The name most heard of lately in the context of the Middle East is without doubt that of ISIL.

The U.S. and the EU have it at the top of the ‘terrorism’ list, while ISIL defines itself as the only legitimate state in the Islamic world and its leaders as the Muslim caliphate. ISIL is constantly reinforcing its control over a wide area from Mosul to Raqqa and aims to build a state based on its own radical and non-Qur’anic conception of religion in a region consisting of Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Jordan.

ISIL is estimated to have 6-7,000 armed members in Syria and more than 10,000 in Iraq. The interesting thing, however, is that its members do not only come from the Middle East. Tens of thousands of fighters have come from - are still doing so or intending to do so at the first opportunity  - Great Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and other European countries, as well as Africa, the Arab world, Indonesia, Australia, the U.S. and Canada.

So what is it that leads people from the other end of the world to abandon their peaceful lives and join the sea of blood and fire in the Middle East?

This is not limited to ISIL alone. There are radical organizations and their extensions operating in a wide range of territory from Central Asia to the Caucasus, from Africa to the Balkans, and from inside Europe to the U.S.

The only reason why radicalism is able to gather supporters from such different cultures and geographies is the education, instruction and propaganda techniques they implement on people who are ignorant of religion and who approach matters emotionally, rather than with their intellect. The internet and social media are the global communication tools most commonly used by radical organizations for education and propaganda.

Therefore, it is obvious that a different means of combating radicalism, other than the use of force and weapons, needs to be developed.

Yet the West’s most popular strategic institutions, think tanks and political advisors have failed to come up with any alternative to constantly producing new military strategies. To be more accurate, the idea that there might be an alternative to mass slaughter has never even occurred to them. They have always ignored the factors of belief and ideology in the emergence of sociological phenomena such as radicalism.

Many strategic advisors and analysts today, and particularly in the U.S. government, are seeking to impose the idea that the only solution to ISIL lies in a major ground operation involving U.S. troops.

Yet all the experience to date is living proof that, contrary to expectations, policies based on the military, weapons and violence further strengthen radicalism and allow it to gather more support and spread over an even wider area. Military operations by U.S. and Western forces in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Libya have strengthened radical organizations such as al-Qaeda, al-Shabab and ISIL and made them even more widespread and more of a threat.

ISIL’s ruthless policies towards people in the regions it controls, the beheading, burning, stoning to death or throwing from tall buildings of people it declares to be guilty of crimes are not, contrary to what most people think, the result of a psychopathic mentality with sadistic tendencies. They are the scrupulous observation of the rules of an extreme traditionalist and ultra-orthodox faith, based on superstitions rather than the Qur’an, in which they believe.

Graeme Wood, a contributing editor at "The Atlantic Monthly Group," refers to this in a piece titled "What ISIS Really Wants" in the March 2015 issue:

“The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs…  When a masked executioner says Allahu Akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.”

In that same piece, Wood says that ISIL abides by common traditional sources adopted by the entire Sunni community as a point of reference, the only difference being that they implement them more punctiliously, literally to the letter:

“Those texts [traditional religious texts] are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. … ‘What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,’ Haykel [the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, an expert on ISIS], said. ‘There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don’t normally have.’” [i]

In short, ISIL simply scrupulously and one by one implements commands about killing anyone who ‘cuts his beard for no reason,’ or ‘abandons praying’ or ‘abjures the faith’ and many others, which appear in sources that are regarded as a basis of Islam in addition to the Qur’an and are published in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, Jordan, Palestine, Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey and Yemen, and most of the rest of the Islamic world but which are actually diametrically in opposition to the Qur’an.

The interesting thing is that many Arab countries that are quite fierce in their opposition to ISIL, especially Saudi Arabia but also Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar and Jordan, share the very same dogmatic, ultra-orthodox conception of Islam as ISIL and strictly apply it as a policiy of state.

Indeed, a tweet by the Saudi commentator Ibrahim al-Shaalan makes the dichotomy clear: ''(ISIL is) but an epitome of what we've studied in our school curriculum. If the curriculum is sound, then ISIS is right, and if it is wrong, then who bears responsibility?''

Therefore, it is not an honest and constructive approach to ignore the non-Qur’anic , ultra-dogmatic and fanatical conception of Islam that represents the root of radicalism - and is a scourge upon the entire Islamic world - and then accuse ISIL alone of perversion. Of course there is nothing acceptable about ISIL’s murders and savagery: An Islamic world that adopts that extremely sectarian, dogmatic and fanatical conception of Islam that lies at the heart of ISIL’s actions (while ignoring the commandments of the Qur’an, the one true source of the faith, and its very essence) needs to take a much closer look at itself.

In conclusion, the only way of putting an end to then terror, violence and killings that stem from a distorted conception of Islam based on superstitious references, distorted interpretations and false hadiths and commandments that are totally at odds with the Qur’an is to inform the entire Islamic world of the true Islam based on the Qur’an, in the finest manner possible, and to correct those false beliefs and understandings in the light and under the guidance of the Qur’an.

Adnan Oktar's piece on New Straits Times & Pakistan - Shafaqna

http://pakistan.shafaqna.com/of-the-week-2/item/33887-an-alternative-to-beating-is-without-mass-slaughter.html