21-year-old Nadia Murad is an escaped former Yazidi sex slave who has testified before the UN in New York to raise awareness about the ordeal of Yazidi girls. In her difficult words: “Isis ‘forced us to pray – then raped us.’”

In another address to Congress, she warned that the Middle East’s Christians, Yazidis, and other minorities will be wiped out if the Islamic State is not stopped and if these minorities are not protected.

Murad called on the Islamic community around the world to do more to denounce the Islamic State, saying that not one Muslim country has labelled the Islamic State an infidel group. She also declared that “what has been happening has been happening under the name of Islam”, and “Muslims must be the first ones to resist this.”

Her words are a poke in the eye to those who deny any connection between the Islamic State and Islam, to those who refer to the IS as an un-Islamic aberration, and to those who deny that Islamic jihad is a serious threat to homeland security, public safety and, in fact, to Western civilization.

Why is no one hearing a loud outcry from Islamic states about the atrocities of the Islamic State? Professor Bernard Haykel from the Department of Near East Studies in Princeton has it right when he indicates that the theology of the Islamic State is very old in Islam and literalist; and that it is directly linked to Wahhabism, in which violence is justified theologically and historically.

Wahhabism originated with a Sunni Muslim preacher named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab of Arabia, who was of the Salafist tradition. His aggressive religious movement ultimately took over Arabia and became the state religion of Saudi Arabia.

Haykel further explains of al-Wahhab:

“The first Saudi State, based on this Wahhabi faith, seemed to confirm his message because of the political and military success it had throughout the 18th Century and 19th Century where it conquered most of Arabia…..Once a town was conquered he would appoint teachers to educate people in his version of the faith. He wrote a number of short books that were the basis for the teaching, books that are used by ISIS today.”

The Islamic State is not a deviation from the historic practice of Islam. It is just one of the most recent manifestations the military wing of Islamic jihad, as preached by al-Wahhab, who himself aimed to “purify” Islam by returning it to the original principles of the first three generations of the religion.

“Escaped ISIS sex slave tells Congress of horrors”, by Ryan Browne, CNN, June 21, 2016: