If you haven’t already seen it, I recommend reading this fantastic essay by the Atlantic’s Graeme Wood on What Isis Really Wants. He takes the time to look into the theology of the ‘so-called Islamic State’, as the BBC insists on calling them (I can’t remember ‘so called Irish Republican Army’), and there is no doubting the theological link. To single out just one passage:
‘Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, “embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.”
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