Jihad and the West Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Four Podcast One

Welcome to an excerpt from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. It was published by Indiana University Press in Bloomington and Indianapolis. This reading is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This excerpt comes from chapter three and turns to Western universities and militant Islam.   Blue-Eyed Jihad: The Caliphate’s Foreign Legion, Part One   Introduction             Earlier chapters provide the background for examining foreign fighters. Chapter 4 explains the draw of the Caliphate. Who is an average foreign fighter? A think tank with the US Military Academy at West Point processed 4,000 captured records of foreign fighters. The average age was twenty-six, but the age range went from teenagers to men in their sixties. Many were uneducated, but several had advanced degrees. About 60 percent were single, but some were married with families. A third had gone to high school, and a quarter had some college education. Most are laborers.               Westerners have heard the Caliphate’s call and have come by the thousands. There are three basic drives to the State: utopia, Jihad, and psychosocial factors.   Black Utopia—Heaven on Earth   “I left to build us all a house in heaven, Allah promised us heaven if we sacrifice our world life. . . . I’m not coming back. A London-raised mother writing from Raqqa, October 2014               Some European foreign fighters go to the Middle East to build a paradise. Well-to-do as well as out-of-luck Western Muslims see limitless prospects in a society they can help create. The world they envision is ordained and described by Allah as the perfect society. It is an Islamic utopia, a heaven on earth.               Other religions and civilizations have imagined perfect worlds. In his 1516 masterwork, Thomas More wrote of a pretend island named Utopia, translated as “happy land.” Its upbeat citizens dressed plainly, eat communally, and owned no private property. A darker utopic vision was crafted in the steamy, disease-ridden jungles of Paraguay in 1886. New Germany was to be protected from the contaminants of modernity, materialism, and racial spoilation. But it collapsed, and little remains today but a scattering of German family names and Nordic appearances in South American jungles.5 The Islamic State’s philosophy bears little resemblance to these societies. However, it shares some characteristics with totalitarian dystopias of the 1930s and 1940s, such as the Soviet Union and the Third Reich.   Three Utopias               Like the Soviets and Nazis, today’s Islamist State adherents see their utopia as void of significant political or social faults. The Soviets sought to build a workers’ paradise of goods and services distributed equally. They saw the major defects in the world the result of unfair distribution of national and political wealth. The Nazis’ paradise was to build on the foundations of a pseudoscience of race. As with the Soviets, the Nazis envisioned a society in which its citizens would enjoy health care, education, nutrition, and wealth.               All three philosophies are atavistic. Like the Marxists and Nazis, Jihadists want to eliminate the roots of war and to re-create elements of a largely mythical past. The Caliphate seeks to return to a period of “rightly guided” Muslims, namely the first generation of Muslims. Although modern technology has been employed, it would be a socially primitive society in which all human activity is circumscribed by Islamic law and Koranic revelation. A young Indonesian explained, “The Islamic State is like a dream come true for me and all Muslims. Now is the time to return to Islamic glory, like . . . in the old days.” The State would provide all the basic necessities for Muslims.               All three philosophies are romantic. Nazis hoped to re-create a pure Aryan society, as expressed in German mythology and folklore. Similarly, Marxists hoped to recreate a world without private property. Islamists, too, look to a distant, largely imagined past. Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger, writers on terrorism, speak of the Caliphate’s hope to return Islam to an imaginary ideal of original purity.  Harvard’s Noah Feldman, a scholar of Islam, adds, “The more medieval the practice, the more they like it.”               Like the Soviets and the Nazis, the Caliphate sees itself as constantly threatened by internal and external enemies. Yehuda Bauer, a scholar of the Nazi period, notes common elements of other twentieth-century utopias. “All three—Nazis, Stalinists, Islamists—aspired, or aspire, to rule over the entire world, promising a utopia and an apocalyptic end to history. All three were, or are, genocidal.”   Blogging the Life in Utopia   “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” George Orwell, 1984, 1949               The utopic aspirations of the State’s foreign fighters can be gleaned from their blog entries. Blogging is a large part of the Caliphate’s information operations. In 2011, before the creation of the Islamic State, a blogger on the al-Tahaddi Islamic Network described utopia as a “divine system, the Islamic system,” which is completely free of discrimination, injustice, or any social flaws. “It is not Arab nor regional, rather, it is Islamic.” This captures the utopic goal of the Caliphate today.             A recurring word in the Caliphate’s literature is “freedom,” which is promised in abundance in the Islamic State. But its usage contrasts with the Western understanding of freedom, which generally means the unfettered ability to say, believe, vote, and, often, behave as one would like. For the Caliphate, freedom is the ability to practice Islam unconstrained and to live in an exclusively Muslim society. This Islamic world has no legally defined borders because it aspires to global dominance. There is no clearly articulated concept of individual freedom in Islamic law, or Sharia. Islamic utopia is predicated on religious conformity.               But many of the world’s Muslims support a level of religious freedom that would be antithetical to the State. In 2013, a Pew poll concluded that most Muslims around the world express support for democracy, and most say it is a good thing when others are very free to practice their religion. At the same time, many Muslims want religious leaders to have at least some influence in political matters.   This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World” will be available in spring 2026. Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.