Souad Mekhennet: Let’s Not Make This a “Religious Conflict” (Part Two)
SK: You have often found yourself exposed in risky situations where you didn’t know how the situation would end. Do you purposefully seek out risk?Mekhennet: I sought out these meetings because I believe they are the only possibility to speak to these people, to understand their motivations, and then to deliver counterarguments.
Their “motivations” are not hard to understand. They are a puzzlement only for those who keep denying what is in the Qur’an and Hadith, including 109 verses that refer to waging Jihad, and several verses that call for “striking terror” in the hearts of Infidels. The Jihadis of IS tell us themselves. Its members quote from the Qur’an before and after raping Christian and Yazidi women, as the victims have testified.
Michael Adebolajo, one of the killers of Drummer Rigby, said:
“I killed Lee Rigby because I am a soldier of Allah.”
He also wrote a note to his children:
“Know that to fight Allah’s enemies is an obligation… Do not spend your days in endless dispute with the cowardly and foolish if it means it will delay you meeting Allah’s enemies on the battlefield.”
As they were sentenced, Adebolajo and Adebowale were carrying and kissing their Qur’ans.
The leader of ISIS, Abu Baker Al-Baghdadi, when he still appeared in public, regularly quoted from the Qur’an and spoke of being engaged in the kind of battles in which Muhammad himself took part, as described in the Hadith. Members of ISIS, and of Al-Qaeda, have been videotaped chanting Qur’anic verses as they decapitate kneeling Infidels. The magazine of the Islamic State, Dabiq — just like the terrorists themselves — is full of those verses from the Qur’an that command Muslims to engage in violent Jihad, and to “strike terror” in the hearts of Infidels. Yet Souad Mekhennet, despite all this evidence, is still trying to seek out the “motivations” of the Jihadis she interviews. She refuses to believe them when they point to the Qur’an and Hadith.
Souad Mekhennet: In my book, you can read about a discussion I had with an IS commander in a car that only went up to a certain point. Up to the moment when he placed his hand on his right-hand trouser pocket. I knew he had his weapon there, so I had to dial back my critical questions. But, naturally, it’s about how I tried to argue with these people and to understand how they have become the way they are. Only then can we think about the possible counteractions we can take as a society.
How hard is it to “understand how they have become the way they are”? Apparently very hard for Souad Mekhennet, because as long as Islam remains the great unmentionable, the behavior. of these Jihadis must remain a puzzlement. And how can she “argue with these people” if she cannot bring herself to recognize what the Qur’an inculcates, and that the Jihadis are doing no more than following its commands? She might more fruitfully investigate why many Muslims, fortunately, choose not to follow the Jihad verses and the example of Muhammad as described in the Hadith.
SK: You are trying to understand the men and women of the so-called Islamic State. Have you found anything out that we do not already know?Mekhennet: Although we see IS as a homogeneous group, it is very heterogeneous in and of itself. I know that there are conflicts between individual nationalities. It would be very problematic if we were to see it as relating to Islam and say that these people hate the West because they are Muslims. Thatʹs exactly what they want. They want a religious conflict to arise. We should not do them the favor.
It is not true that we in the West “see IS as a homogeneous group.” Souad Mekhennet assumes we are ignorant of the various ethnic conflicts among IS members and, more generally, among Muslims in the wider umma. We Infidels already know that there are “conflicts between individual nationalities.” Early in the war in Afghanistan we learned all about the clashes between the Uzbeks and Tadzhiks in the north, with Pashtuns in the south, and about the Shi’a Hazara, attacked by several different uber-Sunni groups. We discovered in Iraq just how much the Kurds resent the Arabs. When our troops were in Syria, we saw the hostile attitude of the Turks toward the Kurds, and the Turkish attacks on the Kurds in Rojava. We could see, all over the Middle East, the distinct unease with Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman dreams, for many Arabs, remembering their centuries of subjugation by the Ottomans, still resent the Turks. And there are many other ethnic and national conflicts within the umma, such as the Berbers who chafe under Arab cultural and linguistic dominance in North Africa, and the Somalis who have been at daggers drawn with Eritreans. We Infidels understand perfectly well that “the conflicts between individual nationalities” exist in IS, which Souad Mekhennet seems to think have been insufficiently recognized. But we also recognize — as Souad Mekhennet does not — that these ethnic conflicts are of far less importance, for the fanatical Muslims who join IS, than their shared faith.
Mekhennet, whose views on Jihadis receive attention they do not intrinsically deserve because she is a reporter for the Washington Post, is determined to focus not on what unites, but on what divides the members of IS, and to refuse even to consider the ideology of Islam as the cause of Muslim terrorism. I have the distinct feeling that Souad Mekhennet, born into a Muslim family, may never have read, that is, never allowed herself to read, the complete Qur’an, for fear of what she might discover. She may have skimmed over, or omitted altogether, the verses about Jihad and “striking terror” in the hearts of Infidels. Or perhaps she knows these verses perfectly well, and has heard her Jihadist interlocutors referring to them, but she simply can’t bring herself to take them seriously, because that would force her to recognize that the ideology of Islam is the explanation, both necessary and sufficient, for Muslim terrorism. And this she will not do.
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