\u201cI like to feel like I\u2019m a conduit, an enabler \u2013 does that sound soppy?\u201d After listening to a couple of episodes of his exceptional new series, Aftermath (23 January, 8pm), I wanted, not for the first time, to know what drives the oral historian Alan Dein to keep making the sorts of radio programmes that he has made for the past 20 years. These include the award-winning Lives in a Landscape and Don\u2019t Hang Up \u2013 ostensibly uncomplicated exchanges with people going about their daily lives, sometimes revealing very little, sometimes more than you can bear. (Landmark radio initiatives such as The Listening Project owe a great deal to Dein.)
In Don\u2019t Hang Up recently, a woman mentioned that her grandmother had flown herself across Africa in a biplane in the 1930s. Dein always seems to have the same sort of response to any such information: lightly intrigued sympathy, shot through with an implacability, like a ship\u2019s figurehead battling into the elements.
In Aftermath , he explores what happens to a community after it has been at the centre of a nationally significant event: Hungerford; Hyde in Manchester, post-Shipman; Morecambe Bay. Some of the most memorable parts of the first programme involve Dein simply driving around the streets of Hungerford with a resident. As the car\u2019s indicator softly clicks, the interviewee points out the plethora of yew trees in that pretty Berkshire town. A great place to make cricket bats, the man thinks out loud, as Dein unhurriedly steers the conversation back in the vague direction of the shootings.
Dein never seems to set traps for his interlocutors, never exhausts them. And yet unhealed wounds are frequently bled. Has he always been good at getting people to talk? He tells me that when his dad took him as a kid to watch Arsenal play in the 1970s, he found he was always more interested in the crowd than in the match, in \u201clooking at faces and wondering about how they spoke to each other\u201d. He says that one question guaranteed to get someone talking is, \u201cWhy do you live where you do?\u201d All things will unfurl from this: personal circumstances, family history, work. Communicated in that quintessentially undramatic Dein way, like puddles gently drying in a courtyard.
The venue for the declaration of the \u201cIslamic State\u201d had been carefully chosen. The Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul was a fitting location for the restoration of a \u201ccaliphate\u201d pledged to the destruction of its enemies. It was built in 1172 by Nur al-Din al-Zengi, a warrior famed for his victories over the Crusaders. When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ascended the pulpit in July 2014 and proclaimed his followers to be \u201cthe backbone of the camp of faith and the spearhead of its trench\u201d, he was consciously following in Nur al-Din\u2019s footsteps. The message could not have been clearer. The Crusaders were back and needed defeating.
Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future. In Islamic State\u2019s propaganda, they certainly are. Sayings attributed to Muhammad that foretold how the armies of Islam would defeat the armies of the Cross serve their ideologues as a hall of mirrors. What happened in the Crusades is happening now; and what happens now foreshadows what is to come.
The Parisian concert-goers murdered at the Bataclan theatre in 2015 were as much Crusaders as those defeated by Nur al-Din in the 12th century \u2013 and those slaughters prefigure a final slaughter at the end of days. When the propagandists of Islamic State named their English-language magazine Dabiq , they were alluding to a small town in Syria that \u2013 so they proclaim \u2013 will at last bring the Crusades to an end. Every issue is headed with the same exultant vaunt. \u201cThe spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify \u2013 by Allah\u2019s permission \u2013 until it burns the Crusader armies in Dabiq.\u201d
How much does Islamic State actually believe this stuff? The assumption that it is a proxy for other concerns \u2013 born of US foreign policy, or social deprivation, or Islamophobia \u2013 comes naturally to commentators in the West. Partly this is because their instincts are often secular and liberal; partly it reflects a proper concern not to tar mainstream Islam with the brush of terrorism.
Unsurprisingly, the first detailed attempt to take Islamic State at its word ruffled a lot of feathers. Graeme Wood\u2019s article \u201cWhat Isis really wants\u201d ran in the Atlantic two years ago and turned on its head the reassuring notion that the organisation\u2019s motivation was anything that Western policy\u00admakers could readily comprehend.
\u201cThe reality is,\u201d Wood wrote, \u201cthat the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.\u201d The strain of the religion that it was channelling derived \u201cfrom coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam\u201d and was fixated on two distinct moments of time: the age of Muhammad and the end of days long promised in Muslim apocalyptic writings. Members of Islamic State, citing the Quran and sayings attributed to the Prophet in their support, believe themselves charged by God with expediting the end of days. It is their mandate utterly to annihilate kufr : disbelief. The world must be washed in blood, so that the divine purpose may be fulfilled. The options for negotiating this around a table at Geneva are, to put it mildly, limited.
In The Way of the Strangers , Wood continues his journey into the mindset of Islamic State\u2019s enthusiasts. As he did in the Atlantic , he scorns \u201cthe belief that when a jihadist tells you he wants to kill you and billions of others to bring about the end of the world, he is just speaking for effect\u201d. Although not a report from the \u201ccaliphate\u201d, it still comes from front lines: the restaurants of Melbourne, the suburbs of Dallas, the caf\u00e9s of Ilford. Wood\u2019s concern is less with the circumstances in Syria and Iraq that gave birth to Islamic State than with those cocooned inside stable and prosperous societies who have travelled to join it. What persuades them to abandon the relative comforts of the West for a war zone? How can they possibly justify acts of grotesque violence? Is killing, for them, something
incidental, or a source of deep fulfilment?
These are questions that sociologists, psychologists and security experts have all sought to answer. Wood, by asking Islamic State\u2019s sympathisers to explain their motivation, demonstrates how Western society has become woefully unqualified to recognise the ecstatic highs that can derive from apocalyptic certitude. \u201cThe notion that religious belief is a minor factor in the rise of the Islamic State,\u201d he observes, \u201cis belied by a crushing weight of evidence that religion matters deeply to the vast majority of those who have travelled to fight.\u201d
Anyone who has studied the literature of the First Crusade will recognise the sentiment. The conviction, popular since at least the Enlightenment, that crusading was to be explained in terms of almost anything except religion has increasingly been put
to bed. Crusaders may indeed have travelled to Syria out of a lust for adventure, or loot, or prospects denied to them at home; but that even such worldly motivations were saturated in apocalyptic expectations is a perspective now widely accepted. \u201cMen went on the First Crusade,\u201d as Marcus Bull put it, \u201cfor reasons that were overwhelmingly ideological.\u201d
The irony is glaring. The young men who travel from western Europe to fight in Syria for Islamic State \u2013 and thereby to gain paradise for themselves \u2013 are following in the footsteps less of Nur al-Din than of the foes they are pledged to destroy: the Crusaders.
Jonathan Riley-Smith, who revolutionised the study of the Crusades as a penitential movement, once wrote an essay titled \u201cCrusading as an Act of Love\u201d. Wood, in his attempt to understand the sanguinary idealism of Islamic State sympathisers, frequently echoes its phrasing. In Alexandria, taken under the wing of Islamists and pressed to convert, he recognises in their importunities an urgent longing to spare him hellfire, to win him paradise. \u201cTheir conversion efforts could still be described, for all their intolerance and hate, as a mission of love.\u201d
Later, in Norway, he meets with a white-haired Islamist to whom the signs of the impending Day of Judgement are so palpable that he almost sobs with frustration at Wood\u2019s failure to open his eyes to them. \u201cTo Abu Aisha, my stubbornness would have been funny if it were not tragic. He looked ready to grab me with both hands to try to shake me awake. Were these signs \u2013 to say nothing of the perfection of the Quran, and the example of the Prophet \u2013 not enough to rouse me from the hypnosis of kufr ?\u201d
Wood does not, as Shiraz Maher did in his recent study Salafi-Jihadism , attempt to provide a scholarly survey of the intellectual underpinnings of Islamic State; but as an articulation of the visceral quality of the movement\u2019s appeal and the sheer colour and excitement with which, for true believers, it succeeds in endowing the world, his book is unrivalled. When he compares its utopianism to that of the kibbutzim movement, the analogy is drawn not to cause offence but to shed light on why so many people from across the world might choose to embrace such an austere form of communal living. When he listens to British enthusiasts of Islamic State, he recognises in their descriptions of it a projection of \u201ctheir idealised roseate vision of Britain\u201d. Most suggestively, by immersing himself in the feverish but spectacular visions bred of his interviewees\u2019 apocalypticism, he cannot help but occasionally feel \u201cthe rip tide of belief\u201d.
The Way of the Strangers , though, is no apologetic. The time that Wood spends with Islamic State sympathisers, no matter how smart or well mannered he may find some of them, does not lead him to extenuate the menace of their beliefs. One chapter in particular \u2013 a profile of an American convert to Islam whose intelligence, learning and charisma enabled him to emerge as the principal ideologue behind Dabiq \u2013 is worthy of Joseph Conrad.
Elsewhere, however, Wood deploys a lighter touch. In a field where there has admittedly been little competition, his book ranks as the funniest yet written on Islamic State. As in many a British sitcom, the comedy mostly emerges from the disequilibrium between the scale of his characters\u2019 pretensions and ambitions and the banality of their day-to-day lives. \u201cHe can be \u2013 to use a term he\u2019d surely hate \u2013 a ham.\u201d So the British Islamist Anjem Choudary is summarised and dismissed.
Most entertaining is Wood\u2019s portrait of Musa Cerantonio, whose status as Australia\u2019s highest-profile Islamic State sympathiser is balanced by his enthusiasm for Monty Python and Stephen Fry. His longing to leave for the \u201ccaliphate\u201d and his repeated failure to progress beyond the Melbourne suburb where he lives with his mother create an air of dark comedy. Visiting Cerantonio, Wood finds their conversation about Islamic State ideology constantly being intruded on by domestic demands. \u201cHis mother was about ten feet away during the first part of the conversation, but once she lost interest in the magazines she walked off to another part of the house. Musa, meanwhile, was discussing theoretically the Islamic views on immolation as a method of execution.\u201d
The scene is as terrifying as it is comic. Were Cerantonio merely a solitary eccentric, he would hardly merit the attention but, as The Way of the Strangers makes amply clear, his views are shared by large numbers of Muslims across the world. Just as Protestant radicals, during the 16th-century Reformation, scorned the traditions of the Catholic Church and sought a return to the age of the Apostles, so today do admirers of Islamic State dread that the wellsprings of God\u2019s final revelation to mankind have been poisoned. What, then, are they to do?
That their enthusiasm for, say, slavery or the discriminatory taxation of religious minorities causes such offence to contemporary morality only confirms to them that there is a desperately pressing task of purification to perform. As Wood observes, \u201cThese practices may be rejected by mainstream Muslim scholars today, but for most of Islamic history, it barely occurred to Muslims to doubt that their religion permitted them.\u201d Verses in the Quran, sayings of the Prophet, the example of the early caliphate: all can be used to justify them. Why, then, should Islamic State not reintroduce them, in the cause of making Islam great again?
Perhaps the most dispiriting section of Wood\u2019s book describes his attempt to find an answer to this question by consulting eminent Muslim intellectuals in the US. Scholars whose understanding of Islam derives from a long chain of teachers (and who have framed documents on their walls to prove it) angrily condemn Islamic State for ignoring centuries\u2019 worth of legal rulings. It is a valid point \u2013 but only if one accepts, as Islamic State does not, that scholarship can legitimately be used to supplement the Quran and the sayings of Muhammad.
When Wood asks Hamza Yusuf, an eminent Berkeley Sufi, to demonstrate the group\u2019s errors by relying only on the texts revealed to the Prophet, he struggles to do so: \u201cYusuf could not point to an instance where the Islamic State was flat-out, verifiably wrong.\u201d This does not mean that it is right but it does suggest \u2013 despite what most Muslims desperately and understandably want to believe \u2013 that it is no less authentically Islamic than any other manifestation of Islam. The achievement of Wood\u2019s gripping, sobering and revelatory book is to open our eyes to what the implications of that for all of us may be.
Tom Holland\u2019s books include \u201cIn the Shadow of the Sword: the Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World\u201d (Abacus)
The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State by Graeme Wood is published by Allen Lane (317pp, \u00a320 )<\/p>\n

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