Conclusion
By looking only for secular logic, one sometimes forgets that religion is at the heart of this war called “holy” or “sacred”. Graeme Wood is doubtlessly not wrong when he writes that “The Islamic State is very Islamic”. And Dar-al-Islam is not aimed at those who are ignorant in religious matters: its contributors have really mastered the texts and address themselves to their public dramatically, showing a great knowledge of the Qu'ran and its hadiths.
As opposed to the nihilism of marginalised delinquents described by some, there is here a real project aimed at transforming the world, at saving it from its 'excesses' and its intrinsic 'chaos'. Its actors are driven by eschatological anguish: far from being brain washing, this is human passion in action here – to participate in an emotional community, offer one's life, sacrifice those of others, make sense of death, to ensure the triumph of virtue over vice. It is a holy war of liberation of a kind, fed by an extraordinary mobilising myth which challenges humiliation and the neocolonial order, that is, the Caliphate. As Denis Crouzet says, the religious war is a dialogue with God: you must show Him that you are fighting for Him. Thus is intertwined allegiance to a mythic Islamic identity which has its origins in the time of the Prophet and his immediate successors, and participation in the reality of a 'holy war' in which you propose to play the part of a hero.
Jean-Pierre Filliu has described the growth of apocalyptic fervour which has seized the majority Muslim countries since 1979, and it is really in this specific context that we must understand the prophetic-apocalyptic discourse of Daesh. At the same time one cannot always detach Daesh from other apocalyptic discourses which are current today, from ultra intransigent Catholicism and its incarnation in nineteenth century mariology of combat to the Adventists and other Mormons or New Age trends, with their declarations of the imminent end of the world, except that Daesh are not just talking about it, they are engaging in real violence in order to hasten the arrival of a new era and they understand thereby how to embody, in effect, the Word of the Prophet.
In apocalyptic discourse. Prophecy is at once territorialised and written in time, in chronology, in history, in the event of its ending: Christianity also brings together the qualities which are at once soteriological, salvationist and eschatological of a religion of prophesy. This prophetism deploys a discourse which “is bathed in an assembly of phantasms which are shared with its auditors”, as André Vauchez writes. It speaks to a pathological phenomenon situated in a particular context (religious, political or social), a context which produces social anxiety, and develops a dynamic fed on the discourse of apocalypse. This discourse prophesises imminent collapse and catastrophe, and announces a radical transformation of existing social and political structures.
This is not just Good against Evil, it is also, in terms of the historical dynamic, regeneration against ruin: a blend of apocalyptic rhetoric and prophetic warning; the new jihad proposes a rationale of decadence and opposes to it the expectation of redemption. It draws heavily on the theology of war, especially between 1914 and 1918. The Caliphate is itself an 'Islamic State', that is, at once a political entity and an instrument of salvation. But as Fahti Benslama insists, it is an anti-political utopia, in which religion prevails as alone capable of governing the two worlds. More than totalitarianism, it is an Absolute.
