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The culture of jihad is a culture of romance. It promises adventure and asserts that the codes of medieval heroism and chivalry are still relevant. Having renounced their nationalities, the militants must invent an identity of their own. They are eager to convince themselves that this identity is not really new but extremely old. The knights of jihad style themselves as the only true Muslims, and, while they may be tilting at windmills, the romance seems to be working. ISIS recruits do not imagine they are emigrating to a dusty borderland between two disintegrating states but to a caliphate with more than a millennium of history.
Anyone who reads much jihadi poetry soon sees that it contains a great deal of theology. Religious doctrine is the essential glue of the culture, and many jihadi theologians have written poems. Just as the poets think of themselves as resurrecting an authentic poetic heritage, so the theologians believe that they are uncovering and resuscitating the true tenets of their faith. As theologians, jihadis are largely self-taught. They read the canonical texts (all of which are easy to find online) and are reluctant to accept the interpretations of mainstream clerics, whom they accuse of hiding the truth out of deference to political despots. The jihadis are literalists, and they promise to sweep away centuries of scholasticism and put believers in touch with the actual teachings of their religion. The elements of this scenario closely resemble those of the Protestant Reformation: mass literacy, the democratization of clerical authority, and methodological literalism. Under these circumstances, anyone might nail his theses to a mosque door.
Among the principles that militants are trying to reclaim from the clerics is the principle of jihad itself. Armed struggle has long been recognized by the Islamic tradition, but it was rarely put at the core of what it means to be a Muslim: by the twentieth century, many jurists considered it little more than a relic. For the jihadis, this attitude is treasonous and has led to the Islamic world’s decline. They believe that waging jihad is central to Muslim identity—an ethical obligation and a political necessity. Some of the most compelling expressions of this view are poems.
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After Ahlam al-Nasr arrived in Raqqa last year, she was given a celebrity tour by ISIS. She wrote a long prose account of what she saw, addressed to her “sisters” and disseminated through ISIS media outlets. Walking through the streets of Raqqa, al-Nasr notes that the stalls are full of fresh vegetables and that men encourage one another to follow the example of the Prophet and to stop smoking. She is allowed to cook for the militants, which gives her great joy: “Everything had to be clean and wonderful. I kept repeating to myself: ‘This food will be eaten by mujahideen, these plates will be used by mujahideen.’ ” She is also brought to a gun shop, where she learns how to assemble and disassemble Russian- and American-made rifles. “All this happened in Syria, sisters, and in front of my eyes!” she writes.
Al-Nasr sees the caliphate as an Islamist utopia, not only because it is a place where Muslims behave as Muslims should but because it is a place of new beginnings. To most observers, Raqqa, under ISIS, is a rigidly totalitarian society, but for al-Nasr and other recruits it is a frontier where everything is in flux and negotiable—not only political boundaries but personal identities as well. Al-Nasr’s role is an unusually public one for a woman to play in jihadist movements, but ISIS has made a point of putting women on the front lines of the propaganda war. It has also created a female morality police, a shadowy group called the al-Khansa’ Brigades, who insure proper deportment in ISIS-held towns. Although media accounts of ISIS’s female recruits typically cast them as naïfs signing up for sexual slavery, it is a fact that no other Islamist militant group has been as successful in attracting women. In the most recent issue of Dabiq, ISIS’s English-language magazine, a female writer encourages women to emigrate to “the lands of the Islamic State” even if it means travelling without a male companion, a shocking breach of traditional Islamic law. This may be a cynical ploy—a lure for runaways. But it is in keeping with the jihadists’ attack on parental authority and its emphasis on individual empowerment, including the power of female believers to renounce families they do not view as authentically Muslim.
The radical newness of ISIS society forms a strange counterpoint to the self-conscious archaism of the culture—the obsession with purity, with the buried truths of religion, and with classical literary forms. The al-Khansa’ Brigades are a notable example. Al-Khansa’ was a female poet of the pre-Islamic era who converted to Islam and became a companion of the Prophet, and her elegies for her male relations are keystones of the genre.
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Topic: Why Jihadists Write Poetry