WarSclerotic

Sharia as the Jihad’s Point of Coordination, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, February 4, 2016

Stephen Coughlin has a really important paper out and you should read it all, but I just want to highlight one area.

The three entities (the ummah, dawah and jihadi) do not have to act along formal chains of command to interoperate successfully. This is because they each execute according to their own functional orientation to Islam that reconciles through a common understanding of Islamic law.

And further

To appreciate the strategy, it should be visualized along the lines of the starfish rather than the spider: Cut an appendage from a starfish, and the severed part can grow into a fully functional starfish. Cut off a spider’s head, and all appendages become useless. In terms of command relationships, we in the West tend to think like spiders. While the Soviet Union was a spider; the Islamic Movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and ISIS are starfish.

These are very important points that need to be understood to grasp the larger scope of the struggle. Finally…

To say the threat arises out of Islam is to say that it emanates from shariah. Hence, the arrow in the diagram reflects the recognition that the three lines of operation emanate from Islam through a common understanding of shariah. For this reason, shariah also provides a common reference point based on Islamic legal concepts recognized as settled. This doctrinal framework is commonly understood and easily communicated in the Islamic world. For this observation to be valid, one does not have to prove that the underlying Islamic law reflects “true Islam,” or even that most Muslims agree with it.

As I’ve said, read the whole thing, but this needs to be kept in mind, particularly when arguing with the “ISIS is not real Islam” or “Hamas is not real Islam” school of deniers.

This entry was posted on February 4, 2016 at 5:42 PM and is filed under Islamic jihad, Sharia law. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Islamic Jihad, Sharia law