As the world mark’s the 100th anniversary of the First World War, the self-proclaimed  Caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, made his first public appearance at the Great Al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul, Iraq. In a fiery sermon, the man who claims to be the leader of the first Islamic caliphate since 1924 in effect declared war against the non-Islamic world. Across the globe, especially in Europe and America, his words were greeted with ridicule and scorn.  I would urge a less dismissive and much more analytical response.

Just like the Meccans who fourteen  centuries ago dismissed the Prophet Mohammed, only to later submit to him as the founder of the world’s second largest religious community, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is currently seen as nothing more than a transient figure. This reaction should be tempered by remembrance of a previous dismissal, especially  by American policy makers, when Osama bin Laden issued his fateful fatwa in 1996 declaring war on the United States.

In his sermon,  al-Baghdadi makes clear that the formation of the Islamic Caliphate is merely a means to an end. That end is defined in terms as brutally stark as they are unambiguous: revenge. In the words of the new caliph, “By Allah, we will take revenge! Even if it takes a while, we will take revenge, and every amount of harm against the ummah will be responded to with multitudes more against the perpetrator.” (https://ia902501.us.archive.org/2/items/hym3_22aw/english.pdf)

Who are the targets of al-Baghdadi’s uncompromising hatred? In general terms, he defines them as ” the crusaders and the atheists, and the guards of the Jews!” In addition, those political rulers within the Muslim world who, in his view, are agents of the above enemies, are also included on the target list. This would include advocates within the Islamic world for pluralistic democracy, since this contradicts, in al-Baghdadi’s worldview, the will of Allah, as manifested in Islam’s shariah law.

Much of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s polemic was devoted to annunciating contemporary grievances against the Muslim world which, in his strident mindset, cry out for a powerful vengeance. More than twenty specific references were made in al-Baghdadi’s sermon. Perhaps surprisingly, the Israel-Palestine conflict ranked only seventh on the Caliph’s list, preceded  by references to violence against Muslims in Burma, Kashmir, the Philippines, Bosnia and the Caucasus. The offending states include Russia, India and China, as well France (its sin being laws passed by the nation’s legislature for promoting the separation of church and state, which included restrictions on the wearing of the hijab).  Iran is also singled out as anti-Islamic, its Shiite form of Islamic governance regarded as apostasy and heresy, the most  grievous of all anti-Islamic offenses in the eyes of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his followers.

In Islamic jurisprudence and shariah texts, holy war or jihad can be conducted against unbelievers and apostates. An extension of this theological rationale for waging war in the name of God is the division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, the latter encompassing the unbelievers and apostates. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi  has very dramatically appealed to his followers in a warlike sermon, calling on them to follow him as their leader as he wages war for the propagation of Islam by exacting revenge on the entirety of our planet that falls outside the new Caliph’s definition of the House of Islam.

There will be a tendency to ignore or belittle Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in much of the world. However, irrespective of what one may think of his merciless manner of waging war and general lack of humanity, I think that, looked at objectively, there can be no denying that Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a remarkably  charismatic and able leader of the international jihadi movement.

Extremist notions in religion are not the monopoly of Islam. In times past, the most savage religious wars have been waged in the name of Christianity. In the seventeenth century  the Thirty-Years War between Protestants and Catholics  wiped out one third of Germany’s population.  In 1850 Hong Xiuquan, a Chinese religious fanatic, became convinced he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, chosen by God to bring Christianity to China through the sword, and he launched the Taiping Rebellion. When the rebellion was finally suppressed in 1864, between twenty and forty million Chinese were slaughtered, making this religious war the second bloodiest military conflict in history. And that was with weapons that were very primitive by current standards.

The lessons of history itself should compel us to take Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s promise to wage a ferocious worldwide war of vengeance against those he sees as the enemies of God with the utmost seriousness. His sermon in Mosul may very well mark the opening shots of the Third World War, and the most ferocious religious conflict since the Taiping Rebellion.

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In the year 680 AD, a military engagement  occurred in the town of Karbala, in present-day Iraq. The forces of Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of Islam’s prophet, were defeated by the army of the ruling Umayyad caliph. Hussein was beheaded, and approximately 150 men on both sides died. Based strictly on military casualties,  the Battle of Karbala would be viewed by historians as a mere skirmish. However, the importance of a battle cannot be measured strictly by an accountant’s ledger of losses inflicted and incurred. In terms of its long-term  strategic significance, the Battle for Karbala  must be ranked as one of the most consequential in recorded history, for it created the seismic divide in the Islamic world between Shia and Sunni Muslims, and the for the past 13 centuries the internecine struggle persists as to the correct and legitimate line of succession beginning with the Prophet Muhammad.

The followers who mourn Hussein, his bother Hasan  and father Ali as the first Imams, and martyrs of the true path of succession in Islam, have come to be known as the Shia, a large minority branch in the Islamic world that has been in perpetual theological conflict with the majority within the Muslim world, the Sunnis.  This internal strife within Islam that has endured for more than a millennium sets the context for the fearsome bloodletting occurring in Syria.

In a uniquely insightful column published in Lebanon’s English language newspaper, The Daily Star, entitled “Qusair Portends Great Danger Ahead,” Beirut-based Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri  points out that the victory in that devastated Syrian town for President Assad is in a larger sense a defeat, for it was only with the massive intervention of the Iranian backed and controlled Shiite militia based in Lebanon , Hezbollah, that a triumph could be claimed over heaps of rubble in a once predominantly Sunni populated city.

In response to the destruction of Qusair, prominent Sunni theologians throughout the Arab and broader Muslim world are calling on their faithful to flock to Syria to fight a new Jihad, not against the Western world or Israel, but in opposition to what is being described as a Iranian Shiite plot to dominate the Middle East. Those sentiments are being echoed by renewed sectarian violence in Iraq, and continuing Sunni-Shiite conflict in Pakistan.

Khouri writes with prescient eloquence, “The Hezbollah-Syria-Lebanon dynamic now also feeds into the newest regional problem arena: deteriorating Sunni-Shiite relations across the Middle East, including increasing incidents of outright ethnic cleansing, bombings, and intense provocations that started after President George W. Bush and Prime MinisterTony BlairinvadedIraqand turned it into the first modern Arab battleground of Sunni-Shiite mutual demonization and death. “

Now, a decade after the beginning of the first modern Sunni-Shiite civil war  that resulted from the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Syria has become the center of gravity in a regional sectarian bloodbath  that displays every indication that it will get far more bloody, with no end in sight to the carnage, as the rest of the world lulls itself into believing that it can be mere spectators to frightful instability that will  likely not confine its ruinous impact to the Middle East.

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