Four books on Islam and the rise of ISIS

In its short history, ISIS has had some nine name changes. Each name marks a fluid point in time, affiliation, geography, and vision: Currently, we use ISIS, which stands for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIL, for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (which includes Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria). Before 2011, ISIS was called AQI, for Al Qaeda in Iraq, prior to the split between the two groups, or ISI for when it was in Iraq but not yet Syria. Then there’s DAESH. It’s the Arabic acronym for ISIS, which detractors use derogatively, since daesh sounds like the Arabic word daes (one who crushes) and dahes (one who sows discord).

I’d never gotten any of this straight until I read the answer to “What should we call this group?” in “Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and the Global Jihadist Movement: What Everyone Needs to Know” (Oxford, 2015). This invaluable primer is in Q&A format, with responses by Daniel Byman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Byman helped me grasp that Al Qaeda seeks terrorism, but ISIS seeks territory. At its peak, ISIS held an area as large as Britain and had made inroads into 18 nations. As I write this, the Islamic State (to cite its latest, most encompassing name) has lost a quarter of its gained land since 2015. But it still bears this motto: baqiya wa tatamadad, or “lasting and expanding.”

How to last and expand? Money, partly. In September 2014, ISIS was earning $2 million a day in oil smuggling. By contrast, at the time of 9/11, Al Qaeda had a $30 million annual budget — and has since been decimated by drones and aging leadership. “The Islamic State is Al Qaeda’s most important progeny and its greatest nemesis,” writes Byman. And this back story propels my next book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Black Flags: The Rise of Isis” (Doubleday, 2015).

Journalist Joby Warrick begins in 1998 at a Jordanian prison that houses “Ahmad the hoodlum,” as he was known in his impious youth — meaning Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Sunni “sheik of the slaughterers,” who razored off the tattoos from his pre-devout days, went on to front the insurgency in US-occupied Iraq, recruit disaffected ex-Ba’athists, and make the country “unsafe for democracy” by threatening those who went to the polls to vote.

Zarqawi’s ISIS formation strategy was extreme: Exploit national chaos (Iraq, Syria); use shocking brutality as a recruiting tool (the filmed beheadings); and eliminate “impure” Muslims (namely, Shiites, plus apostate Sunnis, and later the Yazidis). Zarqawi himself was killed by a targeted US bombing attack in 2006. Eventually, his successors (such as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) and disciples watch an unraveling Syria “with wary hopefulness, like a starving coyote eyeing a buffalo.” Thus ISI becomes ISIS. Warrick recreates this creation story, including the tense divisions between Al Qaeda and its surpassing offshoot, partly by gaining access to high-level Jordanian and CIA sources.

Warrick is an excellent journalist, but William McCants is a scholar, currently director of the project on US Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. He analyzed many Arabic primary sources, including secret Al Qaeda and Islamic State letters, for “The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State” (Picador, 2015). It focuses on how the return of the Islamic empire dovetails with end-of-the-world scenarios. Given the American invasion of Iraq, the Arab Spring, and the implosion of Syria — all theoretically caused by heretics or infidels — it makes sense that a 2012 poll recorded that half the Arab world believed the Mahdi, the Muslim savior, would appear imminently. Moreover, the Koran proclaims al-Sham (Syria) the site of the final days. Here’s McCants: “[T]he sudden churn of Arab politics after decades of stagnation fired the apocalyptic imagination.”

I get the particulars. But, in general, why does Islam now have a higher political profile than any other religion? This question is rivetingly explored in Michael Cook’s “Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective” (Princeton, 2014). Cook, who teaches Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, notes that Western civilization embraced the unifying structure of a nation based on ethnicity. A Frenchman lives in France, not Catholic-i- stan, a Swede in Sweden, not Lutherania. But in the Islamic world, with newer, weaker nations, one’s religious identity supersedes one’s national identity.

Cook grants that most faiths have featured persecution of threatening outsiders (the Prophet Muhammad took 65 expeditions against the infidels) and fundamentalism (the American Christian far right), and militancy (modern-day Sikhs). Only Islam, however, combines all these features at present, galvanized by its past theocratic heritage of the caliphate. Here in the West, we may find ISIS shocking and unprecedented. But these books lend hope we can comprehend it, and not in name only.