13. Sowing the Seeds of ISIS, Over a Millennium Ago (Part 3)
As the struggle between the Khawarij and just about everybody else intensified, the fanatics grew in viciousness, and eventually viewed even neutral Muslims as enemies. As they saw it, neutral Muslims’ failure to support the Khawarij, despite what the Khawarij saw as the glaringly obvious righteousness of their cause, was proof that such neutrals were not Muslim at all. Instead, they were apostates, which made them kafirs (infidels). Since they were not really Muslims, the Khawarij reasoned, it followed that shedding their blood was no sin. That line of thinking was picked up over a thousand years later by modern philosophers of Islamic terrorism, whose writings furnished the intellectual underpinnings for nihilistic groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS.
Having absolved themselves from moral blame, the Khawarij went on a rampage in which atrocities abounded, from widespread torture and disfigurement of captives, to slitting the bellies of pregnant women, to massacres of entire villages and towns. Their most extreme subsect, the Azariqah in southern Iraq, separated themselves from the entire Muslim community and declared death to all sinners – defined as all who did not share the Azariqah’s puritanical beliefs – and their families. Their rebellion was eventually crushed, but embers remained. The Khawarij became the anarchists of Islam’s first centuries, an ever-present irritant and menace. Rejecting the authority of the Caliphate, they engaged in a campaign of terror and assassinations. They combined that with a low-level insurgency in backcountry regions, that would flare up every generation or two into a major rebellion that required considerable expense and effort to suppress.
