The suicide of “the Caliph” leaves imams with some explaining to do
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died as he had lived: ignominiously. He called himself “the Caliph” — on the most dubious of grounds, admittedly, but quickly acquired a global following. But the cleric who named himself after the Prophet’s successor, Abu Bakr, led a life of depravity. Under his rule, Islamic State was marked by murder, torture and rape on a vast scale, for which the “Caliph” set the tone — notably in the case of the American hostage Kayla Mueller, whom he treated as a sex slave and who died in captivity.
Yet when the tide turned against him and his so-called Caliphate, Baghdadi did not lead by example. He did not stand and fight to the death, as on his orders so many of his followers did in Mosul and Raqqa. Instead, he abandoned his “brothers and sisters” to flee into the wilderness, a fugitive from justice and from the cause for which he had made so many thousands suffer.
Baghdadi was finally run to ground by US special forces — led there by the Kurdish fighters who are the real heroes of the story. He is reported to have panicked, run screaming into a tunnel, and then detonated a suicide vest, killing himself instantly and taking three of his young children with him. The arch-terrorist died in terror.
Baghdadi’s death may make no difference to Islamist terrorism, but the manner of his passing matters. Islam strictly prohibits suicide on pain of eternal damnation. The only partial exception is martyrdom in jihad, but not even the harshest of Salafist theologians could seriously justify Baghdadi’s cowardly self-immolation as the action of a martyr. As for the slaughter of his innocent children: it recalls the Nazi propaganda minister and Hitler’s heir, Joseph Goebbels. He and his wife Magda poisoned their six children before killing themselves in the bunker. Baghdadi, like Goebbels, ended a life dedicated to genocide with an act of infanticide.
It was inevitable that the news of Baghdadi’s death would be instrumentalised by all concerned. Donald Trump has claimed credit in his usual melodramatic style, just as his opponents have poured cold water on his claims. Such presidential self-aggrandisement has a long history and is often counter-productive: think of Bush declaring “mission accomplished” on the deck of an aircraft carrier, shortly before Iraq descended into chaos. But Trump is no less entitled to exploit Baghdadi’s elimination to promote his own re-election than Obama was to do so with that of Osama bin Laden.
More important than the ephemeral political consequences of Baghdadi’s death is its effect on Islam. Might the rise and fall of Daesh, the “Islamic State”, pave the way for a global rejection of its theology, so insidious and yet so calamitous? Will the adherents of a faith that may soon overtake Christianity as the world’s most numerous religion now learn from this dreadful example? Or must Muslims and non-Muslims alike endure yet more such death cults masquerading as the sole authentic interpretation of Islam in the future?
In Western societies that see themselves as secular, the afterlife may have lost its transcendent significance. But for many of the Muslims whose communities make up a growing proportion of the population, the paradise promised by the Koran still matters. The lure of the hereafter provides fertile ground for demagogues such as Baghdadi. It is essential that this teaching moment should be seized in every mosque of the Western world. Imams need to explain to ordinary Muslims precisely why Baghdadi is no more a martyr than he was a caliph, why he will not be rewarded in heaven for his cruelty in life and death. If our imams fail to do this, they have some explaining to do to the rest of us.
