The many shades of Islam

OPINION:

After the massacre on Bondi Beach this month, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters that the killers were adherents of a “radical perversion of Islam.”

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett said the men who gunned down 15 Jews, including a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, were aligned with the Islamic State group, which she claimed is a terrorist organization, “not a religion.”

Really, mates?

It has been a generation since al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Back then, most people had no idea who Osama bin Laden was, much less what he believed.

No one wanted to tar all Muslims with the terrorist brush. That was admirable. Just days after 9/11/01, President George W. Bush proclaimed that “Islam is peace.” That was morally generous but analytically incorrect.

These many years later, it’s no longer excusable for powerful and influential people like Mr. Albanese and Ms. Barrett to not know much about history and even less about theology.

Cutting to the chase: Members of al Qaeda, the Islamic State group, the regime that rules Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and Boko Haram are all terrorists, but we may presume that they also are true believers whose interpretations of the Quran and the Hadiths (collections of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) are not insupportable.

Many members of these bellicose groups self-identify as “Salafi-Jihadis,” meaning they see their version of Islam as akin to that of the Prophet Muhammad’s seventh-century companions and followers whose armies marched out of Arabia, swords raised, conquering foreign peoples and settling in foreign lands.

Vast Islamic empires and caliphates soon dominated much of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as significant swaths of Europe and Asia.

It was not until the 1920s, in the aftermath of World War I, that the Ottoman Empire collapsed and the last Ottoman caliph, Abdulmecid II, boarded the Orient Express at a station near Istanbul, heading for exile among the unbelievers of Europe.

Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian schoolteacher, saw this as a historic tragedy. In 1928, he founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Its mission was and still is to reestablish Islamic supremacy and domination everywhere and anywhere.

Since then, Brotherhood theologians have provided inspiration to pretty much every group committed to waging jihad against Jews, Christians, Hindus and others.

Those “others” include Muslims who decline to embrace the jihadis’ reading of Islam and the obligations the jihadis insist are incumbent upon Muslims.

Under a doctrine known as takfir, these jihadis excommunicate and, on many occasions, kill Muslims who decline to toe their theological line.

This has been happening in Nigeria, where Boko Haram, the Islamic State West Africa Province, and Fulani militias slaughter Muslims who prefer to peacefully coexist with their Christian neighbors.

Similarly, residents of the Gaza Strip uninterested in fighting an endless war against Israelis are denounced as “collaborators,” a crime for which Hamas has summarily executed dozens over recent months.

Takfiris insist it’s their way or the highway because Islam is not open to interpretation, unlike Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism.

We know that claim is false because Shiite Islam diverged from Sunni Islam nearly 1,400 years ago. Over the centuries, many other Islamic denominations have evolved. To name just a few: Sufis, Alevis, Ibadis and Ahmadiyya. Within modern Shiism, there are three distinct traditions.

You’ll also recall that the Islamic State split from al Qaeda. Among their theological differences: Al Qaeda opposed the premature declaration of a caliphate.

Al Qaeda reasoned that if a caliphate was declared and then crushed, with the caliph killed by infidels, millions of Muslims would conclude that the jihad lacked divine endorsement.

As it turned out, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State group founder and its first self-proclaimed caliph, was killed during a U.S. raid in Syria in 2019. The three caliphs who succeeded him also came to untimely ends.

Now, there is a fourth caliph, and the Islamic State carries on, not least in Syria and Nigeria, where its forces have recently been bombed on President Trump’s orders. Meanwhile, in recent years, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been reforming “Wahhabism,” the state theology of Saudi Arabia based on the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an 18th-century scholar whose goal was to establish a singular, rigorous and pristine school of Islamic law.

The Muslim Brotherhood is outlawed in Saudi Arabia, as it is in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE even has a minister of tolerance and coexistence. In 2023, he opened the Abrahamic Family House, a complex featuring a mosque, a church and a synagogue, intended to convey “interfaith unity, tolerance, moderation, and peaceful coexistence.”

Who has the authority to tell the Saudis and the Emiratis that they are not good Muslims? By the same token, who has the authority to tell Jew-hating Muslim gunmen in Australia that they are “perverting” a peaceful religion that doesn’t countenance terrorism?

That concludes my sermon for today, but, in the few column inches I have left, I will tell you a story.

In 2009, the State Department sent me to Pakistan under a “U.S. Speaker and Specialist program.” One of my meetings was with a group of religious leaders from different Muslim sects. One spoke of “moderate Islam.” Another objected: “There is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam.’”

Not one expressed support for bin Laden (who was then secretly living in Pakistan), but neither would any label him an apostate or heretic.

This conversation prompted me to start reading and thinking about the subject of today’s column. It’s high time Mr. Albanese, Ms. Barrett and many others in government, law enforcement and academia did the same.

• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.