The Way of the Strangers Quotes

“One of the photos Yaken posted on social media after he made it to Syria showed a bucket filled with severed heads, hashtagged “#headmeat.”36 Irrespective of whether his adventure to the land of the caliphate was spiritually fulfilling, the imagery it produced was a kind of pornography. And like all pornography, it aroused strong reactions, ranging from titillation to revulsion, and sometimes both at once. These reactions share an intellectually disarming effect. As in the case of porn, they resist detached analysis. The scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith noted a similar tendency in the failure to understand the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978. The problem, he said, was an unwillingness to undertake the difficult task of “looking, rather than staring or looking away.”37”
― Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State

“Turki al Bin ‘ali does the Islamic equivalent of smashing an electric guitar and kicking over an amplifier every time he steps up to the minbar.”
― Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers

“Mass illiteracy once protected religion from amateurism, but now the gates to the nuclear facility have been breached, and hobbyists and high school students are playing with the missile material.”
― Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers

“Mainstream Muslims are in a bind. The Islamic State professes that there is one God, and that Muhammad is his last and greatest prophet. Denying the Islamic State's faith and its supporters' status as Muslims, excommunicating them because you disagree with their version of Islam, is to concede the match. After all, takfir is the official sport of the Islamic State, and if you practice it, you become one of them. For Muslims who hate the group, the Islamic State's claim that there is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet is a statement of faith that forces a painful admission: the Islamic State is a Muslim phenomenon. Wicked, perhaps. Ultra-violent, certainly. But Muslim, by definition. No one wants the most well-known practitioners of his religion also to be its most fanatical and blood thirsty. Most religions have zealots that the mainstream would prefer to make disappear, and the Muslim bind is not unique [. . .] The Islamic State is as Islamic as the above are Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist or Catholic, which is to say it is thoroughly Islamic, even though it is, by its own proud admission, a minority sect. Whether it is "legitimate" is a question other believers answer for themselves, overwhelmingly in the negative. But these questions of legitimacy are a matter of opinion and dogma. The fact the majority believes the Islamic State to be deviant does not make them objectively deviant, any more than many Christians' view of Mormonism as deviant makes Mormonism illegitimate or a perversion of Christianity [. . .] Being in a minority, violent or not, does not equate to being illegitimate [. . .] It takes astonishing levels of denial to claim, as uncountable Muslims and non-Muslims have, that the Islamic State has "nothing to do with Islam", merely because the group's heinous behavior clashes with mainstream or liberal Muslim interpretation.”
― Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers

“We should tremble, not because they might be right about the end of the world—the history of Messianic movements is a history of failure—but because apocalyptic conviction rarely disappears quietly, and often ends in mass death.”
― Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers

“Wherever there is grievance, savagery can be sown. Wherever there is savagery, it can be used and exploited. Wherever it can be exploited, the nightmare can endure.”
― Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers

“Every generation of Christians and Muslims yields up its crop of madmen and howlers at the moon, and they always spook the rationalists of their eras. A previous generation noted with concern the Iranian revolution's rhetoric of apocalypse. More than half of American evangelicals believe, or profess to believe, in imminent doomsday. Luckily, most apocalyptic movements sputter out, soften their tone, or turn out to be bluffing. Many of the Iranian revolutionaries who thought the Ayatollah Khomeini would reveal himself as the Mahdi—a messianic figure said my most Shia to have been in hiding since 941—now deny they ever believed such a thing. The ruling mullahs are at least as interested in trade agreements as in nuclear weapons. As for American evangelicals, they claim to believe they live in the end times, but they still contribute to their retirement accounts. There is similar reassurance in the belief that when a jihadist tells you he wants to kill you and billions of others to bring about the end of the world, he is just speaking for effect.”
― Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers

“In my conversations with scholars of Islam, few of the people who dismissed the Islamic State as a product of false Islamism— Jacobinism with an Islamic veneer—were able to name a single cleric or scholar associated with the Islamic State, or a fatwa or other statement by that scholar. The level of ignorance is as appalling as if a scholar of Marxism declared the Soviet Union “not Marxist” and turned out to be unfamiliar with the name Trotsky or Lenin, or the title of anything either of them wrote. Since 2012, tens of thousands of men, women, and children have migrated to a theocratic state, under the belief that migration is a sacred obligation and that the state’s leader is the worldly successor of the last and greatest of prophets. If religious”
― Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State

“But Zarqawi and the state he spawned have taken the position that apostasy is also revealed by many other acts. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being reluctant to call other people apostates. By”
― Graeme Wood, The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State