The Dream of a Caliphate (ISC5)
Lessons from Theo Padnos' memoir of imprisonment by the new rulers of Syria
This is part 5 of a series. In part 1, I discussed why I am using the term “settler-colonialism” despite its usual deployment in bad faith.
In part 2, I looked at how the origin story of Islam provides a recurring inspiration to those Muslims who want to colonize or “purify” societies.
In part 3, I discussed some of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s plays for global dominance, and how “blasphemy” is one of the hallmark tests of the western value for free expression.
In part 4, I introduced the idea of western Cultural Immune Deficiency Syndrome and compared Manifest Destiny to the Islamic belief in inevitable global domination as the final outcome of Divine will.
For avoidance of doubt…
Nothing written in this series is meant to advocate vigilantism. This project is about opposing violence, not promoting it. So don’t be a dangerous fool.
Series intro:
The term “settler-colonialism” and its associated academic disciplines were designed to incriminate Israel and Anglophone ex-colonies like the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. But the term would be better applied to Arab, Turkic, Persian, and other Islamic empires that colonized the world from Iberia to the Philippines and from Sarajevo to the Zambezi watershed. Present day threats to humans are far more likely to come from would-be Islamist colonial masters than from the usual targets of settler-colonial theory.
The leaders and citizens of not-yet-Muslim-majority nations often display basic misunderstandings about the past, present, and future of Islamic colonization. I hope this series sheds light on the matter.
The Dream of a Caliphate
Thousands of years ago, in the land of Sham, angels prophesied that during a time of great apostasy that all the books containing God's words will be destroyed. But a tiny band of faithful, who had memorized the Divine message will recite God’s words to one another. Then they will take up arms and fight off the Demon Lord and his minions who have oppressed God’s people for decades. The reciters will gladly spill their blood and lose their lives to restore belief and righteous action to Sham, bringing in an age of faithfulness and truth. The righteous martyrs who die in the fight to free their kin will go straight to paradise. Their ultimate victory was assured thousands of years ago. “It has been written.”
Today, those holy warriors call themselves Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.1
In 2012, Theo Padnos was an idealistic young freelance journalist with a few years of Middle Eastern living and Arabic under his belt, and the dream of catching his big break with a story about what normal Syrians were experiencing in the civil war that had broken out there the previous year. After hosteling in Antakya, Turkey for longer than he wanted and watching his cash dwindle, he took a chance on some Syrian “journalists” who turned out to be journalist-activist-thugs for an al-Qaeda affiliate in northwestern Syria. They kidnapped him, hoping to collect ransom money and impress their higher ups in the al-Qaeda organization (what soon came to be known as Jebhat al-Nusra, and later, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — the faction that put Bashar al-Assad’s army and government to flight).
I know now that in an Islamic State kidnapping, killing, activism, and journalism are one. The most loved, most widely celebrated citizens do all of these things well.
The activist citizen makes the dream of a caliphate real by rallying the faithful. The journalist builds it by sending out photographs of victories, family happiness in the streets, and the togetherness of the men at prayer. When he puts the video of a killing on Facebook, he shows that here, on this stretch of Syrian ground, while the black flag waves, the enemies of God are coming to grief.
One of his captors was quite open about their goals:
“We will put the black flag on the White House,” he announced.
“Okay,” I said.
“For every one of your George Bushes, we have an Abu Musab.” This, I knew, even then, was the al Qaeda in Iraq leader, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, killed in action in 2006.
“Okay,” I said.
“We are a nation,” he said. “The leader of our army is God. The constitution is the Koran.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Bashar al-Assad is nothing,” he said. “He is filth. When our armies finish with him, we will attack the real enemy. First Damascus,” he said, “then Jerusalem.”
…
I assumed Abu Osama to be bragging about a fairy realm in which sane people did not believe. I suspected that he himself didn’t much believe in it. He meant to intimidate and to impress, nothing more.
“The mosques here are full as never before,” Abu Osama told me that afternoon. There were morning study sessions for women, afternoon study sessions for children, and everyone, everywhere, loved the heroes, the sons of the land—the mujahideen. “Every man in every family,” he said, “is a mujahid on the path of God.”
I scoffed. A week later, the shimmering olive leaves beyond the window of the child’s bedroom kept coming back to me. I saw them in my sleep. I could not get them out of my mind. If I had been capable of taking this person’s ranting seriously, I would have known that safety for me lay out there, in the thistle and prairie grass, between the lines of trees. Instead, I dreamed about a random encounter with Good Samaritan housewives. In an Islamic state, Good Samaritan housewives exist, I know now, but they do not leave their houses. They will make food for a prisoner if they are so ordered. But they cannot speak to him. They certainly cannot help him.
In the first days after his kidnapping, Padnos managed to give his amateur captors the slip, and went to the town police headquarters, which had been taken over by the Free Syrian Army — nominal allies of the US government in their fight against Bashar al-Assad. In a cruel twist of fate, the FSA leaders not only recognized Padnos’s captors but soon turned him over to an Islamic judge and became convinced that he was a CIA spy. The FSA let Jebhat al-Nusra keep him hostage, so that they could see to their version of Islamic justice. Because he was fluent in Arabic, knew verses of the Qur’an and had lived in Yemen and Damascus, the mujahid mind could not possibly believe Padnos’s alibi. Why would a young American (who could be out screwing the easy women of America or getting rich or doing drugs or whatever it is that Americans do for fun) ever go willingly into a war zone in Syria? He must be a spy.
Before long the torture started and Padnos eventually said anything they wanted to hear in order to get a reprieve. You would have, too.
So they had his admission that he was really a CIA agent. One line that he was unwilling to cross was converting to Islam, as another American captive he met did. (Padnos helped that captive escape, but was left behind.) Padnos knew that in Islam, conversion is a one-way street. Holding out hope that he might be ransomed, he thought his life might be worth something to his captors. But if he became Muslim and then went apostate, he’d be asking for a death sentence.
Padnos ended up being moved around from makeshift prison to prison in a jihadi gulag that brought him from Idlib to Aleppo to the eastern border near Iraq over a period of nearly two years. Of Americans kidnapped by al-Qaeda affiliates he is the longest surviving hostage to have been released.
Entering Padnos’s story and seeing the would-be Syrian caliphate “from underground” leads to a transformation of consciousness. You will be forced to look past the surface, to think about how young men are transformed from normal youthful desires to a longing for glorious death in a holy war. You will confront the fact that there is not one Islam but rather many Islams, and the war for a caliphate is not merely about the conquest of territory but about one Islam vanquishing all others.
There are lessons we can glean from Padnos memoir. They are relevant to anyone wishing to understand the people nominally in charge of Syria today, how a caliphate enforces the laws of God, and how mujahideen treat their hostages — such as the remaining hostages in Gaza.
Utopianism
Similar to the Spanish Inquisition, the HTS torturers expressed concern for the faith of their captives. Wherever they were imprisoned, clerics would be brought in to preach fiery sermons, assuring them that they were bound for hell — but God is merciful. In theory, strict fulfilment of Islamic law would guarantee them a place in paradise. In practice, Shia and Alawites were damned. Sunni Arabs who were suspected of aiding the Assad government were also resisting God himself, and likewise most of them died in captivity.
Equally importantly, strict fulfilment of Islamic law would bring about justice on earth.
The believers in a caliphate think it comes because fifty thousand years ago, at the dawn of time, the angels wrote that the current generation would throw up such a quantity of heroes so filled with divine purpose that they could not keep themselves from making the dream come true. Yet even the believers will admit that a caliphate is also a psychological phenomenon that settles over crowds, then works its way through neighborhoods, cities, landscapes.
In October of 2012, the soldiers of our Islamic state weren’t asking the citizens to pledge their allegiance to anyone in particular, nor did they want to give their caliphate a name. The armed men called themselves Muslims or Believers or sometimes, simply, “us.” Their ambition wasn’t to bring an al-Qaeda government to Syria but rather, they said, to bring Islam.
Treatment of the Infirm
Padnos was fortunate to be young and in good shape at the start of his imprisonment. The same cannot be said for many of the Syrians imprisoned in cells next to him. Some of the most wrenching moments in Blindfold are when prisoners (including a middle aged diabetic man and a developmentally disabled man, possibly on the autism spectrum) are hauled in for vague charges and tortured to death because their captors didn’t take their lives or medical needs seriously.
Prisoners become Captors
When Padnos writes about his captors, one recurring feature is the revolving-door nature of imprisonment in Syria. Many of his captors had been prisoners of the Assad regime and tortured there. Many of their captives were officers in Bashar al-Assad's Syrian National Army. Some of the leaders of Jebhat al-Nusra/HTS had been imprisoned by the US military in Iraq — and met their future partners or rivals in jihad there. The opportunity for revenge against an alleged CIA agent must have been delicious. When some of the younger Jebhat al-Nusra fighters tried to play “good cop” they would comment on how they, too, had experienced imprisonment. Perhaps an Islamically fatalist view of Divine Will was in the mix here?
Hospitals and Other Civilian Assets
The Jebhat al-Nusra headquarters in Aleppo was in a commandeered hospital. Sound familiar? Not only did they run their operations out of a hospital, but the basement was where they kept their hostages. They also converted farmhouses, warehouses, a wealthy man’s estate — civilian assets — into operational HQs with attached prison cells.
Conspiracy Theories about the Jews
One of the Arabs imprisoned for months with Padnos had come to Syria from Morocco to join the jihad, but had run afoul of the al-Qaeda aligned fighters (perhaps for sleeping around in Damascus before getting down to the business of fighting). Abu Sofiane liked to bargain for favor from their captors by accusing him of being part of the supposed global Jewish conspiracy:
During the previous months, Abu Sofiane had been eager to exhibit to anyone within earshot how wise he was to the machinations of the World Bank, the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, and American Jewry in general. When he was frightened or frustrated, as he often was, he eased his mind by steering the discussion in the cell toward the sinister designs of Jews in the Middle East. I was his example of the seemingly innocent American traveler who, under the cover of “journalism” or “diplomacy” or “business,” was plotting, in coordination with the World Bank and the CIA, to turn Syria into a sprawling plantation under the administration of Israeli settler families. When he had gotten the attention of a cluster of officers, he would put suggestive questions to me, in a loud voice, in Arabic. For instance, “How often do you go to Tel Abib?” and “Are you possibly a Jew yourself?” and “The newspaper you write for is a Jew newspaper, isn’t it?”
I tried to ignore him. This allowed the doubts about me in the room to fructify. I denied his insinuations angrily, in no uncertain terms. This caused Abu Sofiane to smile. “Not a Jew at all?” he would say. “Not one little bit?”
“No,” I would say.
“But you often go to New York, yes?” he would reply, grinning like a Cheshire cat. “There are many Jews in New York? About how many Jews would you say there are?” And so on. I worried that it wouldn’t take much for Abu Sofiane’s aspersions to crystalize into certainties, for the certainties to crystalize into a verdict, and, in this way, for Jebhat al-Nusra to justify an auto-da-fé.
Boys
Young boys were brought in on tours to see the enemies of God, and how they were being humiliated in their captivity. Some of the more committed teen and preteen boys brought food, led prisoners to the bathroom, or participated in brutal torture sessions. They were being trained for a glorious future of enforcing righteousness in Syria. Sometimes they were more cruel than the adults. Teenage boys in groups hadn't learned to temper their cruelty in ways that encouraged prisoners seek their favor.
Suicide Vests as Jihadi Fashion
Sometimes the unit commanders or senior terrorists would throw the cell doors open and just glare at a huddled group of hostages, while posing in their suicide vests and bristling with weapons. They demonstrated their commitment to the cause by their readiness to blow themselves up at any moment. Padnos once witnessed an argument between terrorist militias during a transfer journey that almost led to just that. A commander was readying to cross the wires that would blow up himself and everyone around him for meters. This was not just a few opportunists manipulating mentally ill youngsters into "martyrdom." It was signaled from the top down.
Loving Death
Each of his captors told Padnos that he sought a martyr's death. A few confided other dreams to him — of moving to the USA or Europe or Morocco, of starting a restaurant. But the jihad, the struggle, had called them. And their highest aspiration was to die fighting.
My first conversations with the people who brought food and water to my cell in the hospital were about paradise. Did I feel I would ever be in paradise? they wanted to know. “I don’t know,” I said. They knew just how they would live out the rest of their lives and how they would die. Every moment that remained to them on Earth would occur in battle, against the enemies of God. In the instants of their deaths, they would be transported to the side of God. He dwelled on the highest of the ninety-nine levels of paradise. Here fellow martyrs were watching them and waiting for a beautiful reunion. Everyone would live in happiness together. “Allah has purchased the lives and the wealth of the believers,” reads a line in the Koran that came up often in casual conversation in that basement.
For that, they shall have paradise. So they fight in the cause of God, and kill and are killed. It is a true promise God has made….
Perhaps others elsewhere have different ways of glossing this passage. In this basement, it meant that long ago, at the dawn of time, God had offered a solemn contract to these young men. They had contemplated the offer, then accepted it. Accordingly, they would kill and be killed. Afterward, the ascension. Then, the togetherness. For now, all was well. They would fight and die. Then God would honor his side of the agreement.
“You also might be killed this evening,” the fighters in this hospital would tell me—not so much to threaten me, I thought, but because they knew life here, on our planet, to be unpredictable. They wondered if I was prepared for my death as they were prepared for theirs. “You’ve done nothing to prepare?” they asked. They smiled. It seemed to me that these young men had at last understood that they were the holders of a binding contract with God himself. Now they meant to live and die by the terms of their contract.
Purgation
When Padnos was moved to the eastern part of the country, along the Euphrates and the border with Iraq, he reflected on the way imprisonment and torture were a primary means for purifying the caliphate.
The enemies who kept us in this condition were too far away to vanquish. The citizens couldn’t be led anywhere because the highways were much too overrun with bomb craters and haunted by bandits and drones. Thus the real work of the men of learning was to select citizens from within our society who might plausibly be taken as representatives of the enemy, to bring them before something or someone that might plausibly be taken as an instrument of God, and then to stage an event that might be taken as an instance in which the people of God triumphed over wickedness.
The carrying out of these selections was a prodigious labor. Because the entirety of the society had lived so long under the psychology of the Assads, the moral condition of that family was thought to have sunk itself into the collective psyche. Even the men of learning had, in earlier times, succumbed to it. They admitted this openly. But they had kept the dream alive within themselves, too, had kept the evil at bay, and at the first sign of the dream’s dawning over the landscape they knew right away what was happening….
Arriving in our river valley, they discovered that their work was to fan out across the society, to identify the agents of the Assads, along with all the others who had allowed the psychology of the Assad regime to infect their thinking, to roust these enemies from their beds and to chase them across the rooftops, if need be, then bring them to jail.
In the book and interviews since, Padnos has talked about how he was broken down and remade into a different person. Imprisonment, deprivation, and torture eventually made him give up nearly everything he considered to be key to his identity in a cosmic bargain for his life. These passages read as something well outside the rational, but who can judge the words one speaks in the dark when hope has fled far from one’s delirious mind?
Cause for Hope
If the caliphate seemed unstoppable in Syria, it is not without its weaknesses. As a product of shared imagination, it requires a certain level of theater and denial of practicality.
I found it odd, at first, that the people who inflicted such a regime of violence and whisper-punishment on their brother humans also loved to play at make-believe, but all the sheikhs in all the prisons in which I lived in the eastern part of Syria (there were six, all told) were much more devoted to their imaginary worlds than they were, for instance, to looking after their rifles or filling up the tanks of their pickups with gas.
I noticed this quality of theirs many times a day. It was in their habit of dressing sometimes as black-robed avenging angels of death, sometimes in tracksuits, sometimes as MTV rappers, and sometimes as everyday citizens, out for a stroll in the sunshine. Of course it was in the sound of their voices as they sang to their friends in paradise. I experienced it most vividly during the “you shall know who we are” call-and-response dramas they staged for the new prisoners.
Of course, in Islam, the collective prayer invites practioners into the magic of the theater five times a day….
In this frame of mind, you turn yourself to the holiest spot on Earth. You sing from the poem, in rows with the young and the old, the poor and the rich, the sinful and the righteous. Elsewhere in the city and across planet Earth, following the arc of the sun, other believers are singing these lines with you. It is a dream of harmony come to life. The purpose of this simultaneity is to cause the community to drift, just for a moment, out of earthly time.
Or in another passage,
All the middle managers fancied themselves mighty warlords. Each had a pickup truck, a Glock in a shoulder holster, and a line of talk about freeing the Muslims of the world from injustice. I felt that while the outside world viewed these men as a threat to global stability, I knew them to be too dim to fix their own pickup trucks. Medicine was beyond them. So was organizing an elementary school.
I felt that I knew the details of their gimcrackery well enough to show how the operation worked. They fawned over their sacred spaces. They murdered the people who lived there. Their caliphate was an elaborate real estate scam. Their MO was to blow things up, to stride around in the guise of lawgivers for as long as the illusion held, to summon, via the world’s social networks, all those dim or needy enough to submit to their law, and finally, when local conditions got too hot, to slip out of town in the night. Like all scam artists, their highest purpose was to keep their con rolling.
Recolonizing the nominally secular nation-states in the heartland of Islam is one thing. Establishing a caliphate in western countries would take something more than a shared hallucination from the 14th century. (I plan to return to that theme in future posts.)
But now these men are in charge of Syria. One wonders how long their newly declared toleration of Christians, Druze, and Kurds (not Alawites) will hold up. Throughout the book, there are a number of instances where Jebhat al-Nusra/HTS commanders would speak of taking back Jerusalem. That appears to be off the table for the moment, perhaps because the IAF destroyed most of the Assad regime’s leftover heavy military hardware. But it would be foolish to doubt that the dream is still there. Al-Sham is not just Syria, after all. And for the purposes of this series, it’s hard not to see similarities to the Taliban, Boko Haram, Hamas, the Houthis, and other mujahideen fighting for the dream of a caliphate in other lands.
Even if you don’t have time (or the stomach) for Blindfold, I highly recommend listening to Padnos’s interview with Michael Moynihan at The Free Press/Honestly podcast. He’s still in touch with some of this captors via the Internet, which led to one of the more surprising exchanges in that discussion. If you are interested in knowing more about HTS and similar jihadi movements, Blindfold contains a lot that I haven’t gone into and is well worth your time. I “read” the audiobook version first, and Fajer al-Kaisi’s narration is top notch.
الشام “al-Sham” is the Arabic term for the Levant, encompassing not just Syria, but Lebanon, Israel, the disputed territories attributed to Palestinians, and Jordan.
Thank you. I watched the interview. Fascinating.
Powerful.