The surprise declaration of a “caliphate” by Islamic State (IS) jihadists accused of committing atrocities in Syria and Iraq has provoked an outcry of condemnation even among Islamists who dream of a state under Sharia law.

The caliphate, an Islamic system of rule, was abolished nearly 100 years ago, although many Arabs and Muslims still associate it with a golden age.

But this week’s announcement of a caliphate by the radical IS group appears to only appeal to fanatics.

“All Islamist groups want the caliphate,” said Mathieu Guidere, who teaches Islamic studies at France’s University of Toulouse.
But IS, which operates in Syria and Iraq and was formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, “is equated with terrorism and massacres; it has a bad track record,” Guidere told AFP. IS’s widely publicized brutality, including public beheadings and crucifixions, “give a very bad image of Islam… tainting the (caliphate) project, which Islamists view as an ideal.”

IS chief Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s self-designation as “caliph” — or leader of all Muslims, and successor to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) — has shocked most Muslims, even jihadists, who have rejected the idea outright.

Al-Azhar University, a leading authority of Sunni Islam, “believes that all those who are today speaking of an Islamic state are terrorists,” its senior representative Sheikh Abbas Shuman told AFP.

“The Islamic caliphate can’t be restored by force. Occupying a country and killing half of its population… this is not an Islamic state, this is terrorism,” Shuman added.

Islamist rebels in Syria, who are fighting both IS and President Bashar Assad’s regime, have branded the caliphate announcement as “null and void.”

In Iraq, the influential Association of Muslim Scholars said IS had “consulted neither residents of Iraq nor Syria.”
And Lebanon’s Jamaa Islamiyeh, which is the local branch of the widely influential Muslim Brotherhood, lashed out at the announcement and called it heresy.

The group also said IS’s acts “are a deformation of Islam, that disgusts the people of the region.”

Even more hard-line Salafist Muslims dismissed the call.   »»» Arab News

The self-proclaimed Caliph “Ibrahim al-Badri, a run-of-the-mill Sunni Iraqi cleric, gained a degree from the University of Baghdad at a time when pedagogy there had collapsed because of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship and international sanctions. After 2003 he took the name Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and turned to a vicious and psychopathic violence involving blowing up children at ice cream shops and blowing up gerbils and garden snakes at pet shops and blowing up family weddings, then coming back and blowing up the resultant funerals. This man is one of the most infamous serial killers in modern history, with the blood of thousands on his hands, before whom [monsters like] Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy fade into insignificance.” –Juan Cole

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