Comment by fivedogit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fivedogit | Hacker News Reader

Read this a few days ago. So good. Everything I've heard otherwise in the media has been superficial by comparison.

TL;DR ISIS is a doomsday cult analogous to David Koresh's. They interpret the Koran exactly literally and any deviation from it is punishable by death (this includes AQ and all shia for modernization offenses). They believe they are a primary actor in the prophecy that'll bring about the ultimate battle with "Rome" at Dabiq, Syria and the judgement day.

My take is that while modern mainstream Christianity laughed off the Branch Davidians as crazy people who offered nothing, mainstream Sunnis see IS as similarly crazy with the important exception of "well at least they're fighting the Shia". In other words, there is some tacit support for IS based on millennia-old factionalism, (edit: which is how they've grown from a small cult into a significant movement).

An interesting point in the article is that while AQ can hide underground and never be fully eradicated, IS has to maintain land and provide government services under the caliphate to remain legitimate (according to the Koran, of course). This makes it an entirely different enemy that can, in theory, be destroyed.

Further, no peace can ever be negotiated because the borders of IS have to keep expanding or the caliphate is no longer valid. That is, Muhammad says all non-believers have to be converted, full stop.

Anyway, the article is outstanding. Take an hour to read the whole thing.

> Further, no peace can ever be negotiated because the borders of IS have to keep expanding or the caliphate is no longer valid. That is, Muhammad says all non-believers have to be converted, full stop.

I think a lot of liberal media in the West tends to whitewash some of the, shall we say, more unpleasant actions of Islam's founder described in the Qu'ran (violence, child bride, etc).

However, the assertion that Muhammad said that all non-believers must be converted is false, full stop. There is a very famous verse of the Quran addresses this categorically (in the words of Muhammed as supposedly dictated by God):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Baqara_256

Indeed, the entire tax base of most Muslim empires, most notably the Ottoman, was based on taxing non-Muslims (Muslims were exempt from this tax, but had to serve in the military). So the rule against forcible conversions was not only stated clearly in the Qu'ran, but there have been unbroken enforcement of this rule by Muslim empires, kingdoms, and nations from Muhammed's time to the modern era, in a large part because of the incentives those entities had in keeping a large number of non-Muslims to tax. This is not to say that Muslims never forcibly converted people, but it is/was widely recognized as being forbidden by the Quran.

Now, this is a separate matter from expanding borders. The Islamic State surely would love nothing more than to establish a caliphate at the farthest historical borders, so N. African up across Spain, Europe across the Balkans up to Vienna, and all of Central Asia. That said, I can't see them ever expanding beyond the Levant, even in the worst case scenario. Even without a massive Western ground intervention (which would obviously happen if they threatened Spain, if not before), IS would have to conquer Turkey and Iran, and that seems extraordinarily unlikely.

It does create a non sequitor in my mind that such cults are so implacably opposed to modernisation or adoption of contemporary culture, but will happily fire a captured M16 or fly an Mi-24 in support of their objectives...

My understanding is that it's not modernization in that sense but re-interpretation of scripture.

> My take is that while modern mainstream Christianity laughed off the Branch Davidians as crazy people who offered nothing

Much of the contemporary (with the events) right-wing Christian and militia-movement response to the affair with the Davidians was to overtly sympathize with and support the Davidians against the actions of the government. The kind of rejection you describe seems to me to fairly extreme historical revisionism.

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