How Islamic is Islamic State? This question has prompted much agonised equivocation from politicians, broadcasters and pundits. Implicit in the BBC’s dogged insistence on referring to IS as “the so-called Islamic State” is a desperate yearning to believe that it has nothing to do with Islam at all. How much more reassuring it is to blame the organisation’s crimes – not to mention its appeal to Muslims who have travelled from across the world to join it – on Western foreign policy, or anomie, or perhaps a lack of sex. Anything, in short, rather than contemplate the possibility that the murderous savagery of the jihadis might indeed be fuelled by an authentically Islamic ideology.
Such a conceit has become a good deal harder to sustain, however, with the publication of Shiraz Maher’s groundbreaking study of what he terms “Salafi-jihadism”. A senior research fellow at King’s College London and a contributing writer for the New Statesman, Maher combines scholarly objectivity with something no less valuable for someone trying to make sense of Islamism: personal experience of campaigning for a caliphate. Radicalised after the 11 September 2001 attacks, he spent four years rising through the ranks of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Sunni organisation committed to establishing a global Islamic state, but repudiated it on the day of the London Tube bombings. When Maher delivers an evaluation of Salafi-jihadism, he does so with the confidence of a man who knows whereof he speaks.
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