Isis: The Origins of Violence

High above the war zone, the all-seeing eye of the West

searches out the enemy.

But what do we really know about the enemy?

The terrorists claim they are fighting for Islam.

The vast majority of Muslims, and Western leaders too...

...insist that they have nothing to do with Islam.

But who is right?

There is only one way to discover the origins

of the extreme violence of Isis.

By taking a journey into the past.

My name is Tom Holland.

In 2012 I made a film about the origins of Islam.

But a lot has happened since then.

It's as if something buried deep in the past has caught up with us.

Things have been done in the name of Islam

that I would never have imagined happening.

I promised myself I'd never go back there again.

But here I am, going back.

This is our khilafah in all its glory.

We are men honoured with Islam who climbed its peaks to perform jihad,

answering the call to unite under one flag.

This is the source of our glory, our obedience to our Lord.

So bring it on, all of you.

Your numbers only increase us in faith

and we're counting your banners,

which our prophets said would reach 80 in number.

And then the flames of war will find you

and burn you on the hills of death.

Bring it on.

So, we've grown very accustomed to the ultra-violence of Islamic State

and that's the thing that really captures the headlines,

it captures our imagination.

So it develops this strategy of extreme and brutal ultra-violence

in order to try and intimidate its opponents into saying, well,

we may not get to you today or tomorrow but if we do,

we'll be so barbaric and sadistic and horrific

that we just want you to understand

the costs of participation against us.

It's not just here but right up here.

We're going to continually raise the cost of participation.

Isis, even here it fills you with a kind of horror.

They use this principle called muathala.

What happens is they don't just burn him alive in the cage

but at the end of the cage, a truck comes

and drops rubble on top of the cage and that rubble and rock

is from a site that they said he'd bombed.

These atrocities are like video games.

They've got a kind of script.

Scripts have to start somewhere and lead somewhere.

My own feeling is that this is a problem,

and a crisis that will be around, probably,

for the rest of our lifetime.

We've come to Paris because Isis come to Paris.

Because Isis have a thing about Paris.

They've attacked concert halls and football stadiums.

They killed the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.

They shot dead a policeman here on the Champs-Elysees.

But what's all this got to do with Islam?

In fact, what's it got to do with Paris?

Isis call Paris the capital of prostitution and vice.

They call France the home of the Crusades.

It just seems crazy... . ..all those killings.

It's like fiction.

Something out of The Da Vinci Code.

With every new atrocity they're sending out a message.

But what is the message? And who's it being sent to?

You can't help thinking that somehow the answers are here in Paris.

The streets of Paris have always been witness to violent crimes.

Up here, for instance, there was a particularly brutal killing.

A man was seized, a knife was put to his throat,

and his neck was severed off.

And you could almost say that Paris begins with this beheading.

But that was long ago in the third century when Saint Denis,

the first Bishop of Paris, lost his head here, in Montmartre.

But in those days it was the victims who were the martyrs.

Today it's the killers who go to Paradise.

And people who live here are nervous.

The Bastille.

I got a message to meet someone here.

A refugee just escaped from Isis.

He doesn't want us to reveal his name.

Sometimes I don't want to remember these things,

but I think I have to tell it.

When I went there I saw a crossed man.

On the cross? Yeah. And what had he done?

Do you know?

They said he is a spy. Right.

Was he alive or dead?

Was he dead or alive? Dead. The dogs were eating his flesh.

Yeah, it was horrible.

Do you feel safe now you are in France?

You know, here we are being filmed

but you have your back to the camera,

you don't want to be seen on camera.

Why is that? They will kill my family because of this.

Will it be dangerous for me?

To the... You mean... You mean... To the brothers of the Islamic state?

Yeah, it could be dangerous.

He tells me that even though he escaped from Isis in Iraq

he still doesn't feel safe in Paris,

and after what happened round the corner from the Bastille,

maybe he's right.

Daniel Psenny's flat overlooked the street behind the Bataclan.

He filmed the Isis attack from his balcony...

...and he still hasn't recovered from being shot in the arm.

Qu'est-ce qui se passe? Qu'est-ce qui se passe?

Oscar!

Oscar!

Oscar!

90 people were killed at the Bataclan.

Another 40 were shot in cafes and bars across Paris.

These were not simple murders.

These were murders in the service of an idea.

The victims were merely the means of conveying the message.

Young people dead, all the killers dead, all killed in the name of God.

Everything in the name of God.

But to do something like this,

you've got to have a very good idea of what God wants.

The truth is we all know that people have killed in the name of God.

Christians no less than Muslims.

But Isis are raising a lot of ghosts from the past.

We've just gone through Vienna.

Muslim armies came this far twice.

We've passed a town where they massacred everyone.

And the further east across Europe you go,

the more people remember things like this.

It's nightmarish... and it's supposed to be.

Isis have a user's manual.

It's called The Management Of Savagery.

"We need to massacre others," it says.

"Hostages must be eliminated in a terrifying manner."

The circumstances we are now in

resemble those faced by the first Muslims.

Istanbul,

a city that has always been in the crosshairs of the titanic rivalry

between Christendom and Islam.

But it is also a city that shaped the very beginnings of Islam.

In the early 8th century it was a Christian capital, Constantinople.

And an Arab war fleet was laying siege to its walls.

Constantinople, the capital of the Christian Roman Empire,

the greatest city in the world,

the great object of Muslim desire.

The Arabs believed that they had been promised the world by God,

so they wanted to reach out and take it,

probably more than anywhere else in the world.

And they did that twice, and twice they failed to do it.

They were so tantalisingly close,

but they couldn't quite get hold of it.

And so, in the face of that failure, they went back to first principles.

They asked themselves, "What should we be doing here?"

And they decided that what God wanted was struggle.

Jihad.

So this is where the notion of jihad really begins,

before the walls of Constantinople.

In the Koran, jihad meant the effort required to be a good Muslim.

But defeat here gave it a much sharper meaning.

Sacred violence.

Stories began to be told of Muhammad,

that he believed those who died fighting for Islam

would receive the greatest rewards in heaven.

The sword scrapes away sin.

As a result, those who died here were cast as martyrs.

In here we've got the tomb of...

...supposedly, an Arab soldier

in the first Arab campaign that was sent

against Constantinople.

And he is supposed to have died here, so he ranks as a martyr.

He died for his faith.

And the... ...sight of his...

...tomb was discovered, supposedly,

after the Muslims had conquered Constantinople in 1453.

So many centuries afterwards.

And... ...you might think...

...this was quite a convenient, not to say improbable, discovery.

Nevertheless, this tomb in here

commemorates one of Islam's earliest jihadis.

With the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople,

the city became the capital of a great Islamic civilisation.

Its sultans ruled as caliphs,

successors of Muhammad himself,

and claimed the allegiance of Muslims across the world.

But then, a century ago, came the fall.

The Royal Navy in the Bosphorus

marked the end of the First World War.

Allied troops occupied Istanbul.

A new Turkish strongman arrived, Ataturk,

a moderniser with little time for Islam.

In 1924 his assault on Islamic tradition reached a seismic climax.

This is the Dolmabahce Palace. It was built in the mid-19th century.

Now, the reason that it is a museum these days is because the dynasty

for which it was built, the Ottoman caliphs, no longer exists.

And the reason for that is that on 3rd March, 1924,

the caliphate itself was abolished.

So, a line of caliphs that stretched all the way back

to the lifetime of those who'd known Muhammad himself

was terminated.

And that evening,

the prefect of police came to the palace and told the Caliph,

Abdulmejid II, that it was all over,

that he had to leave,