Middle East Peace Impossible: The Religious Justifications for Islamist Violence

Many apologists for Islamic extremist violence blame the U.S. for Islamic extremism. But throughout the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and North Africa, extremist groups cite specific religious texts directly in their founding and operational documents. This provides them with scriptural justification for killing and even frames killing as an adherent’s duty.

Al-Qaeda’s 1998 fatwa, the “World Islamic Front Statement” published under bin Laden’s name, opens by invoking Quran 9:5, the “sword verse.”

It closes its central ruling by citing two further verses: “fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.”

From these citations, bin Laden derived the ruling that killing Americans, civilian and military, was “an individual duty for every Muslim.”

The fatwa’s theological lineage runs through Ibn Taymiyyah, the 14th-century jurist whose ruling that Mongol rulers weren’t true Muslims because they didn’t govern by sharia became the reference point for modern takfir, and more directly through 20th-century Salafi-jihadist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb.

Qutb’s writings frame the modern world, including nominally Muslim governments, as having reverted to jahiliyyah, pre-Islamic ignorance. That framing obligates jihad to restore true Islamic rule.

A decade after the 1998 fatwa, Ayman al-Zawahiri issued his own ruling, laid out in a work called “Exoneration.”  It went further than bin Laden’s, pre-justifying a future mass-casualty attack on the United States. It cited fellow jihadist ideologue al-Fahd on the religious duty of waging jihad beyond any single battlefield.

Zawahiri backed the ruling with a published list of radical clerics who endorsed it, an appeal to religious authority meant to answer doubts about his own standing to issue a fatwa.

A quantitative academic study of all 28 issues of Islamic State’s Dabiq and Rumiyah, its English-language propaganda magazines, found a similar pattern at an industrial scale.

The names are drawn from Islamic apocalyptic prophecy. Dabiq, a town in northern Syria, is foretold as the site of a final battle against “Roman” forces before the end of times. After ISIS was driven out of the town in 2016, the magazine was renamed Rumiyah, Arabic for Rome, the next prophesied target.

Only about 9% of the Quran was quoted at all. The passages used were consistently stripped to their most violent fragments. They were isolated from surrounding verses that provide historical and legal context. Terrorism researchers describe this pattern as cherry-picked rather than representative of mainstream Quranic exegesis.

A separate corpus study of Dabiq’s first 14 issues found three-quarters of the 624 verses quoted or referenced were cited only once or twice.

That is consistent with selective mining of scripture for specific rulings rather than systematic exegesis. Academic analysis of the five most-cited verses across all 28 Dabiq and Rumiyah issues found they serve two functions: establishing al-wala wal-bara, loyalty to fellow jihadists and disavowal of everyone else, including other Muslims, and justifying violence against those so disavowed.

Hamas’s 1988 founding charter is the most explicit in citing scripture toward a specific outcome.

Article Seven quotes a hadith, attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and recorded in the collections of Bukhari and Muslim, stating that “the Hour of Judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’ except for the Gharqad tree.”

The same charter cites Quran 2:120 to frame reconciliation with non-Muslims as a betrayal of faith. It declares in its preamble that “Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model, the Quran its Constitution, Jihad its path.”

Boko Haram’s theological justification draws on the same Ibn Taymiyyah lineage cited in the Al-Qaeda section above. Ibn Taymiyyah’s rulings provided a basis that later extremists used to justify declaring self-identified Muslims apostates, a practice known as takfir. Founder Mohammed Yusuf built the group’s original mosque, the Ibn Taimiyyah Masjid, around this framework.

His successor, Abubakar Shekau, expanded it into a doctrine under which Muslims who voted, held government IDs, or sent their children to secular schools could be branded unbelievers and killed as such. This is the theological basis for the group’s name, which translates roughly to “Western education is forbidden.”

Shekau’s version of the doctrine traces back to an 18th-century concept from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, “nawaqid al-Islam,” or nullifiers of Islam. It also draws on the work of the modern radical ideologue Diya al-Din al-Qudsi, whom Shekau is reported to have quoted verbatim in his sermons.

The broad application of the doctrine became the fault line that split the movement. In 2016, ISIS’s central leadership formally removed Shekau specifically over his “Takfir al-Umum,” takfir applied broadly to the general Muslim population rather than specific enemies. ISIS installed Abu Musab al-Barnawi as the leader of its ISWAP faction in his place.

ISWAP’s own doctrinal position was laid out in a book by Barnawi. It explicitly rejects Shekau’s application of takfir to justify killing ordinary civilians, Muslims, and even fellow commanders. The internal dispute is over how far to extend a shared premise, not whether takfir itself is legitimate.

The Islamic State’s 2014 caliphate declaration drew on a similar takfiri lineage but applied it with an added claim of restored Islamic sovereignty: the “convert, pay jizya, or die” ultimatum ISIS issued to Iraq’s Christians in June 2014.

Against Yazidis specifically, a 2014 Dabiq essay titled “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour” (Dabiq, Issue 4, pp. 14–17) cited classical jurisprudence to argue Yazidis were pagans whose enslavement was religiously sanctioned. Lawfare’s analysis documents that ISIS treated this ruling as settled law. ISIS accounts for more minority deaths in this survey than any other single group.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) adheres to Twelver Shia Islam, which holds Muhammad as the final prophet of Islam, the same position held by Sunni Islam.

What separates them is a governance doctrine: wilayat al-faqih, “guardianship of the Islamic jurist,” formulated by Ayatollah Khomeini and installed as the constitutional basis of the Islamic Republic of Iran after 1979.

The doctrine holds that in the absence of the Twelfth Imam, whom Twelver Shia belief holds to be in occultation rather than dead, supreme religious and political authority passes to a qualified cleric, currently Iran’s Supreme Leader.

The IRGC’s hostility toward Israel is tied directly to Mahdism, the doctrine that removing obstacles to the Twelfth Imam’s return is a religious obligation. Middle East Forum reports the IRGC regards Israel’s existence as the “greatest barrier” to that reappearance, making its destruction a religious prerequisite rather than a strategic objective.

Hezbollah’s founding 1985 Open Letter explicitly pledges obedience to the faqih as its ultimate religious and political authority.

The same document brands Israel “the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve.” The group was formed in 1982 with direct organizational and doctrinal support from an IRGC delegation sent to Lebanon for that purpose.

Hezbollah frames armed struggle against Israel as jihad. Specifically, it frames the struggle as fard ayn, an individual religious duty rather than a collective option, once Muslim land is deemed under occupation.

Martyrdom in that struggle is presented as a path to eternal reward. Hezbollah has used this doctrine to religiously sanction its fighters’ operations against Israel since the group’s founding.

Islamic extremism has been blamed on the U.S., economics, geopolitics, and a number of other alleged causes. But much of the Islamist violence is justified by the religious ideology of the terrorist organizations themselves.

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