It (and aL-Qaeda ) was around long before the USA, its just a radical version of Islam.
" ISIS can trace its intellectual lineage to the rise of Islamism and jihadi-Salafism. As ISIS was founded in 2006 from an Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda’s ideological legacy features prominently in current ISIS thought. Al-Qaeda clearly draws from the teachings of ibn Taymiyyah (born 1269 CE), a 13th century Islamic scholar who advocated for the purification of the Islamic faith, especially from idolatry. His, and his student’s, writings would become the core of Salafi theology, a theology that advocates a return to the original ways of Islam. He argued that “clerics had distorted the truth by abandoning an exclusive focus on the Quran and hadith…By forsaking the scriptural core of the religion and tolerating beliefs and practices that the earliest generation of Muslims, the salaf, tried to eliminate, religious leaders had lost touch with the essentials of the faith”. However, Taymiyyah opposed an uncritical adherence to Muslim scholarship and did not advocate outright rebellion. Taymiyyah was also the first to pair salafism with jihad, or holy war, insisting that “to wage jihad was the obligation of the legitimate political authority, who was enjoined to lead his army on this holy task at least once a year”. Another major thinker that al-Qaeda, and ISIS, extract inspiration from is 18th century cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (b. 1703). al-Wahhab was a follower of Taymiyyah and took the idea of purification to an extreme attacking Shia populations in Saudi Arabia. He believed that Islam must be purged of the “idolatrous” Shia Islam if Saudi Arabia was ever to prosper (reminiscent of the internal Crusade against the Cathars in 13th century France). It was from these beliefs that he founded Wahhabism, and it is from these ideas that ISIS gets its anti-Shia, a branch of Islam that ISIS and salafi adherents believe venerate Mohammad’s family too much, sentiment. al-Wahhab believed in returning to the old ways of Islam, but took it a step further and claimed that “delivering a legal ruling on the basis of something other than the Quran and hadith was apostasy”.
Terry
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