Whose Islam Is It?

"Populations that are most vulnerable to radicalization essentially view the religious institutions used to push forward these claims as illegitimate themselves."
Michael Wahid Hanna, senior fellow, The Century Foundation

"[Needed is] major efforts to delegitimize Islamic State's claim to some religious foundation for what it's doing, and begin to put real Islam out there."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

"They are incapable of confronting the violent extremist groups and those that sever necks not because of laziness or procrastination, but because everyone shares in the same thought and sayings. How can they confront a thought whose basis they themselves hold within them?"
Turki al-Hamad, Saudi novelist

  Militants with the Islamic State group are seen after placing their group’s flag on a hilltop at the eastern side of the town of Kobani, Syria. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

It is most inconvenient, embarrassing, needlessly insulting to be viewed so askew by the world outside Islam, the world of the kuffar, that the one true religion that surpasses all others, sacred to 1.3-billion in the worldwide ummah, is being regarded as violence-prone, given to committing gruesome atrocities, martyring its own in a bloodbath drenching the soil of the Middle East and beyond. That kind of bad press is beyond irksome.

And it requires intervention, it requires calm, sensitive voices to be raised, to persuade the world so ready to condemn Islam and the faithful as deranged psychopaths that this is not at all the case. What is occurring in actuality is that a relative handful of unauthorized purists are simply behaving in a most obstreperous manner, insulting to the vision of a peaceful religion prepared to live in harmony with others regardless of their own ill-choiced religions.

Egyptian cleric Abdel Moneim el-Shahat who has been busy casting aspersions of contempt at pre-Islamic icons of secular and Pharaonic Egypt has been moved to the more currently urgent task of criticizing the Islamic State's ideology. This, from someone of the ultraconservative Salafist school of Islam. Which, funnily enough is quite what Islamic State represents; purist Salafism, a throwback to the era of emerging Islam, conquering by the sword to spread Islam by deathly terror.

Details, mere details. But what are they to do? They've received urgent messages from the United States which insists that religious scholars make an effort to persuade those vulnerable to radicalization that the ideology they are attracted to does not represent Islam, it is an illegitimate claimant to Islam, doing it great harm. At least in the opinion of the world outside Islam, which is hardly qualified to judge.

Clerics in Saudi Arabia and Egypt where in fact the early 20th Century saw the emergence of jihadist-loving Islamism and widely embraced it to the extent that it has grown apace, have been inducted into the temporary requirement of softening the visage of Islam to make it more palatable to those who cannot understand its complexities and are too swift to condemn in their ignorance. The religious scholars of longtime U.S. allies condemn clerics issuing edicts justifying "terrorism".

To which their audience respond in messages such as "By God, I regret the day I respected this man". The Grand Mufti Abdul-Azia al-Sheikh called for Muslims to "rid people and religion of their evil and harm", and battle Islamic State whose actions distort Islam and are "filled with mutilations and hideousness", which no one in their right mind could disagree with. Other than the reality that the Saudi clerics advance similar ideals to the Islamic State themselves.

In Tunisia, a main recruiting centre for jihad, government has stepped up its efforts to halt jihad-loving fighters from heading to Syria, and in the process have kept a close watch on pulpits. Since January, 160 imams have been removed from mosques for "deviating from moderate speech", using their sermons to incite to violence.

In Egypt, el-Shat, noticing that Islamic State was gaining admirers, began countering Islamic State's ideas that detracted from his own Salafist movement. Young people, he said, are so frustrated that they feel "sympathy with any victory, even if it's unreal".