Dabig #2: The Flood (Mike Lumish)

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Dabiq is the official recruiting magazine of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and they publish in a number of languages, including English.


Dabiq # 1 re-established the Caliphate in the minds and hearts of the believers.

Let us look at how they express their ideology in Dabiq # 2.

"It is either the Islamic State or the Flood" issue number 2 dramatically declares.

What the organization claims to want is an all-out war with "Rome" and the "jews."

{The lower case J is obviously not a typo.  It is a childish way for a crude and barbaric people to demean imaginary enemies.}

And they want war to happen as soon as possible on the Plains of Dabiq in northeastern Syria, because one of the holy hadiths proclaimed it so:

Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The Last Hour would not come until the Romans would land at al-A'maq or in Dabiq. 

At the close of this piece I will briefly give my views on how this horrendous madness relates, and does not relate, to either Muslims or Islam.

The first thing that I want to note about Dabiq # 2 is that the cover art is very good.  It is exceedingly slick and attractive in a way that I would generally associate with either western or far eastern magazines.

This is a polished bit of media and it is published both on-line and in paper format.

One thing to be said about the Islamic State is that - their hatred toward everyone non-Muslim aside - they are not racist.  I suspect that they would even accept me, were I to repent and make a perfect Muslim example of myself in the ways that they require... which would undoubtedly be non-stop fun, 24/7.

They do not care where you come from or what color your skin is.  The only thing that they care about is the intensity of your Koranically-based worship and your willingness to fight.

The spark has been lit here in Iraq, 

and its heat will continue to intensify – by Allah’s permission

– until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq. - Abu Mus’ab az-Zarqawi

They want war.  One of the primary questions that we need to ask ourselves is, should they get it?

The foreword to Dibaq # 2 also stresses the primary objective of recruiting as many Muslims as possible.

The first priority is to perform hijrah from wherever you are to the Islamic State, from darul-kufr to darul-Islam. Rush to perform it as Musa (‘alayhis-salam) rushed to his Lord, saying, {And I hastened to You, my Lord, that You be pleased} [Taha: 84]. Rush to the shade of the Islamic State with your parents, siblings, spouses, and children. There are homes here for you and your families.

As mentioned in my review of Dibaq # 1, the Islamic State seems to believe in social welfare.  Just as Hamas was elected in part because they seemed to care more about social programs than did Fatah, so the Islamic State stresses this kind of thing, as well, and I see no reason to doubt their sincerity.

As Graeme Wood writes in The Atlantic:

The Islamic State may have medieval-style punishments for moral crimes (lashes for boozing or fornication, stoning for adultery), but its social-welfare program is, at least in some aspects, progressive to a degree that would please an MSNBC pundit.

It then segues into an argument in opposition to democracy because:

This ideology teaches that no one has the right, regardless of whom he may be, to impose any creed or set of morals on anyone else even if that creed or set of morals is the truth revealed by Allah.

But the metaphor of The Flood is at the forefront of this issue.

Part 4:  The Flood is a Refutation of the Pacifists

Had the proponents of choice contemplated all this, they would have realized that the flood was a clear sign of the falseness of giving choice between truth and falsehood in da’wah. For the flood was the result and consequence of opposing the truth, and evidence that anyone who rejected the truth would be punished in the dunya before the Hereafter and would not have any choice in that regards.

The publication is written in a deeply religious language that someone unfamiliar with the terminologies of Islam might find a tad difficult to follow, but the primary themes are obvious.

They want Muslims to join them.  They demand obedience and they anticipate war in an eschatological End-of Days scenario.

They are also not particularly fond of either Jewish people or the Jewish State of Israel... because Jews are the Eternal Cosmic Enemy.

The Fight Against the PKK

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) apparently represent what little may be available in terms of civil society in that part of the world and, therefore, are an enemy of the Islamic State:

Approximately ten years ago in neighbouring Sham, the marxist Kurds in the north founded a political opposition party called the PYD (Democratic Union Party), which shares the kufri ideology of Ocalan and is seen as being a Syrian front for the PKK...

The Islamic State did not hesitate to wage war against the communist murtaddin of the PKK/YPG, while simultaneously continuing their fight against the nusayri regime and the sahwat.

This is instructive because it clearly demonstrates that, at least for the moment, the Islamic State is primarily focused on the near enemy.  If they are to establish the Caliphate then they need to expand.  They are not like Qaeda, which can easily go underground.  They are significantly more ambitious than that.  If they are to establish the Caliphate they need legitimacy within the greater Muslim world and, in terms of crude power, that means they need increasing numbers and expanding territory.

The Obama strategy seems to be denying them their primary objective, which is war with the infidel West.  The wisdom of this approach is up to each of us to decide for ourselves... although I feel reasonably certain that Bill O'Reilly does not approve.

Much of Dabiq # 2 is concerned with infighting within political Islam in that part of the world and would be entirely opaque to even relatively sophisticated westerners.

Thus we have passages like this:

After this mubahalah, a number of issues quickly came to light. First of which, some of  the stories that ashShami used to claim that the Islamic State resisted Allah’s Shari’ah were shown to be fabrications and distortions, especially the claim that the Islamic State had asked adh-Dhawahiri to arbitrate between itself and the Jawlani rebels. Allah decreed that adh-Dhawahiri himself would negate ash-Shami in a speech (sadly his negation and speech themselves were also distortions of reality).

What any of that might mean is beyond the comprehension of anyone (specialists aside) who is not part of this exceedingly interesting, and remarkably vicious, subculture.

They are, by the way, not nearly the fan of Turkish president Erdogan that Barack Obama is:

When the secularist “Islamists” of Turkey won the recent elections, Islamic Front leaders congratulated the Erdogan secularists upon their renewed apostasy.

Understanding The Hikmah* in Allah’s Actions
* Arabic for "wisdom."

Ibnul-Qayyim (rahimahullah) said, “I will mention a debate that occurred between me and some jews. I said to one of them – after he had denied the prophethood of the Prophet, ‘Your denial of his prophethood entails slandering the Lord of the universe, belittling Him, and attributing to Him the worst of all blemishes.

The Islamic State's primary objective is an apocalyptic war with the West, but Koranically-based hatred toward Jewish people is likewise central to this exceedingly ideologically-driven movement.

In the Words of the Enemy  

As in issue number one, Dabiq # 2 devotes a segment to what American and western politicians have to say about the organization.  There is no doubt but that they care very much about what we think and they are not big fans of "crusader" Senator, John McCain... but, then again, neither are most of my friends.

However, they acknowledge something that should be obvious.  George W. Bush toppled the power structure in Iraq and when Obama withdrew U.S. forces this lead to the power vacuum necessary for the Islamic State to fill.

McCain said this:

I come to the floor this morning with great sorrow and great concern and even deep alarm about the events that are transpiring rapidly in Iraq. ISIS the most extreme, Islamist organization – radical terrorist organization – now controls at least 1/3 of Iraqi territory and is rapidly gaining more. The areas of Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit, they are on the outsides of Samarra… with these victories ISIS controls a swath of territory that stretches from the Syrian-Turkish frontier in the north, down the Euphrates river, all the way down to the Iraqi city of Fallujah just forty miles west of Baghdad.

The writers of Dabiq # 2 do not comment on McCain's words.  They simply note them, but one gets the sense that they have considerable satisfaction in the fact that we in the West have taken notice of them.

Part of the reason that the Islamic State is as cruel as it is - aside from whatever psycho-sexual sado-masochistic gratification that the individual may gain from raping prepubescent children - is because they want our attention.  There is an obvious reason that they film and edit their atrocities to music.

They very much want to say "hello" because they want us to come visit.

In the final pages of issue number two, they celebrate stoning adulterous women to death and caring for orphan children.  It is an entirely bizarre juxtaposition between unimaginable cruelty and social welfare programs.  It is not clear from the text, but one must wonder if the child being cared for by the Islamic State is not the son of the woman they just pelted to death with rocks?

As for the question of whether or not the Islamic State is Islamic, the answer is that it certainly is.  As Wood put it, it is very Islamic.  But that does not mean that ISIS represents Muslims, as a whole.  Islam is a rather large thing.  It is 1.5 billion people who think about themselves and their religion in a complex variety of ways.  This type of violent and apocalyptic uber-fundamentalist Islam comes directly out of the religious tradition, but does so according to political circumstances on the ground.

That they are Islamic, however, is undeniable to anyone who would take a little time to go through Dabiq.

When Obama denies this, he is lying... but for the best of reasons, I am sure.

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Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.