The new issue of Dabiq, the ISIS propaganda magazine, has hit the digital stands. The “cover” page is a color photo of corpses in Paris and worried city firefighters joined by the words, in block letters, “JUST TERROR.” Like any magazine, Issue No. 12 begins with a table of contents: There is an article advocating polygamy for warriors (“To Our Sisters: Two, Three, or Four”), followed, somewhat later, by martial celebration and bloody photographs (“Military Operations of the Islamic State”) and, still further along, by religious exhortation combined with child-rearing advice (“O You Who Have Believed, Protect Yourselves and Your Families From Fire”). More photos from Paris follow. One of them has the now-familiar caption: “The nightmare in France has just begun.”
Is the magazine proper about to begin? No, after the table of contents, a “Foreword” offers the anonymously written words, “The divided crusaders of the East and West thought themselves safe in their jets as they cowardly bombarded the Muslims of the Khilāfah [caliphate]…. But Allah decreed that punishment befall the warring crusaders from where they had not expected. Thus, the blessed attacks against the Russians and the French were successfully executed despite the international intelligence war against the Islamic State.” The foreword is capped by a message from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-styled emir of ISIS: “Soon, by Allah’s permission, a day will come when the Muslim will walk everywhere as a master, having honor, being revered, with his head raised high, and his dignity preserved. Anyone who dares to offend him will be disciplined, and any hand that reaches out to harm him will be cut off.”
Dabiq was first published in July, 2014, and has been issued in many languages almost every month since then. An up-to-the-minute digital herald of the self-proclaimed revolutionary state, the magazine is an organ of ideology and struggle, a newsletter, a manual, an advice column, and a religious text. From the beginning it has offered a slickly produced mix of graphics and text—exciting photos of blood and destruction and articles written in a mode of exalted and redundant pedantry. The pieces combine invocations and celebrations (“Why is it the chest muscles of America and its allies shiver out of fear of you?”); religious instruction and reports on current jihadist activities; prayers and photographs from successful operations, including pictures of blown-up buildings and destroyed ancient temples. Many of the texts, citing historical precedent, assert ISIS’s legitimacy—ISIS’s triumphs, it seems, were anticipated by Muhammad’s feats of conquest in the seventh century. The magazine itself is named after a small town in northern Syria, near Aleppo, where, according to ISIS eschatology, a final struggle will take place between the forces of Christianity and Islam.
Dabiq is also a magazine directed at young men (in the case of the English version, young Muslims in Great Britain, the United States, the former Commonwealth countries, and Anglophone ex-colonies), and, as such, it offers an inducement to revolutionary action ending in the ecstatic transcendence of death. Yet transcendence offered only in terms of the strictest orthodoxy—violence defined by belief and canon, blood blessed by history and religion. Citation follows citation: You kill because Allah has licensed killing. Most of the texts are monotonous in rhythm, the heavy repetitions and citations rumbling like trucks in the night. Reading such passages, one has to shake off disbelief: Whatever else it is, Dabiq is also a modern magazine. Idly, one notices that the cropping and subtitling of the photographs, stuck in the middle of the articles or placed as exuberant filler between them, has a certain lurid flare. Amid the photos of executions, weapons, and triumphal units, there are also stirring long vistas of Iraqi and Syrian cities under the gold-fringed black ISIS flag. The flag, as decoration and punctuation, appears everywhere.
At times, the style has the jeering menace of a Communist pamphlet of the nineteen-thirties. Rather than offer imprecations against capitalists or deluded “reformers,” Dabiq jeers at “crusaders,” “apostates,” Jews, the countries of Iran and Saudi Arabia, and other strands of Islam. The writers offer advice accompanied by threat, the equivalent to Communist revolutionary discipline. An article reprinted in Issue No. 12, “Advice to the Mujāhidīn: Listen and Obey,” tells us the punishment for disobedience is disaster: “How many times has a mujāhid brother been ordered by his leader not to go to a certain area, but he disobeys the leader and as a result he lands in captivity!” Dabiq almost always accompanies advice with threat: In this case, a meaningful death may be the end of sanctified actions, but death resulting from individual initiative is just a waste.
In its way, Dabiq takes up the life of men and women, the fate of the body. The young men, high-spirited as violent jihadists, must be tamed in other ways. “I would like to advise the brothers who have refused to live a life of humiliation and have overcome their desires and lusts, to fasten on themselves the bridle of listening to and obeying the leaders in everything big and small, for obedience is in everything except in sin.”
But what if men want female sex slaves? Are they legitimate? The issue received a measured discussion (“The Revival of Slavery: Before the Hour”) in an early edition. The text tells us that, in the Koran, Allah has advised letting conquered enemies go. Thus, for long periods in Islamic history, slavery was abandoned. Yet various authorities, quoted in the Hadith (the reported sayings of Muhammad), have advocated for the enslavement of “apostate” women. The example at hand: In August, 2014, after ISIS captured some Yazidi women, who are Zoroastrians and by definition apostates, the women and also their children were then “divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations, after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State’s authority to be divided as khums [spoils of war].”
In the end, the article comes down clearly on the side of legitimizing slavery, accompanied by threats against anyone who mocks the ”the taking of concubines.” Various reasons are put forward. In the past, during the abandonment of slavery, “a number of contemporary scholars” have noted that there was an increase in adultery among married men. In the case of a maid working in a married household, for instance, the husband might have been tempted into sin. But there’s a simple solution to this vexing problem: “If she were his concubine, this relationship would be legal.” Leaving aside slaves, the role for married women is clear: “As for you, O mother of lion cubs.... And what will make you know what the mother of lion cubs is? She is the teacher of generations and the producer of men.”
What does ISIS want? The word “want” seems strange in this context, since the wants of a totalitarian death cult don’t seem to fall within the normal range of desires. Death ends all wants. But Dabiq addresses certain aspects of life, too, so clearly not every member of ISIS is expected to die. Survival is also one of the magazine’s aims. Reading the magazine, one can see that, in a general way, ISIS wants land and resources, a recognized state, a caliphate that dominates the Middle East. It wants to slaughter Christians, Jews, and Yazidis. It wants to slaughter Muslims who do not believe in its version of Islam. It wants revenge against the Western presence in Arab lands. It wants to “defend the Prophet.” Most of all, it wants power. That is, it wants the future.
The future means children, and the question of how to educate children turns up near the end of the new issue. An article written by one Abu Thabit al-Hijazi, who was raised in a “crusader nation,” addresses the issue of Muslims educating their children in Western countries. At school, the children will be indoctrinated into “tolerance” (the word is surrounded with scare quotes). “They teach them to tolerate and respect other religions.… They teach them to tolerate and respect sodomites.” The schools also rely on “certain ‘scientific principles’ such as the so-called ‘scientific method’ as a backdoor for questioning the existence of Allah.” It gets worse: “Apart from teaching them to accept all manner of religious deviance and social perversion, the schools of the kuffār [infidels] encourage children to take part in the various festivals of kufr and shirk [idolatry], including Christmas, Halloween, and Easter, amongst others. They have them dress up, paint their faces, sing songs, attend parties, exchange gifts, and take part in school plays held for these various occasions.”
Thus a list of Western crimes committed against children. These criticisms of Western education are accompanied, at the end of the article, by a photograph that serves as an alternative, a positive example. A group of ISIS children—boys maybe ten or eleven years old—all dressed in military uniforms, sit cross-legged on the ground, each boy with a rifle lying across his knees. In front of their faces, the boys hold a black-covered Koran at exactly the same angle. The question, “What does ISIS want?” baffling to so many people, has received a definite answer. These children are what ISIS wants.
