MESOP FOCUS : William McCants |ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s family tree
| September 10, 2015 –Editors’ note: Building on his profile of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Will McCants outlined the Islamic State leader’s surprising genealogy in a recent Jihadicapost.
Will McCants: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State and self-proclaimed caliph, claims to be a descendant of Muhammad. That’s not surprising since most Sunni Muslims believe only a descendant from Muhammad’s tribe can be caliph. What makes Baghdadi’s lineage interesting is that he claims to descend from Muhammad through ten of the twelve Shiite imams. That’s an unusual and sadly ironic genealogy for a man hellbent on eradicating the Shiites. I mention Baghdadi’s genealogy in passing in my profile of him, but you can read a fuller discussion of it in my forthcoming book, “The ISIS Apocalypse.” There you’ll learn about the apocalyptic prophecies that his pedigree supposedly fulfills.
-
William McCants is a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy and director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and has served in government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East and terrorism, including as State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. He is the author of “Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam” (Princeton University Press, 2011) and the forthcoming “The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State” (St. Martin’s Press, 2015).