Nour Al-Din Al-Hatimi: Disillusion with ISIS

Nour Al-Din Al-Hatimi

Nour Al-Din Al-Hatimi explains his disillusion with ISIS:

[The ISIS recruits] wanted to establish the Caliphate, because they considered it a shelter and a utopian place of repentance, where the Muslims could unite and gather all their power, in order to fight the forces attacking them with violence . . . . The first thing that struck me was that the Syrian refugees in Turkey were cursing the revolution and everything that came with it. They were saying that they do not want foreigners coming into their country, and that it would have been better had [the volunteers] remained in their countries. They were saying that they had had enough of all the massacres, and that they only wanted to live a life of dignity with their families, and so on . . . . Yes, in this kind of language. After that, I went to the [Turkish-Syrian] border, and spent some time with people who had taken up arms and were fighting. Some of them told me that what is going on [in Syria] has nothing to do with Jihad, that Islam has no future and the Caliphate cannot be established on that land, because that enterprise is on the verge of bankruptcy. It is in a dark tunnel, leading to a dead end, and it is better for people to find other ways to build their glory. They should plow their own lands and bring about life rather than death.

I notice further in the interview that he still blames the West as having dishonored the Arab Muslim individual. This view is so fixed in the mind of one from a shame-and-honor culture that the other idea could never arise in his mind, namely, that the West hadn't intended any shame because the West, being a guilt culture, does not think in those categories.