| A taste: |
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
’s last enclave in eastern Syria looked close to an end," Rooters recently reported, "as U.S.-backed fighters said they were combing the area for hidden jihadists... Its enclave at Baghouz was the last part of the massive territory it suddenly seized in 2014, straddling swathes of Iraq and Syria, where its leader His Supreme Immensity, Caliph of the Faithful and Galactic Overlord, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
...the head of ISIS, or what remains of it, and a veteran of the Abu Graib jailhouse. Looks like a new messiah to bajillions of Moslems, like just another dead-eyed mass murder to the rest of us. So far he has been killed at least four times, though not yet by a stake through the heart...declared a new caliphate."
While this is welcome news, it also prompts one to wonder: what of all those other Islamic enclaves, those unassimilated ticking time bombs that proliferate throughout the West, which are packed with ISIS-sympathizers, not to mention ISIS members, and which the West largely fails to recognize as such? I am referring to those many so-called "no-go" zones: Western cities and regions that have effectively become Islamic ghettoes. There, Sharia is the de facto law; Moslems are openly radicalized to hate infidels; non-Moslems, even police, are afraid to enter lest they get mugged, raped, or killed.
In short, the ISIS worldview dominates‐not in some distant theater of war, but right smack in the West itself (an internet search for terms such as "no-go" zones and "Moslem enclaves" demonstrates how prevalent and problematic this phenomenon is).
Although these Moslem enclaves are recent and unique phenomena, they have precedents in history and even a nomenclature in the Islamic consciousness.
Wherever the jihad was stopped, there, on the border with their infidel neighbors, jihadis formed strongholds, hotbeds of jihadi activities. These became known as the ribāt (رباط), an Arabic word etymologically rooted to the idea of a tight fastening or joining and found in Koran 3:200: "O you who have believed, persevere and endure and remain stationed [رابطوا] and fear Allah that you may be successful." In Islamic history, the ribāt referred to the chains of jihadi fortresses erected along and dedicated to raiding the borders of non-Moslems.