Islamic State Calls for a Global Religious War Against Jews and Westerners

Late on 4 January 2024, the Islamic State’s main media outlet, Al-Furqan, released the second speech of the official spokesman, Abu Hudhayfa al-Ansari, who introduced himself and the new “Caliph”, Abu Hafs al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi, in his first speech on 3 August 2023. Abu Hudhayfa’s 34-minute speech was entitled, “Kill Them Wherever You Find Them”, drawn from two verses of the Qur’an (2:191 and 4:91). The speech was reprinted in place of the main editorial in the 424th edition of the IS newsletter, Al-Naba.

Abu Hudhayfa’s speech, evidently recorded before the major IS attack in Iran on 3 January, deals extensively with the war in Gaza, insisting that fighting Israel for the land or to “resist” occupation is not legitimate: Palestine should be one part of a religious war against Jews. HAMAS, though never directly named, is lambasted as a “nationalist” organisation that acts as a puppet of the heretical Shi’a rulers of Iran. The Islamic State (IS) has always focused much energy on discrediting other actors who can claim Sunni loyalty and Abu Hudhayfa does so here, denouncing not only HAMAS but the Arab governments, who are accused of conspiring with Israel in this war. Most importantly, Abu Hudhayfa calls for a worldwide terrorist campaign against Jews, “Crusaders” (Westerners), and anybody allied to them. The last time IS made such a call, in 2014, the result was three years of carnage in Europe and elsewhere. It remains to be seen if IS is in any position to repeat the feat.

Abu Hudhayfa began by saying man was created for the worship of God: “to achieve this goal, God has prescribed jihad for the believers and commanded them to fight the unbelievers … [M]onotheism is the goal and jihad is the path. Accordingly, Islam is the entire solution and not part of the solution.”

Despite this, Muslims have splintered into sects, movements, and parties, Abu Hudhayfa laments,

some of which wanted monotheism without jihad; some of which wanted fighting without monotheism; some of them made Islam part of the solution and mixed it with democracy, nationalism, and secularism; and some of them began to see Islam as a problem, rather than the solution, disavowing it and evading its consequences, and even becoming cowardly about raising its banners. A few survived and took the path of monotheism and jihad …

The Islamic State arose and proceeded on this blessed path. Intending monotheism and upholding the shari’a, shirk was rejected, isolated, broken, and fought. Jihad was the instrument adopted, so it [the Islamic State] had taken on the Prophetic methodology in word and deed, and banished completely everything that contradicted and strayed from it, such as [false] methods [manhaj], constitutions [dasateer], superstitions [khurafat], and legends [or myths: al-asatir].

The Islamic State stuck to this path, achieving great success “despite all the wars it was exposed to”, says Abu Hudhayfa, who adds that he wants to “recall and underline these authentic and established shari’i starting points, and hammer them into our hearts and ears”, before turning to the “brutal Jewish war” against “our Muslim people in beloved Palestine”.

Abu Hudhayfa then enumerates several points. First, to ask for the dead in Palestine to be rewarded in heaven and the living to have their wounds healed and find shelter. Second, that IS regards Gaza as one of the “many wounds that befall Muslims”: IS is bound to the Gazans by the doctrine of al-wala wal-bara (loyalty to Muslims and disavowal of unbelievers)—“the strongest bond of faith [imani] and an authentic foundation of the Muslim creed [aqeeda]”—and while this requires “supporting all Muslims to the extent possible, one of the requirements is giving them sincere advice”.

“Third: the heinous murders and massacres committed by the Jews against the Muslims in Gaza have been the practice of the Jews throughout all ages”, says Abu Hudhayfa:

Muslims should not expect anything less from the Jews. … [T]he Jews of Palestine are the same as the Jews of the [rest of the] world. They are part of a whole. They are all infidel Jews, and the distinction between them is a lie promoted by patriots and nationalists. The Holy Qur’an describes the characteristics of the infidel Jews and exposes their reality, and does not divide them into sections and varieties. …

The conflict with the Jews is a religious conflict, not a patriotic or nationalistic one! It is not about land, soil, or borders! It is a conflict that derives its legitimacy from the Qur’an and Sunnah, not from the international community, nor its jahiliyya [pre-Islamic, pagan, ignorant] laws. The Muslim fights the Jews because they are Jews who disbelieve in God Almighty. They fought His prophets and were hostile to the Muslims. If there was nothing else in the history of the Jews, except that they killed our prophets and insulted them, that would be sufficient reason to fight them, even if they had not desecrated Al-Aqsa and Palestine … The war against them extends until the “Battle of Stone and Trees”. The war with the Jews will not end with a one-State or two-State solution, as the patriots believe and aspire to. Rather, it is a creedal religious war that will continue until we kill their Dajjal under the banner of the Prophet of God, Jesus—peace be upon him—as God promised, and God does not break his promises.

This rejection of even the pretence of making a distinction between “Zionists” and “Jews”, and the need for Muslims to wage a global religious war against Jews wherever they can be found, was IS’s first official response to the 7 October IRGC/HAMAS pogrom in Israel, and it is a consistent theme of Islamic State propaganda.

“Fourth”, says Abu Hudhayfa, “in light of the seriousness of this Jewish-Crusader war [in Gaza] and the gravity of what is being plotted against the people of Palestine”, this is no time for “courtesy and evasiveness”:

Grieving over the affliction of Muslims does not necessitate deceiving and defrauding them. On the contrary, it is necessary to declare the truth … to absolve ourselves of sin and prevent blood from being shed in inappropriate places. It is the establishment of the deen of Islam—as mentioned above—that is the purpose of fighting … This goal was absent from the recent battle of Gaza, as was clearly evident in the speeches of the faction leaders and their official statements, which did not rise above the ground. The battle, from beginning to end, revolves around the soil and the nation, which they have made the goal for which blood is being shed!

They missed the fact that Palestine and Jerusalem did not obtain their status from dust or clay, but rather obtained their status from heaven, from revelation, from the Qur’an, from God Almighty … He who blessed Bayt al-Maqdis [the Holy House, i.e. Jerusalem] is the Lord Almighty, who created us for the sake of His worship and monotheism. God Almighty is the goal, not the nation, and blood is [only to be] shed for His sake, not for the sake of the nation!

It is the deen of Islam that granted status to Palestine. The land has no value if it is not governed according to the law of the Most Gracious. Whether it is ruled by [Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) chairman Mahmud] Abbas or ruled by [the U.A.E.-backed Palestinian leader Muhammad] Dahlan, it is the same as if Gaza and the West Bank are conquered by the agents of America or the agents of Iran. It is, therefore, regrettable that fighters’ blood is being shed under these flags and for these ends.

O Palestinian fighter, merely fighting the Jews is not an indication of the correctness of the path or the soundness of the method. Before you, the Jews fought the Communist fighter, the nationalist fighter, and the patriotic fighter. All of these people fought the Jews for years and went through multiple rounds with them. … And here you have tried [your current leaders] for seventeen years, and they did not rule by the shari’a for an hour of the day. … They did not Islamize the conflict as they suggested [they would], but rather returned it to its previous state, a national conflict over the borders and the nation and nothing more.

Know, O fighter, that God Almighty has not commanded you to fight other than fighting in His cause, and fighting in His cause should not be done until it is under the shade of the divine law—seeking its rule and raising its banner—and not under the shadow of international legitimacy and the infidel United Nations charters. So listen, O fighter, for I am a faithful advisor to you, and you are being killed constantly. The time has come for you to correct your course and fight the Jews by the rule of heaven, not by the rule of earth; in the shadow of the law of God Almighty, not the law of mankind, as our Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of God be upon him, fought before, and as [the Rashidun Caliphs] Abu Bakr, Umar, Othman, and Ali—may God be pleased with them—fought.

As ever, IS did not mention HAMAS by name, but the reference could not be clearer, nor the charge—wildly inaccurate, in point of fact—that HAMAS is a nationalist rather than a religious group. IS’s view that it is illegitimate to fight Israel for nationalistic purposes, such as establishing a Palestinian State, is likewise well-known.

Fifth in Abu Hudhayfa’s list is a further mocking denunciation of the terms under which HAMAS (again, without naming them) and its supporters are waging this war against Israel:

As for the claims of fighting to liberate the land, the concept of “liberation” needs to be liberated. Liberating the land does not mean liberating it from a secular government to make it a democratic one, nor does it mean liberating it from a government that rules according to the Jewish constitution to [bring to power] another that rules by the Palestinian constitution. The law that governs Palestine and the Jewish petty state [or statelet] is indistinguishable: created by humans and viewed as one and the same by God Almighty.

So long as the land is not ruled by the shari’a of Islam it is not liberated, even if all the Jews and invaders leave it. Rather, it would be a prisoner of infidel laws and jahiliyya international laws, the mention of which has overshadowed the statements and declarations of the leaders of the Palestinian factions, who continue to assert at every opportunity that their “resistance” is guaranteed under these jahiliyya laws! One would think listening to them that the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, was sent under international law, instead of under to divine law, God forbid.

Without wishing to hand it to them, IS’s forthrightness in rejecting “international law” is a welcome reprieve from the painful contortions those already-nebulous concepts have gone through at the hands of international civil servants, academics, and journalists determined to uphold a worldview in which HAMAS’ aggression is legal and Israel’s defensive actions are criminal.

Sixth is a wholesale condemnation by Abu Hudhayfa of the Iranian Revolution and HAMAS being absorbed into the IRGC Network: “The alliance with the Rafida is a long-standing Ikhwani [Muslim Brotherhood] sin that began with their fascination with the idolatrous Khomeini Revolution and this fitna [strife] has reached its peak in recent years”. The reference to the Ikhwan is because HAMAS began as the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, but this has not meant much for a long time because—as IS’s spokesman quite correctly says—the Brotherhood was electrified by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seizing power, and HAMAS’ origins have much more to do with events in Iran in 1979 than they do the emergence of the Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928.

This alliance can be seen, says Abu Hudhayfa, in the Palestinian factions announcing their participation in the “Axis of Resistance” or “Axis of Jerusalem”: “Thus, the Palestinian factions allowed Rafidite Iran to take the lead on the Palestinian scene and appear as the saviour and defender of Palestine”. HAMAS (unnamed again) has “continued to thank the Iranian militias in Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq, even though they failed them militarily on the ground”, Abu Hudhayfa continues:

The skirmishes [in northern Israel] with Hizb al-Shaytan [the Party of Satan, i.e. Hizballah] and the rest of Iran’s militias are nothing but a smokescreen to complete the Rafida project, which ends in Palestine with the establishment of idolatrous processions, self-flagellation and wailing in the streets of Jerusalem, and cursing the honour of the Messenger of God … and denouncing his Companions [Sahaba] as infidels from the pulpit of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The recent war in Gaza has revealed the reality of this imaginary axis—that Iran established it to serve its projects: its first and last goal was for the Palestinian factions to engage in a proxy war for Iran, not the other way around. Which is exactly what has happened. Iran and its Party [Hizballah] were spared the fierce battle that Gaza alone has had to bear, paying with the blood of its women and children.

Self-flagellation”—the word used is “al-latum”—is a reference to the Shi’i rituals on Ashura. It has to be conceded that, whether or not this war widens to encompass the IRGC/Hizballah in Lebanon, the claim from IS that Palestinians are being killed for the sake of an Iranian regional project is—allowances made for rhetorical excess—true.

Abu Hudhayfa says that this should not be surprising because Shi’a history is “a witness to the extent of [their] hostility and treachery towards Muslims, starting with Ibn Saba”, the Jew who in Sunni-sectarian historiography created Shi’ism. The next example Abu Hudhayfa gives is Ibn al-Alqami. The story of Al-Alqami as the Shi’a vizier who supposedly opened the gates of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258 was dredged up in the days of IS’s founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to justify his all-out war on Iraqi Shi’a civilians, who had supposedly followed in Al-Alqami’s footsteps by opening Iraq up to the Americans, and it has been a staple of Islamic State propaganda ever since. Interestingly, the first use of Al-Alqami in this way was by Saddam Husayn, in his first public statement after being removed from power by the Anglo-American invasion in April 2003.

Khomeini was only the latest in this line, says Abu Hudhayfa, who adds that “recent history” is no better: Iran’s militias horrifically brutalised the Palestinians in Baghdad after 2003, before that AMAL and other Shi’a movements in Lebanon committed atrocities against Palestinians, and “the massacres by Qassem’s [Sulaymani’s] militias [against Palestinians] were plain for all to see in the Yarmuk camp” in Syria. All of this is quite true, though the PLO was responsible for starting the Lebanese war in the 1970s, which raged for fifteen years, and the Palestinians did more than their fair share of the killing, a lot of it against Shi’is. The Lebanese Shi’is were also the first victims, even before war broke out, harassed and bullied in their own villages by the PLO after Yasser Arafat relocated to their country and set up his state-within-a-state in the south.

Warming to this his theme, Abu Hudhayfa adds:

The Rafida, past and present, were and are still a war against Islam and the Muslims. Their expansionism, and their projects and conspiracies against Muslims, are no less dangerous and malicious than the conspiracies and malice of the Jews and the Crusaders. While the Jews dream of a State from the Nile to the Euphrates, the Rafida dream of a far more expansive Rafidi crescent that engulfs the capitals and homes of Muslims from Beirut to Tehran—and further than that! They have eyes on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf! They come driven by grudges and ambitions nurtured over the years, to restore the glories of the defunct Persian Empire.

The Rafida see [the cause of] Jerusalem merely as a mechanism for accessing Muslim lands to complete their deceitful projects, which are no longer hidden, except from idiots. How can a sane person hope for support from these people?

Would a rational person befriend someone who insults his mother’s honour and curses her day and night? How can these people accept being allies and brothers of those who openly insult the honour of the mothers of the believers and the Companions of the best of Messengers, Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace? How can anyone accept being in an alliance and axis with them? For any rational person, this consideration alone would be enough for him to quickly disavow these factions and axes.

The belief that Israel wants to rule from Egypt to Iraq is a common enough conspiracy theory in the region—it was part of what caused a minor kerfuffle in Iraq in April 2004 when there was a proposal for a new national flag—and the abuse of HAMAS for its alliance with a Shi’a power is standard fare.

The interesting aspect is casting the Iranian regime’s imperialism at the present time as driven by a desire to restore the ancient Persian Empire. The IS emir following Zarqawi and his deputy, both killed in 2010, as well as IS’s most infamous spokesman, who was killed in 2016, frequently referred to the Iranians as “Magians” or “Magi”, a reference to the Zoroastrian priests of pre-Islamic Iran, which meshed with the general charge that Shi’ism is a form of idol-worshipping paganism. This line of attack has shown up less often in IS propaganda in recent years. Perhaps Abu Hudhayfa will be bringing it back.

Seventh, Abu Hudhayfa turns next to the (Sunni) Arab governments. “The war on Gaza has once again demonstrated the reality that the Arab tawagheet ruling the Muslim lands in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, the Gulf states, and so on are part of the Jewish-Crusader war against the Muslims”, says Abu Hudhayfa. Before Gaza, the Arab rulers had supported the Americans (though he does not name America directly) in their “wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.”

As these Arab regimes have aligned themselves with the Jews and Christians, Abu Hudhayfa goes on, “jihad [against them] is obligatory for Muslims, just as with fighting the Jews and Christians.” Indeed, “the current battle against the Jews is in fact a battle more with the Jews’ allies than with the Jews themselves”, according to Abu Hudhayfa, who says this reality is apparent from the Gaza war, where “the collusion of the apostate Arab governments weighed as heavily on the people of Gaza as the American bombs and missiles.” The “only legitimate solution” Abu Hudhayfa can see lies in “fighting all of these people”: treating them as a united enemy, since they have all combined against the Muslims. By destroying the Jews’ Arab and non-Arab allies, it “will pave the way for the decisive battle with the Jews, in which the Jews will find nobody to protect them or hide behind, except trees and stones”.

Abu Hudhayfa then moves off his list to make a call for global terrorism of a kind we have not heard from the Islamic State since the September 2014 speech of then-spokesman Taha Falaha (Abu Muhammad al-Adnani). Abu Hudhayfa directly frames his call as a follow-up to Falaha’s, and Abu Hudhayfa’s speech is clearly modelled on Falaha’s, repeating nearly verbatim Falaha’s language in places.

Abu Hudhayfa says [emphasis added]:

Words must be accompanied by actions, and, based on our legitimate duty to support our Muslim brothers wherever they are, including Palestine, and in light of our belief that the battle is with the Jews and their allies everywhere, the Islamic State is mobilising its soldiers in particular and all Muslims who are eager to support the oppressed in general, to target the Jews, the Crusaders, and their criminal allies in every land and under every sky.

O lion, ready to avenge your deen and the honour of your brothers, O zealous monotheists: we call upon you today to renew your activity and revive the blessed operations in the heartlands of the Jews and the Christians, which previously inflicted such great losses on them and plunged them into a vortex of terror and anticipation. O lions of Islam, pursue your prey—the Jews, the Christians, and their allies—in the streets and roads of America, Europe, and the world. Storm their homes, kill them, and torture them in every way you can.

Keep in mind that today you are the hand of the Islamic State that strikes behind [the defences of] the unbelievers, and avenges the Muslims of Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and all other Muslim lands.

Assess the plans and diversify operations: Blow them up with explosives; burn them with incendiary bombs; shoot them with bullets; slaughter them with knives to their necks; run them over and crush them with buses. The sincere one will not miss a trick in bleeding the hearts of the Jews, the Christians, and their allies—and healing the hearts of believing people. Attack them from every direction and kill them with the utmost cruelty. Turn their gatherings and celebrations into bloody massacres. Do not differentiate among infidels: civilian or soldier, they are all infidels, and the [divine] judgment upon them is the same. The armies of the Jews and the Crusaders are bombarding Muslim lands with their planes, not distinguishing between civilians and soldiers. They bomb mercilessly and kill relentlessly. Make them understand that their crimes in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and other Muslim lands will rebound upon them in their own homes in Washington, Paris, London, Rome, and other lands of unbelief.

O angry lion, your umma [Muslim community] is today stricken and grieving, bleeding from so many wounds, the last of which is in Palestine. So race, and compete, to heal its chest, wipe away its tears, and bandage its wounds, for this is one of the best ways to get close to God Almighty, and it is the obligation of the hour, the fruit of monotheism, the essence of al-wala wal-bara, and the greatest, most meaningful, and most effective form of jihad.

You should aim at easy targets before the difficult ones, the civilian ones before the military ones, and the religious targets—like synagogues and churches—before anything else, for that is what most heals the heart and delineates the terms of battle, [underlining that] our war with them is a religious war. We fight them wherever they are found in response to the command of God Almighty.

A caveat: the phrase translated as “religious war”—“harb diniyya”—is slightly inadequate because the word “religion”, meaning the spiritual part of life with the implication that this is separate from all other domains, is a Christian one. “Din” (or “deen”) is often translated as “religion”, but it refers to a “whole of life” commitment that includes what are in Christendom fields separate from religion, like law and politics. Western (Christian) notions of “the secular” have made their way into Islamdom since the end of the eighteenth century, and many individual Muslims now take secularism as a category for granted, but at a societal level in Muslim-majority countries the concept has remained somewhat indigestible, indelibly stamped as it is with its alien origins, and for the Islamic State it is exactly this kind of alien import it aims to uproot. All of which is to say, “sacred war” or “divine war”, more loosely “holy war”, are probably more exact translations, but for those reading in English “religious war” is the easiest shorthand to get the point across.

Abu Hudhayfa next says the Islamic State wants to “remind Muslims to spend for the sake of God Almighty”, to send money to other Muslims who are exposed to war and crisis, and are in need of shelter and other necessities. Abu Hudhayfa suggests the Islamic State itself as a recipient of such charity—a better use of Muslims’ money, so he reckons, than relief organisations run by Christians, Shi’is, or secularists.

“Before concluding”, says Abu Hudhayfa, he has a “message from Emir al-Mumineen [the Commander of the Faithful, i.e. Abu Hafs al-Qurayshi], may God protect him: ‘Peace be upon you’, and he advises you to ‘fear God in private and in public, and to turn to God and draw near to Him through good deeds’, and additionally fight the enemies of God and attack them, for that is the pinnacle of all things and the highest point. He urges you to support the oppressed Muslims in Gaza, from wherever you are in every land and under every sky, for the deen of disbelief is united, and today they shoot at us from one bow. Their evil was once hidden in their breasts but their malice has now become manifest. After all these crimes, there is no excuse for those who fail to support their brothers. His words end here, may God protect him.”

In beginning to wrap up, Abu Hudhayfa addresses the “brave soldiers of the Islamic State who were patient and endured what they endured in support of their deen and upholding the word of their Lord”, and singles out the “patient prisoners behind bars” for recognition, as IS so often does. All of the IS jihadists who have perished are congratulated for doing so in service of the “highest goal”: “slavery” (al-ubudiyyah) to God and avoiding the worship of anything else.

Abu Hudhayfa cites a Qur’anic verse (17:1):

Glorified is He who carried His slave [the Prophet Muhammad] on a night journey from al-Masjid al-Haram [the Sacred Mosque in Mecca] to al-Masjid al-Aqsa [the Furthest Mosque, believed by Muslims to refer to the one now in Jerusalem], the surroundings of which We have blessed, so that We may show to him [i.e., Muhammad] Our Ayat [sign, miracle, proof of God]. Verily, He is all-hearing and all-seeing.

This “noble verse”, beginning with its exultation of God and continuing on in the chapter to describe the ascension of the one entrusted with “the revelation” (al-wahi) to heaven from Jerusalem, provides “an obvious lesson to those seeking to liberate the Peninsula and Jerusalem”, says Abu Hudhayfa: they cannot prevail in conquest by human will; “whoever wants to be among the conquerors of the Land of the Two Holy Mosques and Awla al-Qiblatayn [the First Qibla, i.e. Jerusalem, the first Muslim direction of prayer before it changed to Mecca], must meet the obligations of slavery to God Almighty”, with all that that entails in terms of loyalty to fellow believers and disavowal of unbelievers.

Abu Hudhayfa contends (unsurprisingly) the “soldiers of the caliphate are on the path of slavery to God Almighty” and he bids them to hold to it, whether or not they live in areas of “tamkeen” (lit. “empowerment”, zones controlled by jihadists), and whether they are living in cities or villages, the wilderness or a wasteland. “Live as slaves of God and die as slaves of Him”, Abu Hudhayfa exhorts.

“O God, grant victory to your mujahideen slaves, who fight in your way, in support of your deen, and to uphold your word. O God, bring down your wrath upon your enemies”, Abu Hudhayfa concludes: “spare the blood of the Muslims, and protect them from the infidels. … O God, give us hasana [credit for good deeds, victory, abundance] in this world and hasana in the hereafter, and protect us from the torment of Al-Nar [the Fire, i.e. Hell]. … Peace be upon Al-Mursalin [the Messengers] and [all] praise is [due] to Allah, Lord of the worlds.”

---

UPDATE: On 11 January 2014, exactly a week after Abu Hudhayfa’s call for a global attacks campaign against Jews and Westerners, Israel announced that police and Shin Bet had arrested two Islamic State operatives in the Arab section of Jerusalem as they prepared a terrorist bombing.