Caution and Clarity in Thinking About ISIS and Apocalyptic Activism

The many horrifying actions undertaken under the auspices of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) are well known to almost all who don’t deliberately avoid news reporting, so there is no need to belabor the exceptionally gory details of beheadings, crucifixions and mass killings.  However, it is significant that such atrocities are very widely regarded not only as horrifying but also as bewildering.  By this, I do not mean merely that onlookers are astonished that members of ISIS would perform such horrifying acts.  More importantly, many observers in the public, the press, the academy and the military are bewildered that ISIS was overtly performing them as preparations for an impending apocalypse.

This particular piece of reportage was an amazing new twist for many people who had gradually become inured to events that might have seemed inconceivable not long ago.  Terrorists have gradually indurated the public to deliberate killings of innocents for political purposes since the 1970s, and since at least 2001, religiously motivated terrorists have gradually accustomed the world to once-startling claims that such killings are holy or sanctified.  But sustained, organized and programmatic violence on the part of would-be state-holders geared toward the apocalypse . . . well, that was shocking.  And the shock was measurable.

For example, when The Atlantic published an article on ISIS by Graeme Wood in March, 2015 (“What ISIS Really Wants”), it became—and remains—the most viewed piece in the online history of of that 160 year-old magazine.  The headnote introducing the article read, “The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse.”[1]

Bewilderment and Outright Denial Regarding Apocalyptic Activists

Having followed scholarly and journalistic writings on ISIS closely for a decade, I find Wood’s evidence and argumentation quite compelling.  Nevertheless, the piece attracted plenty of criticism, with much of it coming from easily-anticipated directions:  ISIS isn’t really even religious; its purportedly religious pronouncements are smokescreens for territorial opportunism; it is really just a bunch of dismissed Baathists rather than zealous jihadists; their motivations were worldly grievances against the USA or ascendant Shi’a and Nouri al-Maliki’s regime . . . and so on.  Many of us who work in university social science departments, steeped in secularist biases thereby, are accustomed to hearing people explain away religious phenomena by any available means.  I don’t find this irksome on religious grounds (I happen not to be a religious “believer” in the way that most people use the term), but it certainly does irritate me as an instance of ideological closure against evidence regarding an important phenomenon.  But again, one gets used to this sort of thing, so the blowback to Wood’s article was almost entirely unsurprising to me.[2]

What I did find surprising, and what underscores my premise that ISIS’s apocalypticism is very broadly bewildering (or simply unacceptable to some people, regardless of the evidence) is the reaction Wood encountered when seeking guidance specifically from scholars of religion.  The following is drawn from his 2017 book, The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State:

“The Islamic State’s self-presentation is suffused with religious language, tropes and pomp—but when I asked experts on religion for their opinion on the group’s religious foundations, they typically denied any meaningful link and instead changed the subject to American foreign policy, neo-Baathist power-politics, abnormal psychology, or secular grievance. . . .The notion that religious belief is a minor factor in the rise of the Islamic State is belied by a crushing weight of evidence that religion matters deeply to the vast majority of those who have traveled to fight. . . . And yet in the months after the declaration of the caliphate, I could find hardly a single tenured professor whose writings about the Islamic State revealed acquaintance with the group beyond having read about it in The New York Times.  Almost no one could quote the group’s scholars, let alone engage their arguments, even though the Islamic State’s propagandists had strewn those arguments all over the Internet.”[3]

Wood continues in this vein for pages on end, and the pages are—at once—infuriating and amusing.  I hesitate to quote him at greater length, but one additional passage will help us circle back to the social sciences while also showing that the “blind spot” he encountered when seeking guidance afflicts scholars of Islam as well as the broader professorate in religious studies:

“In my conversations with scholars of Islam, few of the people who dismissed the Islamic State as a product of false Islamism—Jacobinism with an Islamic veneer—were able to name a single cleric or scholar associated with the Islamic State, or a fatwa or other statement by that scholar.  The level of ignorance is as appalling as if a scholar of Marxism declared the Soviet Union ‘not Marxist’ and turned out to be unfamiliar with the name Trotsky or Lenin, or the title of anything either of them wrote.”[4]

This is where the amusement comes in for me, recalling my days as a graduate student in the 1980s, when I was taught that Marxist ideology in the Soviet Union was a bogus smokescreen for neo-Czarist imperialism…by certain professors who had apparently never read a word by Trotsky or Lenin.  Follow-up questions about how the Soviet Union arose in the first place were not warmly received, but then, this is understandable, because of a well established fact:  It is less disconcerting to explain political disasters by reference to relations of power than by reference to ideologies born of personal and political pathologies.

The bewilderment of the attentive public regarding ISIS’s apocalypticism is easy enough to understand, given that many in the scholarly community simply aren’t prepared to accept the overwhelming evidence (namely, that apocalyptic activists have rallied tens of thousands to their black banner from all walks of life and many different countries).  Of course, the average citizen isn’t receiving analysis directly from scholars but rather from television commentators, who seem no more willing to acknowledge the presence of apocalyptic activists in our midst.  For example, when Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 58 others in a reportedly gay nightclub in Orlando, TV commentators turned almost immediately to back-stair psychologizing, speculating that he may have acted out of homosexual self-loathing despite the fact that he took time during the shooting to call 911 to pledge allegiance to ISIS and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

It is easy enough to look down one’s nose at TV, but some op-ed columnists in prestigious newspapers haven’t performed any better.  Josh Rogin wrote in The Washington Post on July 17 that, “Terrorism isn’t a root cause; it’s a symptom of wider problems faced by disenfranchised populations in the Middle East and at home.”  One wonders why the murderous intentions of our home-grown terrorists should be ascribed to “disenfranchisement,” or why anyone would turn to ISIS in search of voting rights.  In any case, in the same column, Rogin argues for aid expenditures to rebuild cities like Mosul, quoting with approval Richard Clarke’s assertion that, “The best breeding ground for terrorists is a city without services.”[5]  Clarke may be right about the “best” part of this quotation, but as breeding grounds go, we know for sure that nice places like Minneapolis or Brussels with solid public services can breed quite prolifically.

It may seem that I’m getting snotty about people with whom I disagree, but actually I find it easy to empathize with Rogin.  He advocates something like a Marshall Plan for northwestern Iraq because that’s the sort of thing we know how to do.  He wants to be helpful, and he wants American policy to be helpful.  Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to him that some people are less interested in voting rights and reliable electricity than they are in the final victory of Righteousness over Evil.  Or maybe that has occurred to him, but he doesn’t have any idea what helpful measures to suggest regarding such people.  It is certainly more uplifting to recommend rebuilding a power grid than calling in a drone strike on the home of an apocalyptic killer, so let’s just do this:  Ignore the guy’s stated enlistment in an apocalyptic conflict, presume he can be mollified with running water, and send in the Army Corps of Engineers rather than the Air Force.  As Wood reflects sarcastically on those who react to the horrors wrought by ISIS as Rogin does, “In some quarters, the relief at discovering the group’s covert secularism is palpable.”[6]

For the record, I readily agree with Rogin that we should help rebuild Mosul, but on grounds of humanitarianism rather than for counterterrorism purposes.  Moreover, I ascribe our disagreement not to wrong-headedness on his part, but rather bewilderment regarding ISIS’s apocalypticism, and as I’ve suggested, that is a very widespread condition.  For good reasons, too, when the phenomenon is set forth in stark questions:  How could those who piously prostrate themselves before God then arrogate to themselves a role as His unerring agents, claiming to know whom He would smite and killing in His name?   How could individuals who are fervently religious engage in brutal beheadings of Yazidis or Coptic Christians or even Shiite Muslims, regarding these as acts pleasing in the eye of God?  Why would anyone actually long for the bloodcurdling events anticipated in Sunni apocalyptic prophesies, and how could such longing be so widely experienced as to engender, “. . . [A] mass market phenomenon . . . a new and hugely popular genre, apocalyptic fiction…now rapidly spreading throughout the Muslim world”[7]

There is plenty here to account for widespread bewilderment, especially within the “climate of opinion” that predominates in our time, which is predominantly secularist or, within religious circles, often tepidly tolerant.  And besides, bewilderment is not all bad, as Socrates and Aristotle taught by showing that the sting of aporia and agnoia can spur a striving for understanding.  Almost everything associated with ISIS is horrible, but this horrifying resurgence of apocalyptic activism—which was widely but mistakenly believed to be a thing of the past—offers fertile ground for understanding essential and permanent problems in human consciousness.

The Perennial Wellsprings of Apocalyptic Activism

The apocalyptic activism manifested in ISIS’s rise to global prominence is properly regarded as a resurgence of a phenomenon rather than its re-appearance.  The historical origins of apocalypticism are, I believe, rather murky, as this mode of consciousness is surely much older than our literary records of it. However, we can say with confidence that it has never disappeared, even if it wanes in particular eras and locations. I shall return to ISIS momentarily, but at this point it may be helpful to offer something like a thesis statement regarding apocalypticism in more general terms.

People have killed other people in the hope of precipitating a world-ending cataclysm in many times and places—perhaps in most times and places, if we think in big blocks of time and space.  Shifting from apocalyptic actions to reactions, I believe we can safely make an even stronger statement: killings and plagues and catastrophes have been regarded as portents of the End of the World almost everywhere they have occurred, for as long as they have occurred.  These actions and reactions (and both the experiential longings and fears that engender apocalyptic symbolisms) do not, therefore, seem to depend for their existence upon any particular religious tradition, nor even upon religious belief itself.[8]

Moreover, apocalyptic activism can arise from a wide variety of circumstantial contexts, with the circumstantial variations including differing cultures and levels of economic development.  It does not seem dependent upon personal misery or society-wide immiseration, though there is good reason to believe that apocalyptic beliefs and actions are much more likely to “catch on” and animate larger groups in times of crisis.  Still, while there is evidence that a fairly broad sense of tangible, worldly crisis may be a necessary condition for a broad upwelling of apocalyptic activism, it is emphatically not a necessary condition for personal experiences engendering apocalyptic symbolizations or activism on the part of individuals-much less a sufficient condition.  Stated simply, apocalyptic longings pop up in individuals in all sorts of times and places, suggesting strongly that the tributaries that water this phenomenon include streams that are personal and perennial—not just social or periodic.

More simply still, individuals with particularities of character and consciousness that make them unusually sensitive to inherent aspects of the human condition (especially uncertainty, imperfection and mortality) engage in revolt against that condition.  The revolt can take multiple forms, some limited to the realm of consciousness, others intruding into the field of worldly action.  Apocalypticism is among these essentially perennial forms, and it too may remain limited to the realm of consciousness, as in relatively benign chiliasm, or may burst forth as a violent attempt to spur a cataclysm that will destroy the world and bring forth a heaven—or a new world with heavenly attributes.  As such, apocalyptic activism that is genuinely apocalyptic in motivation (more on this caveat below) is a specific sub-type of spiritual disorder or pneumopathology, rather than a convulsion resulting from non-spiritual sources such as worldly penury, powerlessness, moral obtuseness or clinical insanity.

Although this line of explanation will be familiar to those versed in the writings of Eric Voegelin, we must acknowledge that—however illuminating we may find it to be—it is emphatically not the predominant public understanding of ISIS or comparable groups.  Several factors explain this, and ideological secularism is only one of them.  For starters, the foregoing account is quite general and theoretical.  That’s nothing to apologize for, and we can certainly benefit from theoretical conceptualization of a politically important mode of consciousness.  But still, if a theoretical account is “disembodied,” i.e., set forth in a way disconnected from particular individuals and groups, without seeking to explain their specific speeches and actions, we can hardly expect others to do the “embodying” on their own.  Certainly we should not “hold our breath” in the expectation that significant numbers of citizens or statesmen or soldiers will seize upon Voegelinian analyses of disordered consciousness as the way to move beyond bewilderment regarding the grim spectacle of ISIS atrocities.

A second factor that helps explain why the word, “pneumopathology” isn’t quite echoing down the hallways of defense or intelligence agencies is that attempts by those who understand this mode of analysis directly to violent extremists are still few in number.  Klaus Vondung’s The Apocalypse in Germany is still extremely valuable, but it is unfortunate that his superb study (published initially in 1988 and translated into English in 2000) hasn’t been succeeded by many others.  I published Eric Voegelin and the Politics of Spiritual Revolt (LSU Press) in 1992, and I believe that remains the only book ever devotedly solely to Voegelin’s analysis of spiritual disorder.   Barry Cooper published New Political Religions in 2004.  That book remains the “state of the art” in terms of applying analysis of pneumopathology to the beliefs and actions of terrorist killers.  This speaks very well for Cooper’s work, but considering its publication date, the book’s continuing preeminence doesn’t speak very well for the rest of us who work in this problem area—myself emphatically included.[9]

A third factor, which helps to explain the second one, is that applying a Voegelinian analysis of pneumopathology to particular terrorists with religious or apocalyptic leanings is quite difficult to do, and especially difficult to do persuasively while also really being careful in one’s methodology.

This article ended up in its current form based on two considered conclusions:  1) An analysis of apocalyptic activism informed by an understanding of spiritually disordered consciousness can be exceptionally illuminating; and 2) the work of connecting such an analysis to particular extremist organizations confronts complications that must be taken seriously if we value conscientiousness appropriately, resisting the temptation to just fire away at terrorist groups (which certainly offer the most tempting targets imaginable).

I will spell these out in reverse order, addressing cautionary considerations first, then closing with a series of fairly concise propositions that I believe we can forward conscientiously regarding ISIS and religiously motivated terrorists—once some caveats are set out.

Cautionary Notes on Interpreting Apocalyptic Activism

Among the factors counseling caution when analyzing—much less “diagnosing”—apocalyptic activists are the following:

1)  They are fairly few in number, because far fewer individuals engage in activism based on apocalyptic beliefs than merely anticipate an apocalypse;

2)  Those who do engage in violent action often do so in groups, but groups include individuals with quite varied motives;

3)  Multiple groups animated by apocalyptic narratives may arise roughly simultaneously (either independently in response to common stimuli, or by multiplication due to factional division), and the clusters of coterminous groups are often characterized by significant variations in the degree to which they are apocalyptically motivated.

*       *       *

1)  One need not be a statistical expert to know that generalizations become less reliable and more perilous when addressed to smaller populations.  Regarding apocalyptic activists, history shows a pretty steady stream of them, but the stream is usually quite thin.  This observation is based on an important conceptual distinction, namely, that apocalyptic anticipators vastly outnumber apocalyptic activists.  It is one thing to, A) sense that impending events might end the world we know; it is another thing to, B) long for such an end, and another thing still to C) believe one can help trigger the end.  In numerical terms, instances of these three types of apocalyptic consciousness telescope down, and do so quite sharply.

To flesh out this point, we know that lots of people anticipate a near-term end to the world, whether because of an inrush of divine or satanic energies, or on account of nuclear war, environmental collapse, or an attack by hostile extraterrestrials.  Anyone doubting the words “we know” or “lots of people” is hereby invited to spend an interesting half hour on Google surveying the evidence.  Among the results to be found are that, according to an international poll carried out by Ipsos Global Public Affairs on behalf of Reuters News, 22% of Americans believe they will experience some kind of Armageddon in their lifetime.  Worldwide, the number drops to just under 15%, but that’s still a big number in my opinion, and this was no small study.  Responses to the international poll were elicited from 16,262 people in more than 20 countries.[10]

When questions are framed in more explicitly religious terms, the numbers can run much higher.  I’ll cite just two examples drawn from two different religious contexts.  First, a Pew Research Center on Religion & Public Life survey from 2010 found that, “By the year 2050, 41% of Americans [that’s all Americans…not just Christians] believe that Jesus Christ definitely (23%) or probably (18%) will have returned to earth,” and, “fully 58% of white evangelical Christians say Christ will return to earth in this period . . .”.[11]

Second, a 2012 survey of Muslims conducted by the Pew Research Center, . . . [I]nvolved more than 38,000 face-to-face interviews in over 80 languages.”  The study, “[A]sked Muslims in 23 countries whether they expect the Mahdi to return in their lifetime” [italics in original].  The study found that, “In most countries surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia, half or more Muslims believe they will live to see the return of the Mahdi.  This expectation is most widespread in Afghanistan (83%), Iraq (72%), Tunisia (67%) and Malaysia (62%).  It is least common in Bangladesh (29%) and Indonesia (23%).”[12]  Clearly there’s a big difference between 83% in one country and 23% in another, but to my eye, a finding that nearly one-quarter expect the return of the Mahdi in the least expectant of countries is almost as striking as the finding that the percentage reaches 83% in Afghanistan.

Returning to the three-fold typology of apocalypse believers with which I opened this section, it is unfortunate that these studies don’t distinguish between those who A) sense that impending events might end the world we know, and those who B) long for such an end.  It seems likely to me that the second set is significantly smaller, but this is little more than guesswork, with several factors clouding the issue.  The events foretold in almost all apocalyptic revelations are very scary indeed, and one could imagine that many people would prefer to sit them out and be exhumed in the latter stages of the process rather than undergo all of it as one of the living in the time when the cataclysm begins.  However, there may be as many (or more) individuals who hope that their time will be The Time.  Be that as it may, I doubt that survey research could ever disentangle this issue decisively or meaningfully for multiple reasons, not least being the likelihood that most people’s preferences regarding such a choice probably haven’t been thought through carefully.

In any case, the more important question is whether the numbers fall precipitously when shifting from those who B) long for the apocalypse in their lifetime, to those who C) believe they can help trigger the end.  Here we can do more than merely guess, as we have historical evidence at our disposal as well as some interesting survey research.  Addressing the latter first, data from, “[A] survey by the Pew Forum and the Pew Research Center, conducted July 6-19, 2006, based on 1,670 respondents who identify as Christian” shows a tellingly wide discrepancy on two different interview items.  When asked, “Do you believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ?” fully 79% responded affirmatively, whereas 17% responded negatively and 4% either didn’t know or declined to answer.  By contrast, when asked, “Can peoples and nations affect when Christ returns?” only 23% said yes, 50% said no, and 27% either didn’t know, declined to answer or were among the 17% who didn’t believe in the Second Coming at all.[13]

Regardless of how much weight we might accord to this finding on its own, we can say that it squares with commonsense psychology as well as the historical record.  The shift from longing for the apocalypse in one’s own time to believing oneself capable of spurring its advent entails degrees of arrogance and impatience that are higher by several orders of magnitude.[14]  Similarly, in times of apocalyptic excitement, many more people long for the fulfillment of prophecy than count themselves among the Elect, and many more count themselves among the Elect than actually kill anybody for that reason.[15]

*       *       *

2)  Apocalyptic activism is ordinarily a group phenomenon, and though we can safely characterize a group as apocalyptic based on its manifestos and proclamations, we can’t safely diagnose a group as apocalyptic or spiritually disordered because of the multiplicity of motivations leading individuals to join a group.  Spiritual disorder or pneumopathology is properly understood as a disturbance or disorder in personal consciousness, rather than a sort of perverted “groupthink.”  It may be “transmissible” to some degree, and we know that extremist groups of various sorts become groups in the first place because of the possibility of persuasive recruitment efforts.  However, for a recruiting pitch to prove persuasive, the symbols on which it rests must resonate with the personal experiences or vulnerabilities of the listener.

This is very nearly axiomatic for a Voegelinian (or Platonic) understanding of pneumopathology (or philosophy, for that matter), so I won’t belabor the point here.  What does require emphasis is this:  We can characterize groups as apocalyptic based on their manifestos, and we can legitimately diagnose individual members as pneumopathological if they provide sufficient spoken or written evidence regarding the motivations underlying their actions.  However, methodologically, we cannot legitimately diagnose groups as pneumopathological, because groups almost always include individuals with widely varying motivations.

Many authors verify this complication.[16]  Obviously, we know that members of religiously inspired terrorist groups embody religiosity to differing degrees (as in any church), but there’s more to the issue than that.  In some individuals, authentically held, grandiose religious motivations along the lines of righteousness and alignment with a “big-P” Purpose co-exist with other attractions that are much more mundane.  In accounts of other individuals, religious motivations are secondary if they exist at all, with mundane motives predominating.

It is easy to compile a list of such mundane motives from accounts of particular individuals and groups, but less common for analysts to offer balanced accounts that accord due weight to religious fervor as well as non-religious enticements.  Getting this balance right is important.  At a basic level, simply being accurate is always an analyst’s responsibility, but there’s more at stake for those of us intent upon redressing anti-spiritual biases in the way that terrorism is being depicted to political and military leaders as well as the public at large.   Offering an account of religious terror groups that insists on the centrality of disordered spirituality to the exclusion of other motivations makes it easy for readers to turn dismissive as soon as they see that other, more readily understood factors are also at work.[17]

Considering an example of an analysis that gets the balance right is worthwhile.  Jessica Stern’s Terror in the Name of God isn’t the most profound analysis of religious terrorists, in my judgment, but it is exemplary in its measured and inclusive consideration of factors.   The book is based on interviews of a variety of terrorists who acted on behalf of overtly religious groups (with ostensible affiliations with Christianity, Islam and Judaism).  On one hand, she acknowledges that:

“Some operatives will admit that they got involved in terrorism out of a desire for adventure.  Many join out of friendship or through social networks,  In some cases, the desire to be with friends turns out to be more important, over time, than the desire to achieve any particular goal.  Others are attracted to the “glamour” of belonging to a militant group.  One operative told me about the appeal of living outside normal society under extreme conditions, on a kind of permanent Outward Bound.  Some get involved in violent groups out of a sense of alienation and anomie.  Once part of a well-armed group, the weak feel strong and powerful, perhaps for the first time in their lives.  Some admit that they find guns and violence appealing.  For such individuals, there are clear emotional benefits to belonging to violent groups.  In short, fun and profit—status, glamour, power, prestige, friendship, and money—provide powerful incentives for participating in terrorist groups.”[18]

With that granted, Stern still recognizes that, “Fun and profit . . . do not explain how an organization begins.”[19]  The book as a whole is descriptive rather than analytical, but its most penetrating passages can be cobbled together to form an admirably illuminating profile of the disordered spirituality of religious killers:

“. . . [R]eligious terrorists know themselves to be perfectly good.  To be crystal clear about one’s identity, to know that one’s group is superior to all others, to make purity one’s motto, and purification of the world one’s life’s work—this is a kind of bliss….[P]urifying the world through holy war is addictive.  Holy war intensifies the boundaries between Us and Them, satisfying the inherently human longing for a clear identity and a definite purpose in life….[A]pocalyptic violence intended to “cleanse” the world of “impurities” can create a transcendent state….Only a few of the terrorists discussed in these pages have had visions or felt themselves to be in direct communication with God.  But all of them describe themselves as responding to a spiritual calling, and many report a kind of spiritual high or addiction related to its fulfillment. . . . The spiritually perplexed learn to focus on action.  The weak become strong.  The selfish become altruists, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. . . . Uncertainty and ambivalence, always painful to experience, are banished.”[20]

Although I’m arguing against employing terms like “diagnosis” when addressing terrorist groups because of the variegated motivations of their members, this need not render us mute.  It is perfectly legitimate, in my view, to characterize an organization like ISIS as apocalyptic and spiritually disordered based on the cast of its narrative and the nature of its actions.  Its membership isn’t all of one piece, but it does have a clearly stated raison d’être and commands its members to act in accord with it—on pain of death.  Particular members may be thrill seekers or gun fetishists or unemployed former Baathists to a greater degree than they are devoted millenarians, but there’s little reason to believe that foreign nationals made the hijrah to fight with ISIS without knowing what they were joining, at least in outline if not in ghastly detail.  No doubt there are individuals who resided in the physical space controlled by ISIS who got “swept up” in something they wouldn’t have joined by choice, but all that establishes is that the character of these unfortunates was at odds with the character of ISIS.

Organizations can embody “characters” in a meaningful sense, and it is therefore legitimate to characterize them, even though they are somewhat heterogeneous.  They are not, however, personal entities that have “souls” that experience the tension of existence.  To be sure, they may be founded and led by individuals who revolt against the limitations of the human condition, and they may likewise attract adherents specifically because they make promises of certainty and perfection and immortality.  But it remains important to maintain theoretically appropriate relationships between our analytical terminology and the level of analysis on which we’re working, using terms like “diagnosing” conditions such as “pneumopathology” precisely, which means at the level of the individual soul.

*       *       *

3)  A final reason to exercise great caution when engaging in spiritual analysis of violent groups is that they may not only be checkered internally but also very different from one another, even when the different groups are engaged in closely related causes.  Accordingly, those who offer general diagnoses of “Jihadi organizations” as though they were all of one piece are in for a bracing corrective if they start digging into details.  To pursue this example, we’ve already sharpened our focus by employing the term, “Jihadi,” excluding violent extremist groups claiming to be Christians or Jews or Sikhs or Hindus, etc., but our circumference still includes ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra), Lashkar-e-Taiba . . . plus a whole series of “affiliated” or “franchise” groups in many other countries.  The relationships among these organizations are extremely complicated even at the highest level (in terms of who bends the knee to whom, or proclaims independence, or lures affiliates away from another major organization, etc.).  Indeed, the sheer number of groups and the intricate interrelationships gave rise to a major project called “Mapping Militant Organizations” that was conducted predominantly at Stanford University, and it is not hyperbole to say that the main maps are potentially migraine-inducing in their complexity.[21]

This is not the place to detail these complexities, but there is a fissure of great importance running through all of these groups, namely, that ISIS is overtly and intensely apocalyptic in its pronouncements and appeals, whereas al-Qaeda has only alluded to or hinted at the apocalypse as its ultimate desideratum, to be hoped for only after a protracted period of this-worldly struggles required to unify the Muslim world, reclaim its original purity and former glory, and set the stage for the foretold events thereby.  As William McCants writes:

“Al-Qaeda’s leaders rarely referred to Islamic End-Times prophecies in their propaganda and never suggested the Mahdi was around the corner. . . . Bin Laden’s and Zawahiri’s disdain for apocalypticism reflects their generation and class.  Until the Iraq war, apocalypticism was unpopular among modern Sunnis, who looked down on the Shi’a for being obsessed with the Mahdi’s return.  Sunni books on the apocalypse were commercial failures.  Bin Laden and Zawahiri grew up in elite Sunni families, who sniffed at messianic speculation as unbecoming, a foolish pastime of the masses.”[22]

As McCants shows, this difference with ISIS regarding apocalypticism was not limited to different readings of the pertinent passages in the Qur’an and the hadith (reported sayings of Muhammad and his companions), though they did indeed arrive at very different readings.  Widely differing expectations regarding the apocalypse led to dramatically different strategies, tactics and recruitment practices between the two organizations, as well as differing directives to their affiliates in other lands.  The ISIS leadership expressed quite publicly its expectation of a relatively near-term, culminating battle at Dabiq, which it “fought ferociously to capture” despite the fact that the village is “not important militarily” but significant only as the prophesized site for “the great battle between infidels and Muslims [that] would take place there as part of the final drama preceding the Day of Judgment.”[23]  Consequently, ISIS had no use for the long-term, incremental strategy insisted upon by al-Qaeda’s leadership, which restricted the declaration of emirates or states (much less the revival of the Caliphate), constrained attacks against Shi’a or un-enlisted tribes, inveighed against the automatic imposition of medieval punishments such as amputations and lethal stonings, and so forth.

ISIS’s urgent apocalypticism translated into a pattern of practice and a whole series of incidents that ultimately led Zawahiri to kick it out of al-Qaeda in February, 2014.  For its part, ISIS shot back that it had ceased to be part of al-Qaeda as early as 2006, when it dropped its title of, “al-Qaeda in Iraq” and declared itself the Islamic State.[24]  ISIS went its own way in the most assertive manner possible, declaring the rebirth of the Caliphate and compelling all Muslims to heed the directives of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, now renamed Caliph Ibrahim al-Baghdadi.  Some affiliates remained loyal to al-Qaeda whereas others rallied to the new ISIS Caliphate (e.g., Boko Haram in March, 2015).

We need not pursue these intricacies much further.  The point is simply that the various jihadi groups are marked by wide variations where apocalypticism is concerned, and these variations have a direct bearing on what we can safely surmise about the apocalypticism of their membership.  Al-Qaeda has trained well over 100,000 radical Muslims in at least five different camps, but only invited a very small percentage of those to actually join the organization as full-fledged members.  ISIS took a totally different approach, throwing its doors open wide for membership and taking in large numbers of former Saddam loyalists and, subsequently, thousands of former Nusra Front fighters even though ISIS and Nusra had ended up as bitter rivals.[25]  Of course, ISIS also accepted thousands of foreign nationals into its membership, including individuals with widely varying backgrounds and levels of information regarding the organization.  The recruitment methods of al-Shabaab differ markedly from either ISIS or al-Qaeda, as the group has reportedly swelled its ranks by pressing individuals—including children—into service.[26]  If we compare the consciousness of these unfortunate individuals (who were probably empty vessels in the case of the children) to that of  well-versed quasi scholars who traveled to join ISIS from Australia or Belgium . . . well . . . hopefully the point has been made, and need not be spelled out at length.

Pneumopathology’s Importance in the Activism of Religious Terrorists

While respecting the difficulties noted above, we should recall that many (perhaps most) observers among the public, the academy, the political leadership and the military remain reluctant to recognize any spirituality at all in the actions of ISIS or others who kill for purportedly religious reasons.  That reluctance constitutes a “blind spot” of the greatest importance, and its importance connects not only to matters of general concern at the moment, but also to issues of public policy as well as questions of operational strategy and tactics regarding possible military responses.  I certainly can’t address all of these implications in a conference paper, and some of them are simply beyond my current capabilities.  However, I argue for taking apocalyptic and religious killers at their word, at least when they give us enough words to work with–as ISIS certainly has.  We should take them at their word because we’ve heard such words before, and seen them put into action over long stretches of time by would-be world purifiers marching under many different banners, both religious and secular.

For the sake of brevity and clarity, I’ll set out what I mean in a set of propositions.  Analysis-by-pronouncement isn’t my style, but the confines of conference papers are quite rigid, and hopefully I have already hedged my case with enough caveats to be granted a chance to advance some propositions forcefully.

Regarding the oft-heard attempts to account for ISIS or religiously inspired terrorist groups by reference to non-spiritual factors, I would reply:

1)  Evidence suggests that the majority of ISIS fighters and supporters are authentically religious, and that motivations of a religious sort are the most important for most of the individuals in question.  Most ISIS members of local origin, and an even higher percentage of those who traveled and joined from outside the region, understand their actions as being imbued with transcendent purpose;

2)  This is true however distasteful this particular form of religiosity may be to us, either in the broadest theological sense or the more circumscribed context of Islam.  A belief that seems theologically questionable or historically unsupported does not cease to be a belief for those reasons, and dismissing the religiosity of beliefs we regard as defective in favor of secular explanations is theoretically mistaken and politically perilous;

3)  Theologians and scholars of religion are understandably attracted to more sublime forms of spirituality than ones that are “lower” or downright murderous, but pathological spirituality is spiritual nonetheless, and can only be conceptualized adequately on its own ground;

4)  Conceptualization rather than condemnation is what is needed regarding ISIS and other groups engaged in religiously motivated killing.  Those who kill innocents for instrumental purposes are fittingly called “evil” or “sick” by political leaders in the aftermath of their attacks, but only because this expresses appropriate revulsion and stiffens the spine of the citizenry—not because the terms are meaningful for analytical or theoretical purposes;

5)  Those who deliberately kill innocents are certainly “sick” in a sense, but most observers are mistaken regarding both the locus and nature of their sickness.  In the majority of cases, the locus of the disorder is not the mind, conventionally speaking, because most terrorists or members of ISIS are not clinically insane;

6)  Generally recognized concepts of clinical of insanity are quite weak in explanatory power regarding most terrorist leaders in general and the leadership of ISIS in particular, as evidenced by the fact that most of them function in consistent, disciplined and effective ways in operational, means-ends terms (however much we abhor both their means and their ends).  It is true that some psychopaths and sociopaths also act in calculating and disciplined ways (e.g., serial killers and school shooters), but such individuals rarely act in sustained cooperation with sizeable groups.  Most terrorists and ISIS members are resolute rather than impulsive, joining organizations in deliberate and considered ways over time, and rarely disengaging abruptly in a manner that makes them seem fickle or unstable;

7)  Characterizations of terrorists or ISIS members as insane are conspicuous by their virtual absence from the growing body of interview accounts supplied by scholars and journalists, and at present there is simply no reason to believe that any significant number of them would could be neutralized by administration of a psychoactive medication;

8)  Just as most ISIS members and terrorists are not clinically insane, neither are they simply immoral, at least in the commonly used sense of that term.  Most aren’t insensitive to questions of justice and right, but rather are highly sensitive to them, regarding their actions as obligatory, self-sacrificing and even altruistic;

9)  Shifting from the general, secular sense of morality to its specifically religious dimension, the evidence suggests that the vast majority of ISIS members and religiously inspired terrorists regard their actions as both divinely sanctioned and personally transfiguring.  Stated simply, almost all who are on record believe their spiritual status is enhanced—not undermined—by killing;

10)  Any analysis of ISIS’s operations, or of “holy wars” more generally, is woefully incomplete if it considers only the strategy and tactics of the conflicts but not the self-understanding of the warriors, which almost always includes the belief that their actions absolve past sins and promise eternal rewards;

11)  Of the multiple attractions that drew individuals to join ISIS (and the attractions are multiple, as we have seen), the most salient was engagement in a sanctified role in a final, grand struggle of cosmic proportions, one that would immortalize the agents of righteousness in their permanent victory over infidels, apostates, and indeed over all afflictions and imperfections.

*       *       *

The apocalyptic religiosity that infuses ISIS’s proclamations and inspires many of its adherents cannot be explained away by arguing that it is a bogus smokescreen employed to conceal a commonplace push for power.  Nonetheless, understanding and countering individuals who understand their activity in this way is much more difficult than dealing with people who are simply pushing for power, and hence we will never hear the end of the “smokescreen” hypothesis.  The problem confronting us as scholars, citizens or soldiers would be much more manageable if this were not the case.  Regrettably, however, the problem posed by most ISIS members (and most religiously motivated terrorists more generally) is not that they are in-authentically spiritual, but rather that their spirituality is disordered in character.

“Most” is not “all,” of course, so there is no point in trying to shout down those who would have us understand an organization like ISIS in purely pragmatic terms as opposed to spiritual ones.  They have evidence at their disposal in the form of ISIS members who aren’t particularly religious and engage in violence for other reasons.  Adherents of the “smokescreen” hypothesis can be expected to rely heavily on that evidence, since they often don’t have ears to hear evidence of a spiritual sort.  Moreover, those who are categorically skeptical about spiritual evidence can be expected to be especially unwilling to connect murderously disordered spirituality with spirituality per se.  Almost all of the spirituality being exhibited by ISIS members is murderously disordered, or, at any rate, disordered in ways that facilitate the murderous intentions of those in their ranks.  Accordingly, modest expectations are in order when it comes to assessing the chances that a Voegelinian interpretation of ISIS will make major headway among political leaders or military planners.  However, that is no reason not to try to shed light on this darkest of contemporary realities.  I believe the odds that some headway will be made will be enhanced if the case is made not only forcefully, but also cautiously and carefully.

Notes

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

[2] Reactions to Wood’s article were sufficiently voluminous that he recounted them and commented on them on The Atlantic’s Web site in two separate postings, one devoted to the general gist of his argument, and another specifically addressing contentions that ISIS isn’t truly a manifestation of Islam.  See:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants-reader-response-atlantic/385710/ …and https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/what-muslims-really-want-isis-atlantic/386156/

[3] Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers:  Encounters with the Islamic State, Random House, 2017, p. 73.

[4] Ibid., p. 76.

[5] Josh Rogin, “A Shortsighted Terrorism Fight,” The Washington Post, July 17, 2017, p. A15.

[6] Wood, The Way of the Strangers, p. 75.  I don’t mean to diminish the importance of basic services, and am aware that they can be taken for granted all-too-easily when one is provided with them consistently, as I am.  But the important point is this:  Considering the poor public services afforded to the majority of the world’s population, we can doubt a causal connection to terrorism for the good reason that we confront murderous terrorists only by the thousands—not the tens of millions.

[7] Jean-Pierre Filiu, Apocalypse in Islam (M. B. DeBevoise, trans.), University of California Press, 2011, p. x.  I make reference to the particular horrors of Sunni apocalyptic prophesies in the sentence to which this note is attached, but it is worth noting that the Shi’ite tradition’s anticipations—while notably different in details—are every bit as ghastly.  See Filiu’s composite sketch, Ibid., pp. 26-28.

[8] The possibility that political apocalypticism or political “religiosity” of a sort could exist apart from a connection to a transcendent religion will be well known to readers of the work of Eric Voegelin, but one can hope that this paper might be read by others as well.  The key sources are:  Eric Voegelin, Modernity without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, Vol. 5 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin [CWEV], Edited by Manfred Henningsen, University of Missouri Press, 2000, as well as Voegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme:  A Meditation,” in Published Essays 1966-1985, Vol. 12 of CWEV, 1990, pp. 315-375.  See also Barry Cooper, New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, 2004, and Klaus Vondung, The Apocalypse in Germany (Stephen D. Ricks, trans.), University of Missouri Press, 2000, original edition from Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich, 1988.

[9] For a welcome recent contribution by a younger scholar, see Scott Philip Segrest, “ISIS’s Will to Apocalypse,” Politics, Religion & Ideology, Vol. 17, 2016, Issue 4, at http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/c8Ik4tqr9BWpaH3FNR6v/full

[10] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mayancalendar-poll-idUSBRE8400XH20120501

[11] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2010/07/14/jesus-christs-return-to-earth/

[12] http://www.pewforum.org/2012/08/09/the-worlds-muslims-unity-and-diversity-3-articles-of-faith/

[13] http://www.pewforum.org/2009/04/09/christians-views-on-the-return-of-christ/

[14] Interview accounts of religiously inspired terrorists point to extreme impatience and arrogance as conspicuously prominent characteristics that are common to violent extremists—and that differentiate them from humble believers marked by faith as opposed to intense conviction.  See Stern, Terror in the Name of God, pp. xxvi-xxvii, but also passim.

[15] This is evident in our time, and for corroboration from another era, see the still indispensable work, Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium:  Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Oxford University Press, Revised and Expanded Edition, 1970.

[16] For example, William McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse:  The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State, St. Martin’s Press, 2015, pp. 98, 114; Wood, The Way of the Strangers, pp. 146-7.  It would be easy enough to furnish additional references, but every example should be considered critically, for the following reason (among others): Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, writing about a misconception regarding Ramzi Yousef (perpetrator in multiple attacks including the first World Trade Center bombing), note that, “He is remembered as something of a bon vivant bomber, a man with ready recommendations for whorehouses around the world and motivations that were a mixture of vanity and secular politics….It seems a better assumption that, like many who came later, he took seriously the admonition, written in a dozen training manuals, to camouflage his identity through behavior that made him appear to be an unbeliever.”  Benjamin and Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror, Random House, 2002, p. 8.  This camouflage approach is still being used today.  Young members of the ISIS-affiliated terror cell that killed 15 in Catalonia in mid-August 2017 weren’t suspected as extremists because they hung out in bars, according to a report heard on National Public Radio, but it turns out that they were deadly serious about killing as many people as possible (they killed 15), and hoped to blow up the Antoni Gaudi-designed Sagrada Familia Basilica under the direction of Moroccan imam Abdelbaki Essati, according to The Washington Post, August 23, 2017, A10.

[17] An analogous instance of dismissiveness may be seen in Thomas Altizer’s well-known criticism that, “Professor Voegelin finds everything to be gnostic.”  That criticism was cavalier and ultimately unsustainable, but it was also understandable, and Voegelin brought it upon himself by offering sweeping condemnations of entire ideologies that he listed in passing as examples of modern gnostic movements.  I’m sure that Voegelin didn’t lose any sleep over Altizer’s criticism.  But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t costs to this:  His tendency to carelessness of expression led to others to attribute carelessness to his analysis, which remains lamentably undervalued in scholarly circles when measured against its achievements.

[18] Stern, Terror in the Name of God, pp. 4-5.

[19] Ibid., p. 5

[20] Ibid., pp. xxviii, 137 and 281.

[21] The project was funded through the Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict, and Cooperation competition, a joint venture between the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense from 2009-2012.  The interactive maps depict relationships between different organizations and offer accounts of the groups, and can be found online at:  http://web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/

[22] McCants, The Isis Apocalypse, p. 28.

[23] Ibid., p. 102.

[24] Ibid., p. 93.  To be clear, the sequence of declarations initiating the multiple iterations of ISIS runs as follows:  Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi declared the existence of “Monotheism & Jihad” in 2003; it transformed into “al-Qaeda in Iraq” in 2004; it was re-named the Islamic State in 2006 after Zarqawi was killed, and the Caliphate was declared in June of 2014 after ISIS fighters over-ran Mosul.

[25] On al-Qaeda’s widespread training but very restrictive granting of membership, see Stern, Terror in the Name of God, p. 260 and Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda:  Global Network of Terror, Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 8.  On ISIS’s open acceptance of Baathists and Nusra fighters, see McCants, The ISIS Apocalypse, p. 34 and p. 98.

[26] “Country Reports on Terrorism 2013.” Bureau of Counterterrorism, United States Department of State, Apr. 2014. Web. Cited on Stanford’s “Mapping Militant Organizations” Web site, http://web.stanford.edu/group/mappingmilitants/cgi-bin/groups/view/61?highlight=Abu+Bakr+al-

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