The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS by Robert Spencer

places for centuries.
    Those who place high hopes on the reform of Islam should note that Wahhabism is a reform movement—indeed, the quintessential reform movement in Islam. Muhammad ibn Abdul al-Wahhab was an eighteenth-century Muslim who proclaimed his intention to restore Islam’s original purity by rejecting all innovation ( bid’a ) and basing his religious observance strictly on what the Qur’an and Muhammad taught.
    Wahhab set out to extinguish all Islamic practices that he considered not to have come from either source: thus Wahhabi mosques lack minarets—the towers that the caller to prayer, the muezzin, climbs in order to chant the azan, the call to prayer. Wahhab also rejected the veneration of Muslim saints and prayers at their shrines, a practice that had become widespread by the eighteenth century. Wahhab pointed to hadiths in which Muhammad himself condemned this practice, calling it shirk, the combination of idolatry and polytheism that is the worst sin of all in Islam: associating partners with Allah in worship.
    The Wahhabis were often just as brutal as the Islamic State is today. In an 1803 attack that could have come from today’s headlines about ISIS, the Wahhabis entered Ta’if, a city near Mecca, massacred all the men, and enslaved all the women and children. 54
    Like the Khawarij, Wahhab declared all Muslims who disagreed with him to be unbelievers who could be lawfully killed as heretics and apostates. In 1744 Wahhab entered into an alliance with an Arab chieftain, Muhammad ibn Saud, and together they set out on jihad against those enemies, fighting against the Ottoman authorities, who Wahhab believed had lost all legitimacy by departing from the tenets of Islam.
    Not long after Wahhab’s death in 1792, the Wahhabis captured the Two Holy Places of Mecca and Medina and after that gradually expanded their domains until finally, in 1932, the Wahhabi sheikh ibn Saud captured Riyadh and established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
    Oil money has made Wahhabi ideals mainstream, even dominant, among Muslims worldwide. The Saudis have spent as much as $100 billion to spread Wahhabism worldwide. 55 However, other Muslims still make the same complaints against the Wahhabis as were made long ago against the Khawarij: they’re Qur’anic rigorists, but nonetheless they misunderstand the noble book, and their piety is a false front: “While claiming to be adherents to ‘authentic’ Sunnah [Muslim tradition], these deviants are quick to label anyone who opposes their beliefs . . . as ‘sufi,’ [that is, akin to adherents of the mystical Sufi sect, elements of which many Muslims consider heretical] while exploiting the Muslims’ love for Islam by overexaggerating the phrase ‘Qur’an and Sunnah’ in their senseless rhetoric.” 56 The same criticisms are made about the new self-styled caliphate today.
    Al-Qaeda is simply an especially virulent outgrowth of Wahhabism. And ISIS is just an especially virulent outgrowth of al-Qaeda.
    The Case for ISIS’s Bloody Tactics: How Zarqawi Laid the Intellectual and Theological Foundations of the Islamic State
    Muslims in the West, the president of the United States, and our media regularly condemn the atrocities committed by ISIS as un-Islamic. And we have seen that the Islamic State’s bloody deeds have made even al-Qaeda terrorists uncomfortable—though they seem to have found it difficult to articulate a principled case, grounded in Islamic texts and the accepted scholarly rulings of Islamic jurisprudence, against those bloodthirsty acts, instead falling back on tactical and prudential arguments.
    ISIS, on the other hand, does not hesitate to justify its atrocities by Islamic law. The groundwork for that justification was laid in the course of the long-running controversy between al-Qaeda and the precursor organization of the Islamic State, which began not long after Zarqawi gave his allegiance(and that of the precursor organization, al-Qaeda in the Land of