Islamic State Condemns the Idea Palestine is “the Foremost Cause of Islam”
This article was published on my old blog before I started with Substack.
An article in the twenty-second edition of al-Naba, the Islamic State’s (IS) newsletter, released on 15 March 2016, explained why the group has not made fighting Israel a priority.
Theologically, IS regards prioritising the fight against the Jews in former Mandate Palestine as nationalist idolatry: this is an area that was once ruled by Muslims and should once again be brought under the rule of Islam through jihad, but it is no more special than anywhere else. Indeed, according to al-Naba, if jihad were to be sequenced according to the sacredness of the land, then Mecca and Medina far outstrip Jerusalem and its surroundings as a priority. The Palestine cause, IS argues, has been artificially inflated in the minds of Muslims by decades of propaganda from Arab nationalist tyrants, who used the cause to distract populations from their own failings.
The danger of this fetish, al-Naba explains, is that it has led to lionising anyone who fights Israel, including Communist atheist groups and even Shi’is like Iran’s Hizballah. Muslims associating with such people is obviously religiously intolerable in IS’s perception, and the Palestine-first view causes people to violate the shari’a in two further ways: (1) the Jews, while a permanent enemy to be eternally fought and killed wherever they can be reached, are a less doctrinally immediate enemy than the apostate Arab rulers; and (2) jihad is only legitimate to bring about the rule of the shari’a, not when it is undertaken for the sake of a Palestinian nation, nor even for the sake of revenge due to Israeli abuses in the Palestinian Territories. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and HAMAS are both condemned as apostate groups pursuing this latter illegitimate course.
Strategically, IS argues that it is the Arab rulers who are the priority. As well as being worse disbelievers since they have reneged on Islam, where the Jews never accepted the faith, it is the Arab governments that form the lines of defence that protect Israel: the Arab regimes have to go first, and then Muslims will have a clear run to conquer Israel. Al-Naba also throws in a tactical consideration—a mandate, really, since it relies on a Qur’an quote—that Muslims fight the disbelievers closest to them. The framework of a constant war against the Jews must be upheld by all Muslims, says IS, but only the Muslims in Palestine are obligated to fight Israel first: Muslims in Syria must fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime, the Syrian rebellion, and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) first; Muslims in Iraq have to fight Iran’s Shi’a militias and the Kurdish Peshmerga first; and so on.
IS concludes by saying that those wanting to take up jihad should try to get to the caliphate, and if they cannot then it is better for them to swear their allegiance to the caliph and carry out an individual attack in the West, rather than sacrificing themselves for the “apostate” causes that are currently fighting against Israel.
A translation of the Naba 22 article is given below.
Jerusalem: A Religious Issue First and Foremost1
For decades, the issue of Palestine and the Jews’ occupation of it has dominated the entire life of Muslims across the world. The ghalun [exaggerators, fanatics, extremists] have gone to excess over it, and the opportunists have traded in it, until most people came to believe that Palestine is the foremost issue of Islam, after the nationalists had declared it the foremost Arab issue.2 No other issue may be raised, according to this view, unless Palestine is liberated, so that efforts are not scattered and resources not wasted. In fact, many consider that no jihad is valid unless it is in Palestine.
The callers to fitna [strife, sedition] and the ulema al-salatin [clerics or scholars of the rulers] in every place have begun to denounce the mujahideen in all the various arenas, and they confuse the ignorant by raising the question: “Why do they [i.e., IS] not perform jihad in Palestine?”
The matter went further with these deviants, until it entered the domain of al-wala wal-bara [loyalty (to Muslims) and disavowal (of unbelievers)], [where they argued] there is no longer an enemy of the Muslim umma other than the Jews occupying Palestine. Even those who seek to broaden the circle to include the Christian Crusaders have deviated from the shari’a by declaring that the sole reason for enmity toward them is their support for the Jews, and refusing to consider any taghut [idolatrous ruler] an enemy unless he has allied with the Jews or supported them.3
On the other hand, everyone who opposes the State of the Jews has become a beloved hero, whose flags are raised and whose pictures are hung—regardless of his deen [lifeway] and aqeeda [creed]. Thus, people’s hearts became attached to Communists like the fighters of the Popular and Democratic Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine [PFLP and DFLP] and their allies in the global Marxist movement for a time. They were glorified, and their dead were called “martyrs” [shuhada], despite the fact that they were atheist disbelievers who did not believe in Allah as Lord, nor in Islam as a deen, nor in Muhammad (peace be upon him) as a Messenger. But that did not matter to those holding to “the foremost Arab cause”, as long as they fought the Jews in Palestine.
Then hearts became attached to the filthy Rafidites [derog. “Shi’is”] like Hizb al-Lat [i.e., Hizballah] and the Amal Movement, due to their fighting the Jews in southern Lebanon in recent years, to the point that during the 2006 war—known as the July War—the flags of the Rafidites and pictures of the apostate Hasan Nasr al-Lat [i.e., Hassan Nasrallah] were raised in the homes of millions.
Moreover, the hearts of tens of millions of people became attached to the worst of the Arab tawaghit [pl. “taghut”], such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, Muammar al-Qaddafi, Hafez al-Asad, and Saddam Husayn, due to their exploitation of the Palestine cause,4 and their selling of illusions to their followers through fiery speeches about throwing the Jews into the sea or burning their State with rockets.5
Deviant Parties
The exploitation of the Palestine cause has gone beyond the nationalists, Leftists, and Rafidites. It has, for some time, entered into the very core of the operating methods of parties, factions, and groups that falsely affiliate themselves with Islam [i.e., Sunni Islamists], who regard it as a means to rally the people and unite the ranks. They found that there was no issue before them on the public agenda that everyone could agree on other than the cause of Palestine, which everyone—without exception—has traded upon. They found it easy to construct their activist methodologies on the foundation of “the Palestine cause,” which had already been nurtured by the nationalists for decades.
This was because they found the people distant from the deen, and their souls made it seem good to them to draw people to their groups on this corrupt foundation and then proceed with them—so they claimed—to achieve the announced goals of their groups in establishing the deen and implementing the shari’a. They did this without paying attention to the differing natures of the people drawn to calls to liberate Palestine—being a mixture of Muslims and disbelievers, of nationalists, Leftists, and Christians. So is it truly possible to rally all of these in order to succeed in any genuine “Islamic” project?
After nearly seven decades of empty slogans, Palestine remains under Jewish rule, and the Rafidites and their deviant party allies continue to trade in the cause, now that historical Palestine has been divided into three parts, each ruled by a taghut government claiming hostility toward the others.
Jihad to Liberate Jerusalem Is Governed by the Regulations of the Shari’a
Placing the issue of Palestine within its proper shari’a framework, and breaking the idol of “the Muslims’ foremost cause” to which people have been devoted for decades, must be the foundation upon which any real action toward that blessed piece of land is based.
The foremost issue of the Muslims is the establishment of tawhid [monotheism]. Allah the Exalted said: “I did not create the jinn and except that they should worship Me” [Qur’an 51:56]. And for this purpose, Allah sent the messengers and prescribed jihad, to purify all the earth from shirk [idolatry] and to make the people worship the Lord of the Worlds, Exalted is He. As He said: “Fight them until fitna is no more, and the deen is entirely for Allah” [8:39].
What applies to Jerusalem and its surroundings in this regard applies to the rest of the earth. Jihad to liberate Jerusalem from the hands of the Jews is not permissible except if it is for the purpose of removing the rule of taghut from it and establishing the deen therein in full and without deficiency. As for replacing the rule of the Jews with the rule of tawaghit like those currently ruling in Gaza and the West Bank, then jihad for that is invalid—it is fighting in the cause of taghut, not jihad in the cause of Allah.
If we look at the reality of the earth today, we find that all of it is ruled by shirk and its laws, except for patches in which Allah enabled the Islamic State to establish the deen. Jihad to repel the disbelievers from the usurped lands of the Muslims is an obligation upon the Muslims, including Jerusalem and its surroundings, the Land of the Two Sanctuaries [Ard al-Haramayn], and the rest of the lands of the Muslims. Accordingly, the ruling on jihad in Palestine is the same as its ruling elsewhere, without distinction. If the virtue of the land were to grant preference to jihad therein, then jihad to liberate Mecca and Medina from the hands of the tawaghit of Al-Saud would, without doubt, take precedence over all other parts of the earth.
Elsewhere, Allah the Exalted commanded His slaves to fight all of the mushrikun [idolaters, polytheists], without making exceptions for some over others, or specification for some [to be fought] over others. He said: “Wage war on all of the mushrikun together, as they fight together against you. And know that Allah is with the righteous [al-muttaqin]” [9:1].
What is it that gave the Jews such a special distinction among all the types of mushrikun that the deviants have restricted jihad to them alone, excluding others? The apostate tawaghit ruling over the lands of Islam are more disbelieving than them [i.e., the Jews], and fighting them takes precedence over fighting the original mushrikun [al-mushrikun al-asliyyin, i.e., those who never were Muslims like Jews and Christians]. The legally-sanctioned [al-mashru] jihad includes fighting the Jews in Palestine, fighting the tawaghit and their apostate followers in every place, and likewise fighting the Crusaders and all the mushrikun in the world. Restricting jihad to the Jews alone is a replacement [or substation: tabdil] of the shari’a of Allah and a following of the desires of the tawaghit who wish to prevent the Muslims from performing jihad against the mushrikun and apostates in the countries they rule.
Likewise, Allah the Exalted commanded the believers to direct their jihad toward the disbelievers closest to them, within the framework of fighting all the mushrikun. He said: “O you who believe, fight those disbelievers who are nearest to you” [9:123].
Therefore, Muslims in every place must fight those disbelievers closest to them. The Muslims under the rule of the Jews begin with fighting them; the people of Syria [al-Sham] begin with fighting the Nusayri taghut and others among the apostates like the Sahwat [Syrian rebels] and the PKK; the Muslims in Iraq begin with fighting the apostate Rafidites, the Peshmerga, and the Sahwat [Awakening forces]; the Muslims in Egypt and Sinai with fighting the taghut ruling Egypt—and so on across all the lands of Islam. When the Muslims in any region finish fighting the disbelievers closest to them and bring their land under the rule of Allah, they can then move on to the disbelievers who are next closest, and so on until the earth is purified from shirk and disbelief.
This reality is further confirmed when we take into account that the tawaghit in the vicinity of Jerusalem and their armies constitute the first line of defence for the State of the Jews. Therefore, it is absolutely impossible to reach the stage of fighting the Jews without first eliminating these tawaghit, removing their rule, and destroying their armies,6 thus reaching the borders of the Jewish State and directly engaging with its army.
Indeed, jihad to liberate Jerusalem and its surroundings from the hands of the Jews—which we ask Allah to bring near—is a shar’i matter, subject in all its parts to the rulings of the shari’a. It is not permissible under any circumstance for anyone to go to extremes in it and raise it [i.e., Palestine] above the tawhid of Allah, just as it is not permissible for anyone who believes in Allah as Lord and in Islam as deen to be negligent regarding it. It is a shar’i obligation upon all Muslims to work toward it, as it is one of the lands of the Muslims that the Jewish disbelievers seized and turned into dar al-harb, governed it by the law of taghut, where the rites of Islam are prohibited within it, Muslims are killed, their wealth plundered, and they are expelled from their land.
Therefore, fighting these Jews is an obligation upon every Muslim. But this obligation is more binding upon the people of Jerusalem due to their proximity to it—provided that the objective of this fighting is the establishment of the deen of Allah, and not merely the recovery of land and wealth or revenge for the crimes of the Jews over the past decades. It is obligatory upon all Muslims in the world to assist them in that, by sending them whatever money and men they are able to, as well as easing the burden upon them and harming their enemy by targeting the Jews and their allies wherever they are found, killing them, damaging their wealth, and disrupting their interests to the extent of their ability.
Jihad to liberate Jerusalem from the hands of the Jews does not justify joining apostate factions and parties such as the Rafidite Hizb al-Lat, the “Islamic Jihad Movement” affiliated with it, or secular and Communist movements like FATAH, the Popular Front, and the Democratic Front, nor those movements bearing the name of Islam yet refraining from ruling by the shari’a of Allah, and applying the shirk of democracy in practice, such as the apostate HAMAS movement.
Fighting disbelievers under a disbelieving banner is never permissible. Rather, the Muslim fights under the banner of the jamaa of the Muslims; and if he is unable to join the caliphate, then its allegiance and his lone jihad is more righteous for him before Allah than destroying himself in a campaign to remove the rule of the Jews only to replace it with the rule of apostate taghut parties and factions.
NOTES
The title of the article is Bayt al-Maqdis … qadiyya shariiyya awwalan (بيت المقدس.. قضية شرعية أولاً). Throughout the above article, where “Jerusalem” appears, the phrase used in the text is “Bayt al-Maqdis”.
The word translated as “foremost” is “al-awwal”, literally “the first”. Could also be rendered “primary”.
Taghut refers to rulers who use man-made laws in place of God’s Law, the shari’a, and therefore place on the same level for worship or regard an idol and what is divine. To jihadists, this is shirk, “associating” idols with God, which is the crime of mushrikun in the Qur’an, and by Tradition the mushrikun are said to be pagan polytheists.
“Qadiyyat Filastin” could also be rendered “Palestine issue”; in more formal settings the “Palestine Question”.
The allusion is probably to an infamous statement made by Saddam, on 2 April 1990, in response to Britain and the United States going public about intercepting Iraqi agents who were trying to acquire and smuggle parts to create nuclear weapons. As we now know, Saddam had begun a crash program to acquire nukes and would have reached his goal if not for the insane decision four months later to annex Kuwait, triggering the American-led operation to evict him, which nearly brought down the Ba’thi regime and, since it ended with troops partially occupying Iraq, enabled an inspection process that uncovered some of what Saddam had done.
In April 1990, however, Saddam denied all. Iraq had no need of nuclear weapons, Saddam said, because it had a chemical weapons of mass destruction stockpile that was only exceeded by America and the Soviet Union. Saddam claimed the Anglo-American actions and statements the week before were designed to give Israel cover to strike at Iraqi infrastructure (this was just nine years after the Israelis had demolished the nuclear-weapons facility at Tuwaytha, known as Osirak to the French, who had—specifically the ultra-corrupt then-Mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac—helped Saddam build the reactor knowing what he wanted it for).
Those apparently “threatening [Iraq] with nuclear bombs” (the U.K. and U.S.) were warned that they would be hit with “binary chemical weapons” if they carried on, and Saddam then theatrically added: “By God, we will let fire consume half of Israel” if it tries anything against Iraq.
When IS mentions States that protect Israel, which must be destroyed first in order to get to the Jewish State, the reference pretty obviously has uppermost in mind Jordan, the birthplace of IS’s founder, Ahmad al-Khalayleh, the infamous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.