Into the Caliphate
I don’t know how to process this rationally. I’ve tried. The Islamic State in 2014 is doing things that defeat whatever capacity I have for moral comprehension—beheadings on open streets, crucifixions, towns reordered entirely by violence—and I keep returning to the same useless question: how does a person arrive at that and cross it? Not as political analysis. Just, literally, how does a human being get there?
Normally I’m good at following other people’s logic, even logic I find repellent. Two sides, two positions, the discipline of understanding what someone else believes and why. But here that process hits a locked door. I can trace the ideology in the abstract, name the grievances, map the history. None of it explains the man on camera who is calm.
VICE News sent a journalist in and filmed the result. The series is called The Islamic State, five parts, and it doesn’t editorialize much—it just shows. Fighters explaining themselves. Recruits being processed. The apparatus of a new state being erected on top of the bodies of everyone who was in the way. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi invoked as both theological authority and political fact. What stays with me is the quality of certainty in the people on screen—not anger, not frenzy, just the very specific calm of people who believe completely in what they’re doing. That’s the part I can’t locate in myself. That’s the locked door.
Religion keeps surfacing in my thinking about this the way it always does in contexts like this: not as faith but as instrument, recruited by something that needed an authorization it couldn’t otherwise produce. The caliphate as theology made literal and territorial, the borders of the sacred made into something you can shoot at. I don’t know how you argue against that kind of certainty, and I’m not sure argument is even the relevant category.
The United States began airstrikes shortly after this was filmed. Whether that changes the shape of things or just displaces it is a question I don’t think anyone can answer honestly yet.