS to muster resources may be vaining (Diyab, 2017), its violent rhetoric embodied in a notion of monovalent literalism and the linear singularity of interpreting canonical text that drive its political ontology, still seems to be rapidly disseminating globally (Meadows, 2017). Despite the military successes of countries like the USA and Russia against the ISIS in Syria and Iraq, the ideological challenge posed by it still remains immensely divisive. Rather, the virulence of IS’s ideology is deepening and it is finding new breeding grounds in moderate Muslim societies in regions such as Central, South and South East Asia (Zakaria, 2017). In the Middle East too, weakened central authorities in a prolonged conflict situation and enduring regional, sectarian and ethnic divides, may tend to facilitate the constant nurturing of extremist groups like the ISIS and their exclusionary ideologies (Ahmad, 2017).

ISIS, the Sectarian Conception of Ummah and the Caliphate

One of the factors that lie beneath the contemporary quagmire in the Middle East has been ISIS’s exclusionary sectarian notion of Islamic Ummah and a parochially crafted notion of a Caliphate. Affirming a sort of post-Westphalian trope that ridicules both territoriality and secularism, the contours of this extremist sectarianism has been simultaneously transnational as well as non-secular. This violent exclusionary doctrine neither has space to accommodate the modern Westphalian conception of the territorially designed Middle East and an Arabic notion of politics based on a sense of regional solidarity. Nor it allowed space for the sociological notion of a polyphonic Muslim community that comprises of several sects and sub-sects. Hence, the ideology of ISIS has been described as being grounded in a totalitarian and millenarian worldview that shuns the notions of a liberal public sphere, competitive cultural topography, political pluralism and social diversities (Gerges, 2016, p. 27).

Locating itself on the plank of this ideology, the ISIS endeavoured at creating its own sectarian conception of the Islamic Ummah on the foundations of its contaminated and deviant interpretation of the theological maxims of Wahhabism. The dominant feature of this Ummah for the ISIS is that all forms of cultural contradictions, antagonisms, hybridities and boundaries of nations are sublated into an utopian sense of pure Islam which is directly under god’s rule (hakimiat-e-ilah). However, this theological utopia has emerged merely as a camouflage for ISIS to justify its acts of terror and barbarism. In the name of achieving this utopia, ISIS has affirmed to contest apostasy (rida), in Islam which according to it is a potent signifier of impure or diluted Islam (iltiqati), that poses a profound challenge in the way of establishing a realm of pure and undiluted Islam (darul-Islam). In accordance to ISIS’s envisionment of the geopolitical and cultural cartography of the abode of pure Islam that is occupied by true Muslims (Momin), the Shi’as and the Sufis emerge as apostates because they are alleged of indulgence in heresy (Zandaqa) and practice of polytheism (Shirk/Mushrikin). Such sectarian political ontology of the ISIS must be understood from the perspective of its conception of ‘pure Islam’. For the ISIS, the notion of pure Islam means that the confessional identity of being a Muslim that is the declaration of creed (Aqida) must correspond with explicitly charted actions (Amal) in the community of believers, implying that the believers’ faith must be proven and those who fail to do this, irrespective of their sects, are not pure Muslims.

This failure then is equivalent to unbelief, and those people who are part of this mistake are not true Muslims and can be designated as apostates. It is exactly to carry out this very task of differentiating between belief/unbelief and, the true Muslim/Apostate, that the IS claims to be fighting. Advocating this position, Baghdadi has stated:

O Muslims! Do not think the war that we are waging is the Islamic State’s war alone. Rather it’s the Muslims’ war altogether. It’s the war of every Muslim in every place, and the Islamic State is merely the spearhead in this war. It is but the war of the people of faith against the people of disbelief, so march forth to your war O Muslims. (Dabiq, 2015, p. 54)

In defence of this, the ISIS has killed fellow Muslims whom it considers as apostates since they have not been able to pray properly (Abubakar, 2014). Thus, in pursuit of its goals, the ISIS has attempted at an arrogation of the epistemological space of Islam by disseminating its own dilettantish understanding of the scriptural canons of the religion (Weiss & Hasan, 2015, p. 41). This is because it has not consulted authentic exegetic sources for a deeper understanding of the real spirit of Islam. But rather, relied on the narrow Internet-based interpretations of some atavistic Ulema, who believe in spreading hatred and violence in the name of god and religion (McCants, 2015, p. 83). As regards ISIS’s conception of the Caliphate, it may be stated here that Baghdadi’s declaration emerges merely to be an empty signifier that does not commend any theological value. This is because it does not lay out any ideas to its followers pertaining to the modalities of State formation and State construction. Moreover, Baghdadi had not flashed out his vision of a Caliphate but merely declared it by fiat which contradicts Islamic law and traditions (Gerges, 2014, p. 342). Above all, in Islam, the beliefs concerning the Caliphate itself have been considered as auxiliary and not foundational to the fundamental canons of religion (Stuart & Ali, 2014, p. 46). Apart from this, the use of the term Caliph and Caliphate in the modern context itself is also a spatio-temporal misnomer.

According to Islam, a Caliph is the vice-regent or the deputy of god on earth who leads a Caliphate which is a unified Islamic entity that encompasses the whole of the Muslim world. He leads the entire Muslim community during prayer, heads the civil government, acts as the commander of the armed forces and is also engaged in matters of religious interpretation and jurisprudence. Such a stature in Islam was held only by the prophet Muhammad and the four rightly guided Caliphs. During this early part of Islamic history, the government was purely based on the Qur’an and the Sunnah. It, hence, meant that people would lead their lives in accordance to the ordainment of god. For the later rulers of the Muslim world beginning with the Umayyads, the institution of the Caliphate and its head, the Caliph was merely a trope to legitimise their authority and did not convey any concrete political, military, religious, cultural and juridical meaning that the term originally embodied. As the ideal of the Muslim Ummah had assumed imaginative overtones because of the large swaths of the land and populous of believers that the Islamic empires controlled, the term Islamic Caliphate also emerged as to be only a metaphoric manifestation of Muslim religious unity. Hence, the terms like the Caliphate and the Ummah were retained for their decorative usage in a bid to sustain political territoriality which was supposed to be defended through the power of faith. The transcendental and ethical values that they commended during the early years of the birth of Islam had now been lost. The rulers of the Islamic world who succeeded the four rightly guided Caliphs did not possess in a single whole, the multifaceted and multilayered qualities that they possessed. The erudite qualities that the four rightly guided Caliphs possessed in the spheres of religion, reason, jurisprudence, politics, warfare and most significantly, spirituality, were not successfully emulated by the later rulers of the Muslim world.

Above all, the question of the succession of power that had set in after the first civil war of Islam during the Caliphate of Muawiyah, witnessed the decline of the sanctity of the institution of Caliphate. A decline that saw its culmination with the establishment of the Umayyad kingdom and this transition from the Caliphate to a kingdom was never to be reversed again. Islamic Caliphate has now become a closed historical event, and there is no one to execute the Shari’a worldwide (Fyzee, 2005, p. 37). Hence, ISIS’s notion of the Caliphate can be seen merely as a delusional assertion for the reclamation of past glory. Such a delusion is mired in a narcissistic emphasis on the purity of its own notion of Islam, that is, undergirded by a pathological distaste for those Muslims who do not adhere to its sectarian political ontology and contaminated interpretations of Wahhabism.

The Caliphate of ISIS is also un-Islamic because for any Caliphate to be established, acceptance of the entire Muslim community is essential. It cannot be institutionalised with the aspiration of merely a few Muslims, intending to declare the establishment of a Caliphate in a limited part of the world. The primary requirements that are laid out in Islam for the declaration of a Caliphate are consultation (Shura) and consensus (Ijma/Jama’ah), among Muslims. Any violation of these principles would deem such a Caliphate to be un-Islamic (Abubakar, 2014, p. 15). Here, it may be stated that far from being any way near to the Caliphate of early Islam, the IS’s claims are merely of a terror organisation. The rise of ISIS may then be seen as a reaction of disgusted extremist war lords who sought to exploit the political vacuum in Iraq and Syria and not as a legitimate process of State formation. Mainly, because the declaration of Statehood by the ISIS is neither part of any civilising process and nor drawing its legitimacy from any anti-colonial nationalism. The Caliphate of ISIS is also illegal because it is neither the result of any social contract between the ruler and the ruled, nor is it a result of any international conflict, civil war or a revolution. It is simply a vague territorial claim, made by an extremist organisation that is bereft of any other attribute of the legitimate process of State formation.

In addition to this, if we consider the basic principles of political obligation, so cogently affirmed in the famous phrase of English idealist T. H. Green, who writes in Principles of Political Obligation, that ‘Will, not force is the basis of the State’, the claims of legitimacy in terms of the formation of the State by the ISIS stands on a precarious foundation. The ISIS Caliphate is situated not on the plank of popular consent. But, it rests upon a code of violence that has a tendency for forceful imposition that is guided by ISIS’s flawed premodern, pre-Westphalian and non-secular conceptions of fixity of political territoriality (Fletcher, 2005, p. 33). This conception for the ISIS can only be defended by an adherence to the notion of a violent offensive Jihad (Jihad al-talab) (Jackson, 2002a, pp. 1–26). Hence, the ISIS has completely distorted the Islamic notion of world order which hinges upon a principle of perpetual peace, by visualising international relations only in terms of the canon of perpetual conflict that is instrumentalised by a permanently warring State (Zahra, 1964, p. 51).

On this count, it may be argued that the call for the establishment of a State by the ISIS indicates merely towards an attempt by an extremist organisation founded upon the instrumentalist use of religion to transform the international public debate and policies of governments by replacing the secular order and islamising it by making a case for god’s rule. Here, the divine authority is supposed to substitute nation state based on democracy or the peoples’ rule, positive law and human legislation with the revelation-based substantiation of the Sharia. In this manner, religion has become the key stone of not only the policies of the IS but lies at the very heart of its constitution, emerging as the law of the land. This is because the IS declares the existence of gods’ sovereignty, founded upon the Sharia-based governance structure. Sharia here is understood purely in the sense of its explanation in terms of revelation and not premised upon its rationalist interpretation (Usul al fiqh). Sharia as revelation hence has become public law for the ISIS. Such a position of the ISIS tends to challenge the notion of secularisation as differentiation, and the norms of the Westphalian synthesis, mainly pertaining to States’ restraint in matters of religion and its reverse (Philpott, 2002, p. 84).

Conclusion

The IS has tried to question the legitimacy of the structure of modern day international order. Through a radical political theology of Islamic revival, it has attempted to provide a delusional alternative to the Westphalian international order by advocating the possibility of the political absolution of the Islamic Ummah that would obliterate the barriers of modern transnational cartography, comprising of sovereign nation states. The ISIS in this manner aimed at anthropologising the geographic space that it forcefully acquired, into a monolithic Islamic cultural structure. However, the modern world order constituted by normative traditions of Westphalian synthesis renders the transnational appeal of the Islamic Ummah to be chimerical. In the structured cartography of contemporary world order, it emerges merely as a metaphysical grand-narrative and not a political reality. It must also be understood that the Islamic world today is embedded in distinct ethno-nationalistic, racial, linguistic and political geographies and is not boxed into a single rubric.

Hence, the Statist imagination of a single Islamic Ummah framed in the metaphor of the Caliphate may emerge as an anthropological derangement, historical anachronism, sociological utopia and a political misnomer. The Islamic concepts like Ummah and the Caliphate contextually accommodate better into the specific episode of early Muslim history and now merely commend normative value and lack any objective palpability. Emerging out of the ashes of post-imperial local discontent like the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda, the ISIS as an idea also is devoid of any discursive worth that commends puissance to negate the dominant epistemological narratives of mainstream Islam. Acting as a fringe sensation, the ISIS does not reflect any symbol that augur towards apocalyptical doctrinal transition in the deep-rooted and long-standing progressive nomo-centric, logo-centric and homocentric beliefs embodying the scholastic articulations of Islam.