by Christopher W. Holton
The Daily Mail came out today with what some folks must have thought was a revelation: the new head of the Islamic State is a sharia-educated scholar.
This should come as no surprise, the recently killed Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was also a highly educated sharia scholar with a PhD is Islamic Studies.
Now, his successor, Amir Mohammed Abdul Rahman al-Mawli al-Salbi, is also an expert in sharia with a degree in sharia from the University of Mosul.
As an aside, just as was the case with al-Baghdadi, al-Salbi had also been detained and held by U.S. forces in Iraq. In fact, The Guardian reports that al-Salbi and al-Baghdadi met while being held prisoner by U.S. forces.
As frustrating as that is, the more important point here is that this is further evidence that Jihadists like al-Baghdadi and al-Salbi were not ignorant or fringe characters.
Sharia is close by at the core ideology of terrorist groups like ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, HAMAS and other Jihadist organizations. According to sharia, the world must submit to Allah and live according to sharia as a one world state, referred to as a caliphate.
Sharia mandates violent jihad against non-Muslims to establish Islam’s rule worldwide. For those Muslims who cannot engage in physical jihad using force, sharia mandates that they support jihad financially—“Jihad with money.”
The brutal doctrine of sharia is both the basis of the Islamic State and the goal of the Islamic State. It is the code that they follow, it’s the path on which they walk and they will not rest until sharia is the law of the land everywhere.
So it should come as no surprise that sharia scholars lead ISIS.
Terror Trends Bulletin 