and the pitfalls of condemning ISIS on Islamic grounds

Journal of Religious and Political Practice

ISSN: 2056-6093 (Print) 2056-6107 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfrp20

Dis/connecting Islam and terror: the ‘Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi’ and the pitfalls of condemning ISIS on Islamic grounds Manfred Sing To cite this article: Manfred Sing (2016) Dis/connecting Islam and terror: the ‘Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi’ and the pitfalls of condemning ISIS on Islamic grounds , Journal of Religious and Political Practice, 2:3, 296-318, DOI: 10.1080/20566093.2016.1222735 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2016.1222735

Published online: 07 Oct 2016.

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Date: 14 October 2016, At: 08:43

Journal of Religious and Political Practice, 2016 VOL. 2, NO. 3, 296–318 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20566093.2016.1222735

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Dis/connecting Islam and terror: the ‘Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi’ and the pitfalls of condemning ISIS on Islamic grounds Manfred Sing Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz (Germany)

ABSTRACT

When Muslim individuals or groups perpetrate acts of violence, Muslim scholars are routinely required to condemn the ‘misuse’ of Quranic verses, and scholars of Islamic studies have to ‘explain’ the distant relation between classical jihad and modern terrorism. Most critics of an organization like the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) refute a direct link between its violence and Islam. However, they paradoxically take this link seriously enough to discuss it in detail or discard it entirely, by attributing it to an ‘Islamophobic’ perception of Islam. As misuse is still a kind of use and distance a kind of closeness, these experts risk reconstructing the connection that most of them wish to undermine because their criticism, by aiming at ISIS or ‘Islamophobia,’ still conjures up an Islamic imaginary. The article draws attention to the pitfalls in talking about so-called ‘Islamic terrorism’ and sheds a light on the under-researched politics of condemnation, in which Muslims are routinely called upon to engage. A case in point is the ‘Open Letter to al-Baghdadi,’ published by 126 religious scholars in 2014, which condemned ISIS on religious grounds. The author argues that such a condemnation contributes to an asymmetrical perception of Islam and an ideological understanding of terrorism. It reiterates truncated understandings about the root causes of political violence, while failing to address the thorny issue surrounding legitimate forms of violence. The main problem bedeviling the critics of Islamically justified terrorism is the ambiguous nature of a terror organization like ISIS, whose communication strategy forcefully targets Muslim as well as non-Muslim audiences and their attempts to vindicate or blame Islam.

KEYWORDS

Terrorism; Islamophobia; religion; violence; Salafism

Terrorism, mass media, and discursive counter–strategies Since 9/11, Muslims are regularly required to issue condemnations of terrorist acts before being allowed to speak in public. So, from early on, Muslim representatives have also condemned the proclamation of ‘the Islamic State’ (ISIS)1 CONTACT Manfred Sing

[email protected]

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group


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and its caliphate in 2014 (Mandhai 2014; Leung and Sandmayer 2014), and in the meantime every major Arab or Muslim organization has done so while religious and secular Arab and Muslim intellectuals have published self-critical manifestos (Bidar 2015; Marquardt et al 2015). In spite of the numerous attempts to distance Islam from terrorism, the debate is kept alive by a vast swathe of op-ed articles which try to prove, relativize, or disapprove of the Islamic character of ISIS (M. Hussain 2014; Jenkins 2014a; Keleş 2014; McDonald 2014; Pilger 2015; Wood 2015; Terry 2015). Against this background, the ‘Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi’ is an interesting case for several reasons. It was published in September 2014 and signed by 126 Sunni scholars from across the world, refuted Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s claim to the caliphate, and explained that ISIS had misinterpreted Islam ‘into a religion of harshness, brutality, torture and murder’ that constituted a ‘great wrong and an offence to Islam, to Muslims and to the entire world’ (‘Open Letter’ 2014: 25). The Open Letter, firstly, represents an ‘Islamic’ critique in the sense that its authors and signatories exclusively draw on Islamic material, mainly the Quran and Hadith, to disapprove of ISIS’s acts and justifications in 24 points on 25 pages. Secondly, as an early Islamic critique of ISIS, it is often cited as an important and authoritative document (A. Hussain 2014), which purportedly shows that Islamic theology has ‘the argumentative resources to counter the claim that violence perpetrated in the name of Islam is covered by verses from the Koran’ (Amirpur 2014a). However, as the following analysis will show, the condemnation of ISIS on Islamic grounds is, thirdly, characterized by symptomatic pitfalls and inconsistencies. And, fourthly, as the enduring debate on the Islamic-ness of ISIS reveals, the Open Letter not only had a very limited impact on this debate, there is also a near-complete academic and media disinterest in dealing with the letter and its argumentation. In a wider context, the Open Letter represents the difficulty of Muslim and non-Muslim scholars to create a thorough and consistent discursive counter-strategy and make themselves heard in the debate on so-called ‘Islamic terrorism.’ The inevitable attraction of discussing whether ISIS is Islamic or not is linked to the terrorists themselves, because they brand their deeds as a consistent application of their belief. In this context, terrorism can best be understood as a communication strategy that aims at the mass media. Violent acts by non-state actors are primarily meaningful not as military acts but rather as a media spectacle through which these actors try to communicate with different audiences and summon potential sympathizers to follow the path of action and leave mere talk behind. The spectacle of terror is inseparably interwoven with the mass media’s coverage on it, which selects atrocities and produces news in proportion to the proximity and destructivity of violent acts, while keeping a low profile in other cases (Elter 2006; Waldmann 2006; Tinnes 2012) Today’s Jihadists not only have a more professional media strategy than their leftist and Islamist predecessors, they are also well-versed in spreading uncensored material in the age of the internet, because they no longer depend on the official

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mass media’s indirect support (e.g. Musawi 2010). Leftist terrorist groups in the 1970s mainly communicated in one language. Al-Qaʿida’s main language in the 1990s was Arabic, and its indirect media support came from the then newly established Arab satellite channels like al-Jazeera. By comparison, ISIS has published declarations and videos in more than 20 languages, and its permanent media and internet presence contributes to its notoriety. With the ‘Islamic terror’ that it spreads, ISIS has achieved domination over the world news in a disproportionate manner2 and framed public debates about Islam all over the world. This further contributes to its attractiveness for followers, who are reportedly recruited from more than 70 nations. Spokesman Abu Muhammad al-ʿAdnani has called upon Muslims from all countries to migrate to the ISIS-controlled region, the caliphate, and to commit acts of violence against non-believers in the West by any means possible. In this atmosphere of suspicion and threat, the resulting securitization of Islam is not a miscalculation by ISIS; on the contrary, it is a central element of a communication strategy which aims at social polarization and especially at ordinary Muslims who are permanently coerced into explaining themselves. Self-reflective answers to this challenge, which problematize the talk about the ‘Islamic’ in contexts of violence, are conspicuously absent from the media debate on Islam. Rather one finds attempts to vindicate ‘Islam’ or blame ‘Islamophobia’ both of which risk reconstructing the line of argument that their authors wish to undermine, namely that Islam and terror are erroneously linked together, and we first have to understand Islam before we can understand terrorism. This problem already occurs in scholarly treatments of the question of whether Islam is an inherently or particularly violent religion. After discussing Quranic verses and the doctrine of jihad in Muslim legal history, such an analysis routinely stresses that ISIS and other militants ‘go beyond classical Islam’s criteria for a just jihad’ (Esposito 2015: 1073). In order to deconstruct the Islamic nature of ‘Islamic terrorism,’ the expert points out that ‘focusing on reading the Quran . . . can obscure the importance of . . . the political conditions that terrorist movements exploit’ (ibid: 1079), namely the policies of authoritarian and oppressive regimes and their Western allies. Having said this, political violence by Muslims is then defined as ‘a product of historical and political factors, not simply religion or a militant Islamic theology/ideology’ (ibid: 1079); ‘the primary drivers’ of violence are identified as ‘political grievances with the appeal to religion as a source of identity, ideology, legitimation, and mobilization’ (ibid: 1072). Although well thought, such a deconstruction of the Islamic nature of violent acts committed by Muslims is inconsistent insofar as it re-constructs an underlying correlation between non-classical understandings of jihad and modern political conditions in which both the contribution of politics to Islam and of Islam to violence does not really seem minor with respect to ‘identity, ideology, legitimation, and mobilization’. Even more obvious is this ambivalence in the criticism of ‘Islamophobia’ because the term retains and rejects, at the same time, a focus on Islam by arguing


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that others wrongly perceive the issues under discussion as Islamic, so that their perception is rightly condemned as Islamophobic. In its weak version, the critique of ‘Islamophobia’ indicates that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are decent people and that most victims of so-called ‘Islamic terrorism’ are Muslims as well, while ‘Islamophobic’ prejudices have it otherwise. As this argumentation implicitly reiterates the ‘culture talk’ on ‘good Muslim, bad Muslim’ (Mamdani 2002), the strong version also polemicizes against ‘liberal Islamophobes’ who dare not declare all Muslims their enemies, although their policy targets them indiscriminately (Kumar 2012: 186–189, 193–196). The strong version more poignantly argues that ‘the Muslim peril’ is – discursively – an invention of Western academia, media, and politicians and – practically – the creation of Western secret services or the effect of policing tactics on the domestic fronts or a reaction against Western interventions abroad or the sum of it all (e.g. Mamdani 2002; Kumar 2012; Kundnani 2014). Yet, neither Western complicity in the emergence of Jihadism nor calling Islamophobia ‘the dominant form of racism in Europe today’ (Mahamdallie 2015) does away with, but stokes the debate surrounding the question whether it is (il) legitimate to call movements like ISIS un-Islamic or even ‘very Islamic’ (Wood 2015). Rather, the critique of Islamophobia re-affirms the political importance of things Islamic or perceived as Islamic; this is even more striking in view of the fact that the critics of ‘Islamophobia’ understand it as an element deeply ingrained into, if not necessary for, racism, capitalism, imperialism, and neo-liberalism (Kumar 2012; Kundnani 2014). In spite of its radical opposition to Eurocentrism, this criticism inadvertently remains open to ideas about a binary between the West and Islam, a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Samuel P. Huntington 1996), insofar as this binary is de-constructed as objectively wrong, but politically useful for the West.3 Against this background of unavoidable self-contradictions in explaining and condemning so-called ‘Islamic terrorism,’ one can sense a growing unease among Muslims over the demand that they should dissociate themselves from terrorism ‘in a more decisive way’ (e.g. Amirpur 2014b; Gül 2015; Süğür 2015; Topçu 2015). Instead they argue that distancing themselves from ‘Islamic terrorism’ does not change the fact that terrorists kill innocent people; it only fosters the fallacy that all Muslims are part of the terrorism problem while, in reverse, ‘these brutes are part of us. They are part of society. . . . They don’t come from Mars’ (Gül 2015). Thus, the central questions arise: What can a different response to the terrorization and securitization of Islam look like? Is it really useful to engage in a debate on what ISIS has or has not to do with Islam when ISIS outlets and Islamophobic spin doctors suggest that ISIS expresses the very spirit of Islam? To answer these questions, I analyse the Open Letter’s argumentation and its deficiencies. I then put these in the wider context of misconceptions about the triangular relationship between religion, modernity, and violence in which ‘religious violence’ is always already connoted as ‘medieval’. These misconceptions are not simply based on Islamophobia, but help to create discursive strategies, which structurally treat Islam as something different and exclude non-Islamic factors

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from the explanation of ‘Islamic terrorism’. As ‘Salafism’ has become a powerful signifier to explain ‘Islamic terrorism,’ I then turn to the ideological kernel of ISIS, arguing that it can be seen as a hybrid, massively ‘Westernized’ phenomenon. My overall argument is that the Open Letter unwittingly follows the mainstream discursive strategies as it focuses on the question of the Islamic-ness of ‘Islamic terrorism’ and thus mimics the mass media’s neglect of violent, geo-political, and social contexts. Arguments and deficiencies in the Open Letter In general, there are three slightly different ways of condemning ISIS on Islamic grounds. The first is to argue that ISIS members are no Muslims at all – not because of what they believe or how they justify their acts, but simply because of what they do to other people. This argument presupposes a substantial definition of what makes a Muslim a Muslim, and is problematic from an Islamic perspective, because the technical term for declaring a Muslim a non-Muslim is takfir. So if you, as a Muslim, say that ISIS members are no Muslims, you replicate exactly what ISIS does and from where it deduces the right to kill other Muslims on the grounds that they are apostates. Suffice it to say, the issue of takfir has a long, controversial history in Islam (Adang et al 2015) and the majority’s view is – grosso modo – that only God can see into a person’s heart and He will decide on judgement day who really is muslim and muslima. The second way of condemning ISIS is arguing that it is a deviation from Islam like the Kharijites in early Islam, who fought against both Sunni and Shi’i Muslims in order to force their belief upon other people. This argument has become quite popular in recent months, especially among Sunni and Salafi scholars. It rightly identifies that ISIS expresses a tiny minority position inside Islam and is not even uncontested in salafi or jihadi circles. However, this argument – implicit in the Open Letter – affirms the authority of majority and consensus and delegitimizes not only ISIS, but minority positions in general. It underlines the right of the Islamic establishment to define Islam and questions the right of minorities to do so. This argument represents a mirror image of the ISIS claim that its jihad is a revolt not only against the West, but also against the corrupt Islamic elite. The third method of condemnation is to argue that the deeds and justifications of ISIS are not consistent with the doctrine of Islam. Here, Islam is identified as a good force or a force of/for the good, made popular in the notion that Islam means ‘peace’ or that the bigger jihad is the one against one’s weaker self. The Open Letter revolves around the central term of ‘mercy’ (rahma). Its argument tries to dispel the prejudice of Islam’s specific propensity to violence, but unwillingly reconnects violent – albeit deviant – behavior to Islam. It refutes the link between extreme violence and Islamic convictions, but takes this link seriously enough to discuss it in detail.


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As indicated, the Open Letter employs the second and third lines of argument. The signatories condemn the ideas, justifications, and acts of ISIS, but they do not condemn ISIS as un-Islamic.4 This must be understood against the background of the inner-Islamic takfir debate and against the fact that takfir is a technical term used by the Jihadists themselves. Among the first signatories of the ‘Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi’ one can find several high-ranking public figures, Sufi sheiks, and American Muslims, but also a public intellectual like Ed Husain from the Quilliam Foundation, a Londonbased ‘counter-extremist’ think tank.5 However, the Open Letter presents itself as a purely religious and legal discussion of the sayings and actions of ISIS. This is partly due to the fact that many of the religious personalities who signed the letter hail from the network of 138 Muslim scholars who also signed the open letter ‘A Common Word between Us and You’ in 2007 in response to Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture, in which the Pope had touched on the subject of Islam and violence by quoting a Byzantine Emperor (RABIIT 2012). The ‘Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi’ thus continues a common Muslim effort to oppose the notion that violence and organizations like ISIS are essentially Islamic phenomena and that Muslims have done too little, too late to fight them. The letter was at first published in Arabic and English and has subsequently been translated to German, French, Spanish, Bosnian, Hungarian, Dutch, Turkish, and Persian, hence addressing ‘two’ audiences, a Muslim and non-Muslim one. It is a central aspect of the religious approach in the letter that the Muslim scholars deny the ISIS Fatwa Council (Diwan al-Iftaʼ wa-l-Buhuth) the qualification to declare jihad and takfir and imply that the ISIS Fatwa Council issues complacent juridical opinions to the military and political leadership of ISIS, which do not follow from rigorous Islamic scholarship. Although this charge may be right, the scholars move on shaky ground when they try to deprive ISIS of its Islamic garment by treating ISIS as a phenomenon guided by political, not religious, considerations. Firstly, the line separating the religious and the political is not clear-cut; secondly, many of the signatories from Muslim countries are civil servants or close to their respective states and qualify as ‘the sultan’s jurists’ (fuqaha al-sultan), to use an expression coined by the Egyptian theoretician of the ‘Islamic Left’ Hassan Hanafi (b. 1935); and thirdly, the letter itself certainly has a political background. The majority of its first signatories comes from Egypt (38) and the US (21), while there is only one (Sufi) signatory from each of Syria and Saudi Arabia and only two from Iraq.6 The other signatories are distributed over the other Arab countries (28), Europe (14), the rest of Asia (11), and the rest of Africa (8). This American-Egyptian majority clearly hints at the fact that political and public pressures contributed to the genesis of the letter. In the case of US scholars, their engagement was a reaction to the public debate on Islam; in the case of Egypt, the signatories tend to support the new military state which, after the overthrow of Mohammad Mursi’s government in mid-2013, treats the Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS as fruits of the same tree.

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Beyond this peculiar twist, perhaps the biggest failure of the Open Letter is that it refrains from drawing legal consequences from the discussion of the 24 points in which ISIS behaves un-Islamically. Since the letter poses as a jurisprudential text, ISIS’s deeds are characterized as massive violations of Islamic norms and Islamic law and as ‘heinous crimes’ (Open Letter 2014: 13, 15, and 21) and the perpetrators are called ‘war criminals’ (ibid: 13). However, there is not a single sentence declaring which institutions should hold ISIS accountable or how its crimes should be punished. Instead, the letter calls on the leader and his followers to ‘reconsider all your actions; desist from them; repent them; cease harming others and return to the religion of mercy’ (ibid: 25). Why did the signatories to the Open Letter bother themselves to cite all those Islamic sources only to reach such a vague conclusion? On the one hand, they certainly want to say that their Islam represents the true version of ‘the religion of mercy’ in contrast to the ISIS version of brutality – a religion which is so merciful that it even accepts the repentant sinner. On the other hand, the entire letter is underpinned by the argument that ISIS ‘have given the world a stick with which to beat Islam whereas in reality Islam is completely innocent of these acts and prohibits them’ (ibid: 21). This is not only a trans-historical reification of a ‘completely innocent’ Islam, quite similar to the opposing notion of a guilty Islam produced by Islamophobes; it is also inadequate from a legal or juridical point of view. Given that Islam is innocent of such crimes, Islamic law (shariʿa) should at least provide some ‘resources’ (Amirpur) on how to deal with heinous crimes and war criminals other than being merciful – which, after all, is one of God’s attributes. As such, the letter does not argue about the legitimacy of violence (the word ‘violence’ occurs only once, the word ‘terrorism’ not at all), only about the question of who is entitled to speak for Islam. The 24 points of condemnation revolve around deficiencies, inaccuracies, and the lack of authority in the practical application of Islamic rules, norms, or historical examples which are applied mercilessly – and thus contrary to their real sense. This approach and its deficiencies run through the whole text. Methodologically, it is no surprise that the Open Letter starts by quoting a statement by ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-ʿAdnani: ‘God bless Prophet Muhammed who was sent with the sword as a mercy to all worlds’ (‘Open Letter’ 2014: 2). The scholars explain that ʿAdnani mixed the Quranic verse ‘We did not send you except as a mercy to all worlds’ (Quran 21:107) with a phrase from a Hadith saying ‘sent with the sword,’ thus distorting the universal message of (God’s) mercy. In spite of this, the scholars do not engage in a general discussion about the status of Quranic verses and Hadith material on violence in history and modern times. They do also not take offence at Salafism as such which gives as much credit to Hadith sayings as to Quranic verses – because many Salafists reject ISIS, even though ISIS understands itself as a salafi group. Technically speaking, the Open Letter represents an attempt to formulate a document of consent. Therefore, the


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mainly conservative and sufi scholars argue against ‘severity’ (al-shadda) as a form of ‘exaggeration and extremism’ (Open Letter 2014: 7): ‘When there is a difference of opinion among eminent scholars, the more merciful, i.e. the best, opinion should be chosen . . . The more severe opinion should not be considered more pious, religious or sincere to God’ (ibid). The scholars, however, do not comprehensively tackle the ISIS ideology and its narrative of a continuous Western onslaught on Islam. They subdivide this narrative into bits and pieces, against which they present point by point Quranic verses, Hadith traditions, and scholarly quotations from earlier centuries. This approach is similar to what they deplore ISIS for doing; however, in their first point of criticism the scholars claim the superiority of their own approach when they argue that one must ‘consider everything that has been revealed relating to a particular question in its entirety, without depending on only parts of it’ (ibid: 3). They reject ‘[quoting] a verse, or part of a verse, without thoroughly considering and comprehending everything [emphasis in the original] that the Qur’an and Hadith relate about that point’ (ibid).7 Apart from the fact that such a demand for maximal comprehensiveness would make legislation and jurisdiction very complicated, if not impossible, their own argument resembles the cherry-picking that they castigate. A consistent, contextual counter-argument – of the sort that argues the Quran was revealed under circumstances in which slavery was widespread, but that the Quranic regulations on slavery were rendered obsolete as soon as slavery was abolished – is missing from the Open Letter (Duderija 2015). When it comes to veiling (Open Letter 2014: 12), corporal punishment (ibid: 13), and the call for jihad (ibid: 6–9), the scholars do not propose concrete different solutions, they only oppose the ISIS practices of total veiling (‘they dress according to your whims,’ ibid: 12), mass mutilation, torture, and other extreme acts of violence which also involve children as perpetrators and victims (ibid: 13). In addition, they do so without discussing the historical examples on which ISIS draws; they mainly cite counter-examples. While ISIS maintains that all the historical examples of early Islam comprise normative and ethically acceptable models, the Open Letter tries to mitigate the brutality of some episodes by relating them to the overall ethos of mercy, thus creating a less violent version of early Islam which glosses over the polysemy of religious texts and their at least patchy glorification of violence. Thus, the Open Letter gives no answer to the question of how bloodthirsty episodes relate to the Islamic ethos, because both stand side by side, unrelated. In justifying violence and slavery, ISIS generally draws on historical examples from early Islam, for example on Muhammad’s treatment of one of the three Jewish tribes in Medina, the Banu Qurayza. Under the accusation that the members of this tribe had violated the mutual aid pact, the tribesmen were summoned to gather and dig their own graves. One after the other was decapitated; women and children were sold as slaves. With regard to slavery, the counter-arguments in the Open Letter are that Muhammad had freed all slaves in his possession by the end of his

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life, that the abolishment of slavery was an aim of Islamic law, and that ‘Muslims, and indeed the entire world, have been united’ (Open Letter 2014: 12) in their efforts to criminalize and prohibit slavery and achieve this ‘milestone in human history’ (ibid), one which has been ‘considered forbidden by consensus for over a century’ (ibid). Yet, historically, slave markets were increasingly restricted from the mid-19th century because of European pressure, but the Ottoman Empire refrained from enforcing the prohibition of the slave trade on the Arab peninsula due to strong local opposition. Slavery was only officially abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962. While most 20th century religious scholars regarded slavery as part of Islamic history, but not of Islam, some salafi scholars held the view that slavery has never been explicitly abolished, neither by the Quran nor by Muhammad. Another telling example is how the scholars respond to ISIS’s appeal to Muslims to migrate to the newly established caliphate in Syria and Iraq. They divide their counter-argument into two points (‘national affiliations’ and ‘emigration’) (ibid: 15–16) and first (nationalistically) argue against the call to leave Western countries by explaining that ‘patriotism and loving one’s country does not contradict Islam’s teachings, rather, loving one’s country stems from faith’ (ibid: 15), an argument that is accompanied by the doubtful clarification that ISIS distributes the lands of Iraq and Syria ‘among people who are strangers to those lands, even though they are of the same religion’ which is ‘exactly what Israel did when it invited Jewish settlers from abroad to immigrate to Palestine’ (ibid). In a second step, the scholars (Islamically) oppose to the idea that Muslims should emigrate to the region controlled by ISIS by quoting Muhammad’s saying that ‘there is no emigration after the conquest [of Mecca]’ (ibid: 16). The difficulty with this argument is, first, that the Hadith refers to Muhammad’s situation and, second, that historically the scholarly consensus was that Muslims should leave their lands whenever they were occupied by non-Muslims and the free practice of religion was threatened (Meier 1991). The Open Letter does not refer to this consensus, which would have allowed for a more consistent and polemical counter-argument by calling upon Syrians and Iraqis to leave the lands controlled by ISIS – a call that would have not only hinted at the curtailment of religious freedom by ISIS, but would also have been in line with the reality of the largest mass exodus since World War II and would have reminded Western as well as Muslim countries of their duty to give refuge to the homeless and persecuted. Theoretical misconceptions about religion and violence It goes without saying that (1) Muslims today are confronted not only with prejudice, discrimination, and hostility, but also with a whole array of state security measures, including surveillance, rendition, secret detention, torture, and extralegal drone killings, to name but a few, and that (2) the social and economic crisis in European societies as well as the security and foreign policies of European governments and their geo-political involvement in the Middle East and Africa contribute to the condition of the possibility of violent reactions.


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What is lost in mainstream debates about ISIS, is this inter-connectedness of violent phenomena.8 While the discriminations of Muslims in the West and the failures of Western policy in the Middle East form two core arguments in ISIS propaganda, astonishingly, the ‘Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi’ completely fails to address or even mention these grievances. That the Open Letter focuses on the Islamic illegitimacy of ISIS, but keeps silent about Western domestic and foreign policy, and makes it compliant with the mass media which also exclusively focus on the Islamic-ness of extremists. Western mass media and political statements often turn a blind eye to Western violence and its consequences and instead employ an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary in which ‘Islamic terrorism’ and its atrocities are exaggerated as existential threats (Mueller and Steward 2012) and its victims are publicly bemoaned, while other victims are simply forgotten. On a rather general level, ‘claiming that Islam has a violence problem implies that ‘the West’ does not’ (Halverson 2015). Even if one does not wholly agree with the formula that ‘the terror we give is the terror we get’ (Hedges 2015), it would be essential to consider the economic and military structures as well as the contexts of violence and brutality in which terrorism is embedded. The neglect of the inter-connectedness of phenomena not only obfuscates important factors that contribute to the emergence of terrorist violence (Boubekeur 2008), it is also part of complex discursive mechanisms that foreground Islam as a cause of violence. Many analyses of ISIS confound Islamic justifications with Islamic causes, thus solely placing ‘the blame for extremism on an internal factor’ (Ghilan 2015) – on Islam, Arab societies, or a mentality from a bygone age. Since many ISIS supporters have grown up in European, not Arab societies, in non-religious, sometimes even non-Muslim families and with a criminal record, not a record of piety, the focus on the Islamic-ness of their motivations – by dubbing them for example ‘Allah generation’ – tends to exclude them and treat them as aliens in European societies (Kiefer 2015). Different reports from Cairo to London further show that Islam often only played a role for an astonishingly short period in similarly disturbing personal trajectories (El-Naggar 2015; Hussein 2015). Even given that the Islamic factor would constitute the decisive trigger that finally ‘radicalizes’ young people at the end of a longer process, the disposition to become susceptible for radicalization would still be created by non-Islamic factors – among them the sense of one’s place in society. In this context, it has become quite pervasive to use the term ‘Islamophobia’ – which was coined in the mid-1990s to describe Muslim experiences of discrimination – to criticize the anti-Muslim atmosphere in the so-called ‘war on terror’. In this atmosphere, it is not only political spin doctors who regularly talk about Muslim identity as a root cause of terrorism, but non-Muslims, Muslim ‘informants,’ media, and politicians construct a wholesale negative image of Islam for various reasons (e.g. Kundnani 2014). That the mass media focuses its attention on the cultural and theological aspects of Islam, which presumably prevent Islam or Muslims from adapting to modernity, is an integral part of such Islamophobic

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perceptions (e.g. Kundnani 2014). These perceptions do not take into consideration that it might have been the impact of modernity, which has caused the ‘Islamization of Islam’ (Al-Azmeh 1993) and transformed its ‘culture of ambiguity’ (Bauer 2011), hence often turning it into a rigid, all-too-literalist, and ideological version of itself. Although the discourse on ‘Islamophobia’ has a good point, it also has several blind spots. The insistence that Islamophobia is ‘about politics not religion’ (Kumar 2012: 193), avoids directly tackling the question of religion and Islam. Furthermore, the very term ‘Islamophobia’ is problematic since it de-constructs stereotypes about Islam, but stresses their political, social, and geo-political importance for Western societies, which are presumably bound together by a widespread Islamophobic consensus reaching from the far right over liberal to feminist voices (e.g. Toor 2012). This discourse on the functionality and importance of one-sided perspectives on Islam ignores that ‘Islamophobic’ tropes can also be found elsewhere, even among Muslims. Jihadists, for example, could also qualify as ‘Islamophobes,’ insofar as they despise Muslim diversity and nourish Islamophobic stereotypes in their attempt to frighten other Muslims and non-Muslims. And critics of Islamophobia and Jihadism, like the signatories of the ‘Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi,’ can likewise fall prey to the common bias in the mass media that might otherwise be classified as ‘Islamophobic’. The focus on Western ‘Islamophobia’ underrates Muslim agency as well as the point that ‘Islam matters’ (Sayyid 2003: 40) and hence does not really do justice to the inter- connectedness of perspectives and events. Rather, the dominant view expressed by critics of the phenomenon is that Islamophobia is a discourse that feeds itself while the success of groups like ISIS is simply a reaction to it. As there are obviously Islamic as well as non-Islamic push and pull factors that contribute to the rise and attraction of ISIS, the two main assumptions about its Islamic character – that ISIS either expresses the very essence of Islam or has nothing to do with it – are inaccurate. Thus, the debate on the Islamic or u n-Islamic character of ISIS – as well as the debate on the Islamophobic character of the whole discussion – leads us astray from considering the ISIS phenomenon in a broader context. What is mostly missing in discussions of ‘Islamic terrorism,’ is a more fundamental questioning of the nature of political violence and its relation to religion and state power. Even in the academic understanding, there are two major misconceptions about the relationship between religion, modernity, and violence, which mystify the analysis of political violence and lie hidden, deep below the surface of Islamophobic stereotypes: (1) Although (or maybe because) most religions have an ambivalent relationship with violence and have historically approved different forms of physical, structural, and symbolic violence against believers and non-believers (Juergensmeyer, Kitts and Jerryson 2013), there is a common view in today’s ‘secular age’ (Taylor 2007) that religiously legitimized violence is particularly illegitimate. In a functionally differentiated society, religion is meant to care for the spiritual world and preach


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tolerance, while politics has the monopoly to use force. It seems that only Islam is yet to understand this model of job-sharing – and this is why there is a lot of talk about the need to secularize or reform Islam. (2) Although mass murder is a rather frequent phenomenon in modern history, the sociological understanding of the holocaust in particular and of genocidal violence in general surprisingly only plays a marginal role in the sociology syllabi and research agendas, even as the discipline tries to explain the inner life and nature of modern societies (Christ 2011; Christ and Suderland 2014). A common view implicitly held by many sociologists is that modernity – in spite of all its genocides and wars – is less violent than previous ages, a thesis famously argued for by Norbert Elias (1982 [1939], 1989) in his ‘civilizing process,’ as well as in his reflections about the German development in the 19th and 20th century. Both these misconceptions about the relation between religion and violence as well as between modernity and violence play out in the case of so-called ‘Islamic terrorism’. They underpin the view that acts of violence committed by Muslims are illegitimate because of their religious nature and anachronistic because of their medieval nature. As these views rest on an age-old structurally asymmetrical anthropology of non-Europeans (Latour 1993), they also build the fertile ground for discursive strategies that constitute (1) modern Islam qua religion as a pre-modern and especially violent phenomenon and (2) ISIS as a socially and politically unrelated phenomenon coming from nowhere else than pre-modern and inherently violent Islam itself. Such views are even directly or indirectly fostered by representatives of Islam and other religions. After the Paris attacks on the caricaturists of Charlie Hebdo and the customers in a Jewish supermarket in January 2015, there was a manifesto released in the German tabloid Bild, signed by a Catholic, a Protestant, two Jewish, and a Muslim representative under the title: ‘It’s not allowed to kill in the name of God’ (Glück et al 2015). This wording sounds awkward, since commandment no. 5 or 6 says: ‘Thou shalt not kill’. The attribution ‘in the name of God’ does not only narrow the sense, but suggests that killing in the name of other things – democracy, liberation, or greed – might be acceptable and religiously tolerable. In the few sentences of this manifesto, the differentiation is not be made between legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence, but between the legitimate and illegitimate use of the name of God. What bothered the religious representatives was the non-authoritative misuse of God’s name for the purpose of violence – similar to the argument in the ‘Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi’. This is self-contradictory insofar as representatives of the self-same religions have called for more determined military action against ISIS, clarifying that praying will not be enough to stop ISIS from persecuting, murdering, and enslaving Muslims, Christians, and Yezidis in Syria and Iraq. The apparent asymmetry here is that representatives of Islam are constrained to publicly condemn violence in the name of their religion, while there is a broad consensus that it is absolutely natural to use violence against groups like ISIS or the Taliban in spite of the concomitant

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civilian losses – a consensus that is often accompanied by the argument that ‘we’ have to save Muslim or non-Muslim women from radical Muslim men (e.g. Toor 2012). This intricate problem plays out in different ways, for example in US President Barack Obama’s use of sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah’s pledge for peace. Mauritanian scholar Bin Bayyah, a first signatory of the ‘Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi,’ is regarded as a prominent critic of Jihadism. He has argued that military tactics are not enough to fight Jihadism because Jihadist thought can only be challenged by intellectual efforts, although this might only bear fruit in the long run (see Al-Jadda and Chaudary 2014). In this context, he said: ‘We must declare war on war, so the outcome will be peace upon peace’ (Temple-Raston 2014). Obama, in his address to the United Nations, quoted this sentence, yet added with regard to ISIS that ‘no God condones this terror’ and ‘the only language understood by killers like this is the language of force’ (Obama 2014). Since then, however, the Obama administration has systematically avoided talking about an Islamic or religious brand of terrorism and substituted instead the new term ‘violent extremism’ – much to the dismay of writers like Ayaan Hirsi Ali who criticized the ‘strange’ decision ‘not to call violence committed in the name of Islam by its true name – jihad’ (Hirsi Ali 2015). No matter whether terrorist acts are labeled as an expression of ‘violent extremism,’ ‘Islam,’ or ‘fundamentalism,’ it still leaves the discursive asymmetry intact. All of these labels suggest that extremists, Muslims or fundamentalists have a high propensity to irrational violence, although, in reality, none of these groups agrees upon the use of violence, let alone terrorism. Therefore, such labels fail to explain what they are used to explain. Legally and logically, they fail to do so because they tend to categorize acts by ideology without taking contexts, situations, and personal experiences into account. The reference to ideologies with their blurry boundaries cannot explain why individuals move between violent and non-violent standpoints or turn towards violent action at a given moment. Such purely ideological classifications– especially the category of ‘new’ and ‘religious’ terrorism (Neumann 2010) – simply mask a lacuna in the explanation of political violence. ISIS and its Westernized Salafism For this lacuna, the term ‘Salafism’ is a particularly good example. One the one hand, Salafism is an ambivalent phenomenon ranging from quietist and apolitical to politicized and violent branches (Meijer 2009), on the other hand, the term itself – like Jihadism – is a relative newcomer in the mass media, but has become a powerful signifier in the whole discussion on terrorism. It was not used before 2000 (Hegghammer 2009: 248, Fn. 8), but then quickly spread as a designator for a radical version of Islam, ‘although there is considerable debate and disagreement about what constitutes Salafism’ (ibid: 248) Salafism, as a term, harks back to the example of ‘the good forefathers’ (al-salaf al-salih). However, it is much debated


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among Salafis as well as among non-Salafis who belongs to the salaf, which of the transmissions – collected in six canonical Hadith collections – are valid and applicable to which contexts and whether the direct recourse to these sources is really possible without interpreting them. As most recent theoreticians of jihad like Abu Musʿab al-Suri, Muhammad al-Maqdisi, and Abu Bakr al-Naji (Lia 2009; Wagemakers 2012; Jenkins 2014b) understand themselves and their historical ‘predecessors’ Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) or Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1792) as Salafis, the misconception has gained currency that Salafism is a radical form of political Islam. Yet, among the most outspoken critics of Jihadism there are many Salafists who rank the avoidance of fitna (political and social chaos) higher than the obligation for jihad, including the prominent Syrian Hadith scholar Nasr al-Din al-Albani (d. 1999) (Lacroix 2009) and the Saudi scholar Rabiʿ al-Madkhali, who critically engaged with the application of takfir and the teaching of Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), one of the fathers of modern jihadi thinking (Meijer 2011). Several salafi scholars have published their condemnation of ISIS in English (SalafiManhaj 2014). And, to make the picture more complicated, several prominent advocates of Jihadism like Muhammad al-Maqdisi and Abu Qatada, who are often quoted by ISIS, have openly denounced ISIS, its warfare, indiscriminate killings, and claim to the caliphate. The rivalry between al-Qaʿida and ISIS has caused this split inside the ranks and loyalties of Jihadists (Alshech 2014; Ackermann et al 2015). ISIS, like all Jihadists, summons true Muslims to fight back against the enemies of Islam whose violence against Muslims is always already there. Yet, the practical application of this narrative by ISIS – slavery, atrocities, and ‘excessive’ takfir – has earned it severe criticism even among jihadi and salafi circles, meaning ISIS is not even representative of contemporary Jihadism, although it is certainly a new start-up from its bosom. Ironically, the longest rebuttal of modern Jihadism was penned by the Egyptian Sayyid Imam al-Sharif aka Dr. Fadl, a former advocate of the Egyptian Jihad and of al-Qa’ida (Wright 2008). He, while still considering himself a salafi, revised his own views point by point in a treatise of 1000 pages in 2004, arguing that takfir had been excessively applied to other Muslims, that jihad was used to kill civilians and justify bloodshed, yet has made things not better, but worse in Arab and Muslim countries, especially after 9/11, which he called a catastrophe for Muslims. Thus, he urged al-Qaʿida to stop its violent activities in the Arab world and globally, since these were forbidden according to Sharia and jihad rules. These points earned him a rare and 200 page answer from al-Qaʿida’s Ayman Zawahiri, who argued: I neither condone the killing of innocent people nor claim that jihad is free of error . . . Keep in mind that we have the right to do to the infidels what they have done to us. We bomb them as they bomb us, even if we kill someone who is not permitted to be killed. (ibid)

At the bottom line, one of the leading figures of Jihadism invokes a rather simple ethical tit-for-tat guideline to justify mass killing. Salafism is not the category that can explain this resort to extreme violence; it is itself a category in need of

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explanation. It is certainly interesting for scholars of religions to see that fundamentally different positions can be developed by the salafi method. However, even a precise description of the ideological diversity inside Salafism cannot explain why, when, and how some of its adherents move in violent directions. A similar ambivalence applies to the Salafist battle cry of ‘Westernization.’ In spite of their differences, most Salafists agree that ‘Westernization’ is the main problem for Muslim societies today. ISIS calls Saudi Arabia an ‘apostate regime’ (Women of the Islamic State 2015: 39), whose TV channels abound with ‘prostitution and corruption,’ whose universities are ‘wide open’ to Western scholarship, whose ‘university of corruption’9 allows males and females to ‘mingle in the hallways, as if they were in an infidel country in Europe,’ and whose government perpetrates a ‘myriad of offences’ against women and destroys their ‘chasteness and purity’ while ‘the only matter that it does brag about now is its forbidding women’s driving’ (ibid). ISIS shares this critique of ‘Westernization’ with violent predecessors like the Ikhwan and the Kaaba occupiers, but it also deviates from them in important ways. (1) The Ikhwan, the Bedouin fighters who played an important role from 1912 to 1926 in bringing about the Kingdom of Saudi-Arabia and subsequently rebelled against King ‘Abd al-’Aziz b. Sa’ud: they understood the introduction of the telephone, telegraph, and automobile as signs of Westernization, despised modern weaponry, and opposed the order to stop raiding neighbouring countries. Ibn Sa’ud decided to subdue the rebellious Ikhwan leadership with his troops, which were equipped with machine-guns, had a cavalry, and were supported by British military vehicles and four airplanes. (2) The group of 500 men who occupied the Kaaba district for two weeks and demanded the cessation of oil delivery to the US and the expulsion of all Western professionals in November 1979: they resented women’s education, football, and what they called ‘video machines.’ The leader of the intruders, Juhaynam al-Utaybi, publicly decapitated after the violent end of the seizure, was the son and grandson of rebellious Ikhwan leaders and his ideas were a source of inspiration for the influential theoretician of jihad, Muhammad al-Maqdisi, who since the 1980s has attacked the House of Saud as unbelievers (on him Kazimi 2005; Wagemakers 2012). Compared to these predecessors, ISIS is itself a ‘Westernized’ phenomenon, with regard to (1) its modern arsenal of weapons and vehicles, in which the use of knives and swords for beheadings merely constitutes a folkloristic element; (2) its use of videos and modern communication tools; (3) its use of Hollywoodstyle footage to respond to Hollywood blockbusters (see Bond 2015); (4) its recruitment of Western professional converts; (5) its call – in spite of its decrial of women’s education – to well-educated women from the West to join the ranks of its all-women branch, the so-called Khansa’ Brigade (Eleftheriou-Smith 2015) and its female police squads; and (6) its use of football as a propaganda and recruitment tool. During the World Cup in Brazil in 2014, ISIS members made


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use of the conservative and salafi scholars’ dislike of naked thighs and football (Dorsey 2014a) in a peculiar way by tweeting a video which showed how they mutilated the dead bodies of their victims by kicking their severed heads around (‘This is our ball. It’s out of skin #World Cup’) (Dorsey 2014b). In the Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi, the scholars did not expose the propagandistic value of ISIS’s maniac references to football during the World Cup, but felt it imperative to clarify that football is ‘a sport that is permissible in principle in Islam and which allows people to relieve stress and forget their problems’ (Open Letter 2014: 21). The authors once again miss the point by only thinking in legal terms of permissibility and prohibition – as if it was a question up for serious discussion whether kicking around heads or balls would conform to Islamic norms. While the authors are concerned with judging dozens of details from an Islamic point of view, they are unable to grasp the hybrid character of ISIS and the arbitrariness of its Westernization narrative on a more general level. Conclusion As the terrorist communication strategy aims at social polarization, and as the ‘war on terror’ is still ongoing, we have, in the last few years, experienced a growing yet biased demand for Islam-related explanations and rituals of condemnation in the public sphere. This article has argued that Muslims as well as scholars of religious and Islamic studies are doomed to choose only between bad options when trying to talk about the dis/connection of Islam and terror under these circumstances. Especially Muslims find themselves trapped in a difficult position because they are urged to condemn terrorist violence and sometimes even held accountable for its victims, while there is no similar interest in hearing them publicly speaking out against crimes committed by Western forces and their Arab or Islamic allies. It is therefore absolutely understandable that more and more Muslims abstain from condemning so-called ‘Islamic terrorism’ although they find it crucial to distance Islam from terror and view the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State’ as a disgrace of Islam. Islamic condemnations of Islamically legitimized violence are unsatisfying for both logical and religious reasons. Logically, they are unsatisfying because any such dissociation also reconstructs the connection, which it denies. The Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi is the best illustration for this effect, because it discusses at length textual evidence for the un-Islamic character of ISIS’s actions. As it debunks ISIS’s violence and its justifications as an incorrect practical and theological understanding of ‘the religion of mercy’ without looking at the contexts of ISIS’s use of force, it implicitly legitimizes all the op-ed articles and political statements that see terrorism as a merely ideological problem. This view implicitly gives currency to the common misconception that violent acts are illegitimate simply because of an assumed ‘religious’ or ‘medieval’ nature – a view that exclusively focuses on the Islamist, Jihadist, or Salafist traits of ISIS, but belies the modern, hybrid, and Westernized aspects of its character.

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It is also insufficient to argue against terrorist violence merely on religious grounds, because religions ethically and juristically distinguish between the legitimate and illegitimate uses of force. Religious arguments against violence are faced with two major problems. First, every such argument about the legitimate use of violence turns into a debate of who has the right to speak for a religion – and this is more often than not a question of majority, establishment, and power (not of truth or ethics). Whereas ISIS reclaims the right to forcefully purge Islam of its corrupted elements, condemnations of ISIS often simply state that ISIS transgresses Islamic consensus and established authority. Second, a religious condemnation of ISIS limits itself to repudiating ISIS’s claim to Islamic authenticity, by questioning the Islamic validity of its justifications for extreme violence, while ignoring the more intricate question of legitimate uses of violence. Therefore, it is telling that the understanding of Islam in the Open Letter to Al-Baghdadi boils down to a less violent version of Islam which glosses over the glorification of violence in textual material from early Islam, while it mainly remains silent about injustice, violations of human rights, and aggression against Muslims by Western and Arab states in contemporary times. While Jihadist organizations skillfully exploit the discrimination of Muslims in Western societies and the brutality of Western politics in the Middle East, the Open Letter neither dares to discuss the legitimacy of state violence, nor does it define under what circumstances what kind of violence is legitimate. It merely condemns the legitimatizations for terrorism, which it avoids calling as such. Thus, it represents Muslim scholarly monologue on what is a legitimate text interpretation, but does not address the question of whether or how to (differently) relate Islamic textual material to today’s situation in Syria and Iraq. Still nothing is said about the difficulty of defining terrorism or the thin line separating legitimate and illegitimate uses of violence in already violent contexts. Apart from this, the main problem is that both the condemnation of ‘Islamic terrorism’ on Islamic grounds and the criticism of Western ‘Islamophobia’ try to disrupt the dominant discourses on Islam, but cannot avoid conjuring up the Islamic imaginaries on which Jihadists and Islamophobes base their views. By arguing that ‘Islamic terrorism’ has nothing to do with ‘true’ Islam or by explaining that terror has nearly nothing to do with Islam, but a lot with Western policies based on Islamophobia, both these forms of counter-argument re-introduce ‘untrue’ forms of Islam into the discourse, in spite of their insistence that Islamically legitimized forms of violence and Western strategies in the war on terror are ‘about politics not religion’ (Kumar 2012). This article has therefore argued that the main challenge posed by ambiguous organizations like ISIS or al-Qaʿida is to resist shallowly explaining or disclaiming their Islamic character. Contrary to widely held convictions, it is not paramount to ponder on the Islamic or un-Islamic nature of their acts of violence, but rather to stress the mixture of Islamic and non-Islamic push and pull factors that make jihadist organizations appear attractive for sympathizers. The basic key for understanding the political and media discourse on these organizations is not via a criticism of


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‘Islamophobia,’ although ‘Islamophobia’ in Western societies is certainly on the rise, but by generally questioning misconceptions about the position of religion in modern societies and its relation to violence. Using the epithets ‘Islamic,’ ‘un-Islamic,’ or ‘Islamophobic’ helps neither to better describe and understand violence, nor to explain the overall media attention to violent acts. Understanding violence instead means understanding the contexts and situations to which it responds – contexts which also include ‘us,’ as we participate as analysts, spectators, political actors, or possible targets in creating the circumstances in which political violence resonates. Because of structural asymmetries and deficiencies, condemnations of ISIS on Islamic grounds are well-intentioned, but will have little effect in soothing the fears of non-Muslims or contribute to a mutual understanding between Muslims and non-Muslims or convincing ISIS sympathizers of their deviance. Instead, they tend to implicitly reinforce prejudices about the unknown number of Muslims who are at risk of being led astray by an inherently dangerous Islam or who are unable or unwilling to grasp the thin line separating their religion from barbarity. If Islam is the problem, then condemnations on the grounds of Islam, although much in demand, cannot possibly be the solution. Notes 1. I use the English acronym ISIS (‘Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’ for al-Dawla alIslamiyya fi l-ʿIraq wa-l-Sham) throughout the text although the organization has abbreviated its name to IS (‘Islamic State’) after the proclamation of the caliphate in 2014. It has developed out of al-Qaʿida in Iraq, an organization established by Abu Musʿab al-Zarqawi and several other jihadist organizations after the US-led intervention of Iraq in 2003. 2. Compare for example the low profile coverage on war crimes committed by state actors like the Assad regime, although Assad is not even a Western ally. 3. This ambivalence reveals that the critique of Islamphobia is inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), see e.g. Kumar’s (2012: 20–60) positive references to Said. 4. This has changed after the burning to death of Sunni Muslim Jordanian pilot Mu’adh Kasasbeh in February 2015. The Grand Sheikh of al-Azhar, Ahmed Tayib, released a statement saying that ISIS extremists should be ‘killed, or crucified, or their hands and legs cut off,’ thus applying ‘the punishment of those who wage war against Allah and his messenger’ (Quran 5:33) to ISIS and renouncing the Azhar’s former reservation of declaring ISIS un-Islamic. 5. Prominent public figures are the Grand Mufti of Egypt Shawqi ʿAllam; his predecessor ʿAli Gumʿa; the Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammad Ahmad Hussein; the Turkish theologian Mustafa Çağrıcı; the former Grand Mufti of Bosnia, Mustafa Ceric; and the Mauretanian scholar Abdallah Bin Bayyah. Prominent Sufi sheiks are the Syrian Muhammad al-Yaʿqoubi and the Saudi Abdullah Fadʿaq. American Muslims are represented, among others, by Jamal Badawi from the Fiqh Council of the USA and Caner Dagli, professor of Religious Studies. 6. Syrian signatory Muhammad al-Yaqoubi is well-known for his support of the uprising in Syria and had to leave the country. The Iraqi signatories are Ahmad Al-Kubaisi, spokesperson of the Sunni Ulema Council and TV preacher, and Bashshar Awwad Marouf, former Dean of the Islamic University in Baghdad and fellow at the Royal Al

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al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought. The Saudi signatory Abdullah Fadʿaq is a Sufi sheikh and Shafiʿi cleric. 7. The full quote is: ‘Once all relevant scriptural passages have been gathered, the ‘general’ has to be distinguished from the ‘specific’, and the ‘conditional’ from the ‘unconditional’. Also, the ‘unequivocal’ passages have to be distinguished from the allegorical ones. Moreover, the reasons and circumstances for revelation (asbab alnuzul) for all the passages and verses, in addition to all the other hermeneutical conditions that the classical imams have specified, must be understood. Therefore, it is not permissible to quote a verse, or part of a verse, without thoroughly considering and comprehending everything that the Qur’an and Hadith relate about that point. The reason behind this is that everything in the Qur’an is the Truth, and everything in authentic Hadith is Divinely inspired, so it is not permissible to ignore any part of it. Indeed it is imperative to reconcile all texts, as much as possible, or that there be a clear reason why one text should outweigh another’ (Open Letter 2014: 3). 8. I use the term to designate a relationship that is weaker than causality, but stronger than mere coincidence, implying that the adversaries’ violence is factually there, and not only as a source of self-legitimatization. 9. Reference to the first mixed-gender campus in Saudi Arabia on the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), founded near Jeddah in 2009.

Notes on contributor Manfred Sing received a Ph.D. degree in Islamic Studies from the University of Freiburg in Germany in 2005. He is Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz.

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