The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (31 page)

            
•
   
Pray so loudly that Muslims could chance to hear their prayers;
²⁵

            
•
   
Build new churches or repair old ones;
²⁶

            
•
   
Make fun of Muslims or Islam;
²⁷

            
•
   
Try to prevent anyone from converting from Christianity to Islam.
²⁸

The rules also specify that Christians were not to bear arms and that treachery against the Islamic State is punishable by death.
²⁹

None of these rules is optional. The Islamic State has explained that if Christians reject them, “they are subject to being legitimate targets, and nothing will remain between them and ISIS other than the sword.”
³⁰
Of course, one would be hard pressed to find infractions that do not bring the Islamic State’s righteous sword upon the hapless offender.

The Islamic State issued new threats to Christians in an April 2015 video, shortly after releasing the footage depicting its beheading of twenty-eight Ethiopian Christians. Islamic State spokesman Sheik Abu Malik Anas An-Nashwan declared,

           
We say to Christians everywhere, the Islamic State will expand, with Allah’s permission. And it will reach you even if you are in fortified strongholds. So whoever enters Islam will have security, and whoever accepts the Dhimmah contract will have security. But whoever refuses will see nothing from us but the edge of a spear. The men will be killed and the children will be enslaved, and their wealth will be taken as booty. This is the judgment of Allah and His Messenger.

The Dhimmah is the contract of protection in Islamic law, whereby Christians and other non-Muslims accept second-class status and institutionalized
discrimination in return for the right to continue to live as non-Muslims within the Islamic state.

ISIS spokesman An-Nashwan laments the fact that Muslims today are not collecting the jizya, the tax specified for non-Muslims in Qur’an 9:29: “In the recent past, these rites were absent from the condition of the Muslim Nation. Rather, these rites were the hostages of jurisprudence books and theoretical legal discussions.”

The Islamic State spokesman followed that by quoting the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Taymiyya: “Whoever does not consider the Jews and Christians to be disbelievers and does not hate them is not a Muslim.” Then he quoted a saying attributed to Muhammad himself: “If you meet Jews or Christians, do not greet them in peace.”

The video even shows a Christian accepting his subjugated status: “By Allah, we are happy. We’ve seen security under the Islamic State.”
³²

Security in exchange for submission.

Daily Life in the Caliphate: The Islamic State of Fear

Patrick Cockburn wrote in the
Independent
in March 2015:

           
It is one of the strangest states ever created. The Islamic State wants to force all humanity to believe in its vision of a religious and social utopia existing in the first days of Islam. Women are to be treated as chattels, forbidden to leave the house unless they are accompanied by a male relative. People deemed to be pagans, like the Yazidis, can be bought and sold as slaves. Punishments such as beheadings, amputations and flogging become the norm. All those not pledging allegiance to the caliphate declared by its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, on 29 June last year are considered enemies.
³³

Strange to those of us accustomed to the recognition of universal human rights and the humanitarian penal code of the Judeo-Christian West, perhaps. But none of this was any departure from Islamic law as it had been codified for centuries. In fact, many of the punishments that drew the attention of a horrified world when ISIS carried them out had been applied by other Sharia-compliant governments for decades.

In the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqqa, Syria, a city of three hundred thousand people, twenty-four-hour Sharia patrols, one for men and one for women, make sure that everyone who ventures onto the street at any time is conforming to the strictures of Islamic law.

They are little different from the religious police that terrify the citizenry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, but this new Sharia regime represents a significant change from the relatively secular rule of Bashar Assad. Abu Saif, an observer on the scene in Raqqa, noted, “People have started growing their beards, people have started praying on time, and during prayer times all the shops close. All this might come across as small details for some people, but this is a whole lifestyle change for civilians.”
³⁴

The Islamic State also deploys a uniformed military police, primarily to track down jihadis who have fled from the front lines and send them back to the battle.
³⁶

Schools remain open, but the curriculum has been significantly altered to reflect the Islamic State’s priorities. According to Abu Saif, “Schools and universities
are a big disaster, they have changed the curriculum a lot. They forbade law studies, philosophy, and other social studies, which they consider infidel studies and ‘outside the Shariah of Allah.’”
³⁷

Smoking Kills

The Islamic State authorities take a dim view of smoking because they regard it as a slow-motion form of suicide, which is forbidden in the Qur’an: “And do not kill yourselves” (4:29).

The way the Islamic State has dealt with smoking epitomizes how it deals with everything it opposes: with threats and increasing brutality. In Mosul in November 2014, the Islamic State decreed that any shop owners found to have sold cigarettes would be fined $580 and given two weeks in jail and eighty lashes. Cigarette importers would get a $3,300 fine, plus four months in jail, and also eighty lashes. Those simply caught smoking would be fined $16.
³⁸

In its de facto capital of Raqqa, the rules were even more draconian. If a shop was found to be selling cigarettes, it was closed down. Islamic State jihadis took pliers to the fingers of one man who was caught smoking on the street. Abu Mohammed Hussam of the anti-ISIS group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS) explained that the Islamic State has a series of punishments for serial smokers: “The first time he will be arrested and flogged (40 lashes). If he smokes again, he will be whipped and imprisoned. On the third occasion, he will be taken to a camp in the countryside and fined a large sum of money.”
⁴⁰

What if someone were caught smoking a fourth time? A deputy emir for the Islamic State’s police force in the Syrian province of Deir al-Zor, who also served as an ISIS executioner, was himself found beheaded in January 2015. There was a cigarette stuck between the lips of his severed head. Written on the body was “This is evil, O Sheikh.”
⁴¹

Abu Bakr al-Janabi, an Islamic State supporter who helps spread ISIS propaganda online, praised the Islamic State’s efforts to get people to quit smoking: “It took time for ISIS until they implemented the law, but after having lectures about it and so on, there is no objection—with exception to those who smoke. It’s a little hard for them to suddenly quit smoking. But ISIS have been very good at helping them quit.”
⁴²

Indeed. What could be a more effective deterrent to smoking than the prospect of being beheaded for it? Surgeon General, take note!

Reign of Terror

The Islamic State brings bloodshed and brutality wherever it goes. In April 2015, it seized and occupied the Yarmouk camp for Palestinian refugees, four miles from the center of Damascus. One man who escaped recalled the Islamic State’s casual and even gleeful bloodlust: “I saw severed heads. They killed children in front of their parents. We were terrorized. We had heard of their cruelty from the television, but when we saw it ourselves . . . I can tell you, their reputation is well-deserved.”