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Forces throughout the Middle East are attempting to roll back the self-proclaimed Islamic State, which seized territory in Iraq and Syria in 2014. But regardless of how the jihadi group fares militarily, its ideology remains a long-term challenge. The Islamic State’s ideology is multifaceted and cannot be traced to one individual, movement, or period. Understanding it is crucial to defeating the group.

A Hybrid Ideology

• The Islamic State presents itself as the representative of authentic Islam as practiced by the early generations of Muslims—Salafism—and it draws on an especially strict brand of Salafism in particular, Wahhabism.
• It is overly simplistic, however, to blame any one ideology for the Islamic State’s extremism. Its extremism is the product of a hybridization of doctrinaire Salafism and other Islamist currents.
• The Islamic State relies on the jihadi literature of ideologues who support its stance as well as clerics who do not formally support the group. These clerics adhere to a set of ideas that significantly deviate from mainstream Islam, and many are direct heirs of the Sahwa, an intellectual religious movement that began in earnest in the 1970s.
• The Sahwa blended Salafi concepts with revolutionary ideas from political Islam in a broad sense, but primarily currents influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood. The intermarriage polarized and produced new and unpredictable religious currents.
• Politically submissive Salafism gave way to political takfirism—excommunication after one Muslim declares another an infidel or apostate. This ideology carries the banner of caliphate, jihad, and rebellion.
• The Islamic State is part of a legacy of takfiri schools and ideas to emerge from al-Qaeda. But the Islamic State’s ideological rigidity stands out. Its refusal to bend creates a culture of takfirism within takfirism.

The Ideology in Practice

• The Islamic State promotes a political ideology and a worldview that actively classifies and excommunicates fellow Muslims.
• The group is adept at cultivating and exploiting preexisting sectarian fissures in the Middle East. The Islamic State taps into communal hatred and religious concepts to recruit and justify its acts, or to foster sympathy and neutralize forces that actively reject it. It has proven particularly powerful in outbidding al-Qaeda for recruits.
• It uses clerics’ material to justify the takfir of the Saudi state and Muslim rulers across the Middle East, and to support the rejection of official institutions and forces.
• For the Islamic State, clerics offer justifications for its savagery, especially against fellow Muslims. And the group cites stories from early Islamic history to justify its brutal practices to new recruits.

Introduction

Since the self-proclaimed Islamic State swept through large swaths of northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria in the summer of 2014, the origins of its sectarian and ultraextremist ideology have been debated in the region and beyond.¹ The enslavement of hundreds of Yazidi women in Sinjar,² the slaughter of at least 1,500 Shia soldiers in Tikrit and hundreds of Sunni tribesmen in Syria and Iraq,³ and the beheading of Western hostages and Syrian and Iraqi civilians triggered a collective soul-searching that soon turned into a religious and political blame game.⁴ A Saudi commentator typified the debate when he said on Twitter that the Islamic State’s “actions are but an epitome of what we have studied in our school curriculum. If the curriculum is sound, then [the Islamic State] is right, and if it is wrong, then who bears responsibility?”⁵

Understanding the ideological appeal of the Islamic State is crucial to defeating it. Top U.S. military commanders have repeatedly emphasized the importance of ideology in fighting the group. As Major General Michael Nagata, a former commander of the U.S. special operations forces in the Middle East, has noted, “We do not understand the movement, and until we do, we are not going to defeat it.”⁶ Field commanders battling the Islamic State in Syria have likewise reported that ideology impedes efforts to mobilize forces against the group. Muslim fighters often refuse to take up arms against the Islamic State on religious grounds, even if they would not join the group themselves. This is especially the case for efforts backed by Western powers. Ideology can therefore have practical implications in the fight against the Islamic State.

The Islamic State’s ideology is multifaceted and cannot be traced to one individual, movement, or period.

There is little consensus on the factors to blame for the Islamic State’s violent and confrontational ethos. Some maintain that the Islamic State is the natural heir of a long history of such behavior.⁷ Others attribute its rise and brutality to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and to Iran’s expanding role in supporting Shia militias in the region. Some commentators point broadly to political Islam as the precursor to the Islamic State’s intolerance,⁸ while others reduce the Islamic State to an entity whose sectarianism is driven solely by political opportunism fueled by regional political players.⁹

In fact, the Islamic State’s ideology is multifaceted and cannot be traced to one individual, movement, or period. And relying on the titles of books and writings used by the Islamic State can distort, not inform, the understanding of its ideology. Instead, it is important to closely examine how the group selects, understands, and teaches its ideas.

In isolation, Salafism and political Islam do not produce an Islamic State member or catalyze extremism.¹⁰ On the contrary, both Salafism and political Islam have safeguards that may inhibit the kind of extremism adopted by the Islamic State. Similarly, political or moral outrage alone does not drive people to the Islamic State. The group has flourished in a context of political oppression, governance failures, and sectarian fissures, but this same political context can, and often does, lead individuals to insurgent groups that hold moderate views.

This paper explores the Islamic State’s ideology and sectarianism in context, drawing on primary sources and direct testimonies from Islamic State clerics and members in Syria and Iraq. It discusses broader themes relevant to the group’s ideology to explain the origins of the Islamic State’s violent and exclusivist vision. Until the illusion that the group’s ideology is traceable straight to Salafism is dispelled, the world will not be able to understand the Islamic State’s appeal, or to defeat it.

The Wahhabi Root

The Islamic State presents itself as the representative of authentic Islam as practiced by the early generations of Muslims, commonly known as Salafism. Many postcolonial and modern Islamic movements describe themselves as Salafist, including the official brand of Islam adopted by Saudi Arabia known as Wahhabism, named after founder Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eighteenth-century cleric who helped establish the first Saudi state with the assistance of Muhammad Ibn Saud.

The Islamic State presents itself as the representative of authentic Islam as practiced by the early generations of Muslims, commonly known as Salafism.

Wahhabism is the intellectual legacy of the thirteenth-century Islamic scholar Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyyah and the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, as interpreted and enforced by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his successors. Marked by extreme traditionalism and literalism, Wahhabism rejects scholastic concepts like maqasid (the spirit of sharia law), a principle that many other Islamic schools uphold; kalam (Islamic philosophy); Sufism (Islamic spirituality); ilal (the study of religious intentions in the Quran and hadith, sayings attributed to the Prophet); and al-majaz (metaphors).¹¹

Its clerics also use the concept of bidah—an Islamic term that forbids inventing religious practices unsanctioned by the religion—to label many practices, largely Sufi and Shia, as polytheistic. Wahhabi clerics’ fixation on bidah creates a slippery slope that sometimes leads to the declaration of a fellow Muslim as an apostate. Adopting saints or their graves as wasila (means or intermediaries) to worship God, for example, is considered something that automatically leads an individual out of Islam. Circumambulating graves, slaughtering animals in the name of a saint, or believing in the divine authority of imams are also deemed polytheistic practices. While mainstream Muslims agree that innovation in religion is forbidden, Wahhabi clerics go one step further, drawing on Ibn Taymiyyah’s hardline stance to label as bidah many practices that other Muslims consider legitimate. Wahhabi clerics reject Sufi and Shia contentions that such practices are not intended as worship.¹²

The Islamic State largely borrowed from Wahhabism the penal code that is already institutionalized in Saudi Arabia and practiced less systematically in other Muslim countries. Wahhabism’s greatest contribution to the Islamic State, however, may be the concepts of wala wal bara (loyalty to Islam and disavowal of un-Islamic ways) and tawhid (the oneness of God). While these concepts exist in traditional Salafism as preached by Ibn Taymiyyah and other early scholars, they are interpreted and promoted more extremely by Wahhabi clerics.

According to the concept of wala wal bara, it is not enough for a Muslim to dislike un-Islamic practices and non-Muslims; instead, true Muslims must reject un-Islamic practices and non-Muslims actively and wholeheartedly.¹³ Ibn Abd al-Wahhab reflected this precept when he wrote, “One’s Islam cannot be sound, even if they adhered to the oneness of God and worshipped none but God, without enmity to the polytheists and showing to them hate and hostility.”¹⁴ For the Islamic State, this obligation to act in enmity applies to fellow Muslims who do not fulfill the criteria of tawhid by recognizing the oneness of God.

A basic tenet of Islam, as preached by Ibn Taymiyyah, is that a Muslim must abide by three criteria of tawhid: to worship God, to worship only God, and to have the right creed as prescribed by the Quran or by the Prophet’s traditions.¹⁵ Ibn Taymiyyah drew on the three criteria of tawhid to excommunicate Shia and Sufis after he established that their practices and beliefs, including the veneration of imams, compromised their worship of God alone.

In areas conquered by the Islamic State, symbols of shirk (polytheistic practices) are systematically demolished, notably Sufi and Shia shrines and historical sites that denote a deity. After taking over a town, Islamic State clerics typically launch a campaign against what they deem polytheistic practices, including superstitions and soothsaying. The clerics’ doctrine is slowly shaping societies under their control because many of the ideas preached by the Islamic State are based in established Islamic schools.

Because of such beliefs, study of the Islamic State’s rigid, hostile, and sectarian ideology has centered on Wahhabism. Also, because the Islamic State cites or preaches the writings of Salafi and Wahhabi clerics, some scholars have concluded that the group is a manifestation of those ideas. But it is overly simplistic to blame Salafism and Wahhabism for Islamic State extremism.

A Hybrid Ideology

The Islamic State’s extreme ideology can be viewed as the product of a slow hybridization between doctrinaire Salafism and other Islamist currents.

Many of the extremist religious concepts that undergird the Islamic State’s ideology are rooted in a battle of ideas best understood in the context of Saudi Arabia’s Sahwa (Islamic Awakening) movement in the 1970s, and a similar movement in Egypt, as well as in other countries. In those countries, the interplay of Salafi doctrinal ideas and Muslim Brotherhood–oriented political Islamic activism produced currents that still resonate today. Indeed, the commingling of Salafism and Brotherhood Islamism accelerated in the wake of the Arab uprisings of 2011, filling the void left when traditional religious establishments failed to respond adequately to the aspirations and grievances of the Arab masses. The Islamic State and other Islamist and jihadi groups seized the opportunity to enforce their vision of the role of Islam.

Many of the extremist religious concepts that undergird the Islamic State’s ideology are rooted in a battle of ideas best understood in the context of Saudi Arabia’s Sahwa.

In Saudi Arabia and in Egypt, the marriage of traditional Salafism and political Islam produced new forms of Salafism that were influenced by, and critical of, both movements.¹⁶ Political Islam became more conservative and Salafism became politicized.

In many instances, Salafi concepts were substantially reinterpreted, appropriated, and utilized by a new generation of religious intellectuals who started to identify with a new movement. In Saudi Arabia, the Sahwa generation moved away from the Najdi school, the adopted name for the Wahhabi clerical establishment.

The practice of takfir, or excommunication after one Muslim declares another an infidel or apostate, became increasingly prominent, first during the 1960s in Egypt and then after the first Gulf War in the 1990s when veterans of the jihad in Afghanistan began to apostatize Saudi Arabia for hosting and supporting Western troops to fight Iraq’s then leader, Saddam Hussein.

Politically submissive Salafism, which had rejected political rebellion, began to give way to political takfirism that carries the banner of caliphate, jihad, and rebellion. At the same time, the growing influence of Salafi ideals led to the Salafization of the Muslim Brotherhood.¹⁷

Sayyid Qutb, an Islamist theorist and leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s, drew on Salafi ideals to create an all-embracing takfiri ideology.¹⁸ Qutb argued that Muslim-majority societies are living in a state of jahiliyya (pre-Islamic obliviousness).¹⁹ He believed that all ideologies—including capitalism, communism, and pan-Arabism—have failed, and that the only system that will succeed globally is Islam.²⁰ Qutb considered Islam the only reference for society (known as hakimiyya, or sovereignty of God), and he urged Muslim youth to reject their societies and lead change.

Qutbism provided a political ideology that introduced Islamic supremacism and nationalism, and that rejects many aspects of modern Muslim society and political regimes. It took conservative ideas and molded them to serve as the foundations of a political ideology that has little sympathy for views that deviate from Qutb’s understanding of the Islamic way of life.²¹ It is inward-looking and prioritizes internal threats over foreign threats.

Qutbist concepts such as hakimiyya and jahiliyya shape the Islamic State’s dealings with the religious and ethnic communities it controls. The Islamic State believes that local populations must be converted to true Islam and that Muslims can accuse one another of apostasy without adhering to traditional clerical criteria, which stipulate a series of verification measures to ensure the apostasy of an accused person.²² The group also believes in the Qutbist idea that Muslims have fundamentally deviated from the true message of Islam and that correcting this deviation will require a radical, coercive revolution. As one Islamic State member told the author, “If you think people will accept the Islamic project [voluntarily], you’re wrong. They have to be forced at first. The other groups think that they can convince people and win them over but they’re wrong. You have a ready project, you should place it on society like a tooth crown and make sure to maintain it.”²³

According to Egyptian researcher Hussam Tammam, the Muslim Brotherhood influenced Salafism through at least two channels. The first was the ideas of Qutb, represented by ideologues such as Abdullah Azzam, the Palestinian-born leader of the jihad in Afghanistan.²⁴ The second was Mohammed Surur, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader from Syria. Surur’s influence produced a current somewhere between Saudi Salafism and Salafi jihadism. This current can be discerned in the ranks of Syrian rebel groups that until 2015 made up the Islamic Front, in the group of clerics known as the Syrian Islamic Council, and, to some extent, in the Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda-affiliated group fighting in Syria.²⁵

Increasingly, Salafism has shifted from being a dawa (proselytism) movement to a political ideology. In an interview with the London-based newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, Surur said that the current named after him had “transformed Salafism from one worldview to another” and “destroyed the myth of wali al-amr [religiously mandated blind obedience to Muslim rulers] and the obligation to respect them.”²⁶

The influence of Salafism on political Islam and vice versa led to varying outcomes—broadly referred to by its adherents as haraki Salafism, or activist Salafism. In Saudi Arabia and Egypt, some who adopted formulations of these ideas went on to fight jihad in Afghanistan; this included, notably, Osama bin Laden. A vast number of modern jihadists have cited the influence of Islamist ideas next to their study of Salafism, including, arguably, the true spiritual father of the Islamic State, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi. He is a Jordanian-Palestinian ideologue who mentored Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,²⁷ the group’s founder in 2004 when it was known as al-Qaeda in Iraq.²⁸ Al-Maqdisi never met Osama bin Laden, but he taught at al-Qaeda camps.²⁹

The Islamic State and al-Qaeda diverge ideologically, but the former continues to rely heavily on the jihadi literature used by al-Qaeda.

The vanguard of activist Salafism transformed Salafi concepts, it did not just borrow them. Qutb’s brother, Mohammed, often known as the father of the Sahwa, integrated Ibn Taymiyyah’s three criteria for monotheism and added a fourth he called tawhid al-hakimiyya, or the unity of the sovereignty of God and his laws alone. This fourth criterion was a defining contribution to the Sahwa and to Salafi-jihadi thought in general.³⁰ Jihadi clerics took the Quranic term taghut (false deity) and built a full-fledged ideology on it: rulers of the Muslim world have been apostatized, and based on this, a Muslim who works for the ruler—from clerics to civil servants—can be a legitimate target. Democracy has been labeled a religion and democratic institutions as “habitats of apostasy,” as a Daily Beast article reported.³¹

The Islamic State and al-Qaeda diverge ideologically, but the former continues to rely heavily on the jihadi literature used by al-Qaeda. The Islamic State lacks the religious resources, in terms of committed preachers, both within and outside its territories to develop its own jihadi school reflecting its intense sectarianism.

The same marriage of ideas that helped produce the al-Qaeda generation in the 1990s also produced more conservative Islamist movements that are politically active without endorsing violent jihadism, indiscriminate killing, or genocide. Religious intellectuals such as Kuwaiti Hakim al-Mutairi, for example, called for progressive Salafi ideas, including a multiparty democracy, citing Salafi references.³² Surur’s followers emphasized the Salafi doctrine of tawhid, while vehemently criticizing the Salafi concept of obedience to Muslim leaders, although they remained committed to traditional Sunni authorities.³³

The schools that emerged from the mutual influence of Salafism and Islamism integrated aqadi (doctrinal or creed-based) and ilmi (scholastic) aspects of Salafism with the Muslim Brotherhood’s political activism and revolutionary concepts.³⁴ Qutb’s concept of hakimiyya and other Islamist ideas provided the political and activist ingredients of the new hybrid formulations, while Wahhabism and traditional Salafism provided its jurisprudential and doctrinal basis.  

Although the intertwining of Salafism and political Islam has led to diverse outcomes, most reflect a key feature of Salafism: its propensity to narrowly define who is a Muslim. This makes Salafism sectarian almost by definition. Political Islam, meanwhile, galvanizes its followers and provides them with a political ideology that advocates religious rule, the implementation of religious practices, and Islam’s way of life. Stephane Lacroix, in his book Awakening Islam, explained, “On theological questions connected to creed and on the major aspects of Islamic jurisprudence, the [Sahwa generation] adhered to the Wahhabi tradition and considered themselves its faithful heirs. But on political and cultural questions, their view of the world tended toward that of the Muslim Brotherhood, although it was partly reformulated in terms derived from the Wahhabi tradition.”³⁵

The Islamic State combines ideas such as wala wal bara (loyalty to Islam and disavowal of un-Islamic ways) and apostasy with a religious penal code to form a political ideology and a worldview actively classifying and excommunicating fellow Muslims.³⁶ In this sense, revolutionary religious ideas derived from political Islam are as central to Islamic State ideology as fundamentalist ones.

Takfirism to the Extreme

The Islamic State is part of a legacy of takfiri schools and ideas to emerge from al-Qaeda. But while the Islamic State was once affiliated with al-Qaeda, the two groups have ideologically parted ways. Comparing the Islamic State’s vision with al-Qaeda’s, and noting where their paths diverged, helps to shed light on the evolution of the Islamic State’s sectarian ideology.

Differences between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State can be traced back to early encounters between Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi differed when they were in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as their successors do today, on the use of extreme violence and the targeting of Shia civilians.³⁷ According to the Islamic State, the worst enemies of Islam are the enemies within. The group argues that focusing on the far enemy (the West) and ignoring the near enemy (Muslim enemies in the region, especially Shia) is ineffective. Under the Islamic State’s vision, the far enemy will be dragged into the region as Osama bin Laden planned, but by attacking the near enemy. This scenario has, in fact, played out since Islamic State fighters took over the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014, drawing more than 60 countries to the fight against the group.

The Islamic State argues that focusing on the far enemy (the West) and ignoring the near enemy (Muslim enemies in the region, especially Shia) is ineffective.

The Iraq war in 2003 provided space for al-Zarqawi to spread his sectarian vision. Iraq’s distinctly cross-sectarian familial bonds had previously made it largely resistant to sectarianism. Yet, al-Zarqawi’s followers succeeded in kindling a civil war after bombing the Shia Askari Shrine in Samarra in 2006. Extremist ideas brought to Iraq by al-Qaeda after 2003 became entrenched as al-Zarqawi’s jihadi group evolved into a local movement under the leadership of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who ruled the Islamic State in Iraq from 2006 to 2010, and his successor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who currently leads the group.

For al-Qaeda, such a focus on Shia would distract from the fight against the West. Furthermore, mainstream Sunni clergy reject a genocidal attitude toward the Shia public. Al-Qaeda’s central leadership has admonished the Islamic State (and its earlier incarnations) against attacking Shia civilians. Bin Laden reportedly favored an alliance between Shia and Sunni groups that would position them to jointly attack the West.³⁸

According to a letter published by the U.S. State Department, al-Zarqawi urged bin Laden to focus on Shia. He wrote: “If you agree with us on [targeting Shia] . . . we will be your readied soldiers. . . . If things appear otherwise to you, we are brothers, and the disagreement will not spoil [our] friendship.”³⁹ The Islamic State’s current leaders have criticized al-Qaeda’s mellow, as they call it, stance toward Shia,⁴⁰ and in May 2014, Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani said that al-Qaeda was deliberately avoiding confrontation with Iran and Shia.

In July 2005, current al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri addressed al-Qaeda’s position on Shia in a letter he sent to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He cited religious and practical reasons for al-Qaeda in Iraq to steer clear of targeting the Shia public and places of worship. Referencing Ibn Taymiyyah, he wrote that “such acts affect the protected blood of women, children, and noncombatant Shia public, who are protected because they are excused for their ignorance [of true religious doctrine, unlike Shia clerics]. This is the consensus of the Sunni toward the Shia public and ignorant followers.”⁴¹

The rigidity of the Islamic State’s ideology stands out even in a jihadi landscape marked by rigidity.

Al-Qaeda officially disassociated itself from the Islamic State in February 2014. Generally, outside Islamic State–held territories, the Islamic State has failed to win the support of any prominent jihadi ideologues, with the exception of a few jihadi clerics. Most jihadi ideologues have criticized the group’s indiscriminate violence and sectarian bent. Al-Zarqawi’s old mentor Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi has described the group as “deviant,” and has criticized its public beheadings and alienation of local Muslim communities and armed groups in Syria.⁴²

The Islamic State’s ideological divergence from al-Qaeda is discernable in its outlook and actions toward clerics and leaders as well. The rigidity of the Islamic State’s ideology stands out even in a jihadi landscape marked by rigidity. Its refusal to bend creates a culture of takfirism within takfirism, where any leniency is forbidden.

In a video interview posted online in October 2013, Sami al-Aridi—the top cleric of the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front—explained some of the ideas that differentiate the Islamic State from other jihadi groups, including al-Qaeda. In contrast to the Islamic State, al-Aridi cited as legitimate scholars mainstream Wahhabi clerics, such as Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Abd al-Aziz Al al-Sheikh and prominent theologian Abd al-Aziz Ibn Baz.⁴³ He noted that al-Qaeda adheres to the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence and is more accommodating than the Islamic State of Muslim clerics, often engaging them.⁴⁴

In contrast, the Islamic State considers clerics a key factor in the persistence of tyrannical, illegitimate governments in the Muslim world. The Islamic State believes that tabayun (a process of investigation) is sometimes needed to determine whether a person is a true Muslim. According to al-Aridi, the Islamic State declares a Muslim to be kafir (an infidel or unbeliever) based on intuitive suspicion, consequentiality, and vagueness.⁴⁵

For the Islamic State, ordinary Muslims receive their religious education from clerics who are aligned with corrupt Muslim rulers who perpetuate Western hegemony. Accordingly, the Islamic State prioritizes the fight against clerics and rulers over the fight against the West.⁴⁶

The Islamic State’s particular sectarian outlook is also characterized by the tendency to emphasize sunna (the Prophet’s traditions) as integral to the faith—a departure from mainstream clerics who consider them nonobligatory secondary practices that only strengthen faith. The Islamic State deems a person who adheres to these traditions to be respectful of the Prophet and those who do not adhere to the traditions to be disrespectful. Abu Mariya al-Qahtani, who served as the Nusra Front’s chief cleric before he was replaced by al-Aridi, wrote in February 2014 that the Islamic State distinctly integrated these traditions into Islamic jurisprudence, changing terms from “optional” and “recommended” to “obligatory” and “duty.”⁴⁷

This view was also popular among followers of Juhayman al-Utaybi, a Saudi extremist who seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca along with his followers in November 1979 and declared himself the Mahdi (an expected messiah in Islam). According to Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, religious followers of al-Utaybi would often pray in a mosque with their shoes on, and would take them off as they leave the mosque, as the Prophet Muhammad had reportedly done on occasions.⁴⁸ Mainstream clerics often dismiss such practices as signs of the Islamic State’s lack of religious qualifications, but for the group, these revivalist practices are evidence of adherence to original Sunni traditions.

The Islamic State is also extreme in its application of the Salafi concept of nawaqid al-Islam, or nullifiers of Islam. These are a set of conditions with which doctrinaire Salafists believe all Muslims must comply. The founder of Wahhabism narrowed nullifiers to ten acts: engaging in shirk (polytheistic practices); accepting intermediaries in worship; failing to deem infidels as infidels, or doubting or justifying infidels’ unbelief; mocking religious practices; believing that there is better guidance or rules than those of the Prophet; despising a practice ordained by the Prophet; exercising or accepting black magic; allying with infidels against Muslims; believing some people can do without sharia; and deliberately avoiding learning about or practicing religion.

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