TO ALLEGE THAT those who went and joined Daesh or any other extremist organization were devout Muslims and went back to the core texts of the Holy Quran is not supported by established facts. In a classified report, MI5 concluded that “far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practice their faith regularly. Many lack religious literacy and could… be regarded as religious novices.”37 This observation was proven right just a few years later when two would-be British extremists were arrested on their way to Syria carrying the books, Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies.38
Similarly, in 2015, Didier François, a released prisoner of ISIS, told CNN that his captors were obsessed with politics and did not even keep a copy of the Holy Quran.39 Former senior FBI agent Ali Soufan revealed that when he interrogated members of Al-Qaeda he quickly learned that they were wholly politically motivated and knew very little about Islam and the Holy Quran. Salah Abdeslam who helped plot the attacks in Paris in November 2015 reportedly visited homosexual bars, drank alcohol, was involved in petty crimes and took drugs40 – all of which is strictly forbidden in Islam. To assert that these people are true representatives of Islam is wildly fantastical.
A more recent piece of evidence was given by the German author, politician and former judge, Jurgen Todenhofer. He spent 10 days living with ISIS in Syria and Iraq. He said in his BBC interview:
I wanted to ask them [ISIS, editor], are you really Islamic? Because in Islam [Quran, editor] 113 of the 114 Surahs start with ‘In the Name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful’. Where is your mercy? There is no mercy...They gave an answer: [we] caught 3500 Shias and we killed only 50 percent of them, so we had mercy. They did not have an answer. They are, as far as Quran is concerned, illiterate. They don’t know really the spirit of Quran. I will say that it is an anti-Islamic movement. They have an Islamic mask because Quran does not allow to kill innocents; Quran does not allow to destroy churches, synagogues and so on. And Quran does not allow to force somebody to believe something.41
In short, the argument that being a devout Muslim can possibly turn you into a violent Jihadist is based on pitiable ignorance, or unprincipled malice and mischief. Reports and first hand accounts of Daesh soldiers reveal that they joined this group for monetary and political reasons. They were not devout Muslims who just suddenly saw a ‘light’ while pondering over the Holy Quran. They were no more Islamic in their actions than the Klu Klux Klan is Christian or witch-burning in the Middle Ages was Christian. Their publications have misquoted the Holy Quran in order to try and bring a cover of legitimacy for their barbaric pursuits, but this is no different from misquoting the Bible or other holy scriptures for pursuing similar goals, in both earlier and recent history.
Regardless, for the benefit of the general reader who seeks the truth, the question remains: Who are the true Muslims? What do they believe in? What are they doing to counter such extremist ideologies? We address this question in the next chapter.