5 - On Top of the Revolutionary Game: Uncovering the ‘Islamic State’s’ Revolutionary Message

Summary

Revolutionary violence is ‘the highest [that is divine] manifestation of unalloyed violence by man’.

Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence, 1921

This uprising to which we invite the umma [global Muslim community] must possess the essential elements of success. There must first occur a revolution at the plane of thought and awareness so that the masses are prepared for the next stage, so that they know why they must revolt, and when revolt they do, they must know their ultimate destination.

Hamza bin Ladin Son of Osama bin Ladin, presenting al-Qaʿida as the Guardian of the revolution, 7 November 2017

Since its formation, the social movement of Jihadi-Salafism (Bonner, 2006; Cook, 2009; Meijer, 2009) has consistently advocated nothing less than an ‘alternative modernity’ where a new ‘imagined world order’ would supplant and finally replace the international system of nation states, the global economic system of capitalism, and the effects of liberal democratic values and lifestyles. This ultimate goal of Jihadi-Salafism has, however, taken a back seat in public perception. The movement's most prominent face of the early 2000s, the al-Qaʿida network, exclusively concentrated its efforts on its ‘global jihad’ against the ‘far enemy’ through its clandestine cell activities (Gerges, 2005). But while the al-Qaʿida mother network postponed until very recently the establishment of the ‘global Caliphate’ to an imagined future (Staffel and Aqan, 2016, p. 15), their regional offshoot, the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (Daesh or ISIS), not only made this imagined future their priority from the very beginning, but successfully took the first steps to make it a reality: Even though short-lived, Daesh's governance of social life in Iraqi and Syrian territory between 2013 and 2017 offered a first glimpse of how the global Jihadi-Salafist project might look.

Connecting perspectives that have come to understand Jihadi-Salafism as a social movement (Hegghammer, 2009a; Meijer, 2009; Westphal, 2018), that reject Jihadi-Salafism's singularity in favour of considering it ‘part of globalized modernity’ (Meijer, 2007, p. 423; Hegghammer, 2009b, p. 245), and that accept the movement's revolutionary character (Atran, 2016; Cockburn, 2015; Fall, 2015; Ingram, 2016; Mello, 2018; Walt, 2015; Whiteside, 2016), this chapter explicitly supports the incentive of this volume to de-exceptionalise Daesh (cf. Ditrych et al., this volume) and aims to uncover Daesh's revolutionary message as crucial for its ongoing global success.