There are other rules as well – many recalling Woody Allen’s Republic of San Marcos. Women may not wear makeup or sit in a chair. Men may not cut their hair, put gel in it, or wear it in a “modern style.” Men may not wear low-hanging jeans (okay, for that one I’m booking my ticket to Raqqa now). Just as postwar Vietnamese were forbidden to utter the name “Saigon,” in the Islamic State no one may refer to the ruling group as “Daesh,” the Arabic acronym for the group’s former name, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Those wearing soccer jerseys will receive 80 lashes. And several weeks ago, Islamic State clerics banned pigeon breeding: the sight of the birds’ genitals as they flew overhead was un-Islamic.
That’s right: this is a state that legislates about pigeon genitals. But no one is laughing, as it commands respect at the point of a gun.
That’s also how it inspires Islamic piety. A deserter from the Islamic State has recounted that Islamic State prisons in Raqqa are filled with people were not sufficiently reverent during prayers or who have uttered the name of Allah in a way that Islamic State authorities deemed blasphemous. Their Islamic State captors torture them with sticks and cattle prods, and occasionally even burn prisoners to death.
Sharia forbids music, and so playing music on your car radio can get you ten lashes. Just as in Saudi Arabia, stores must close during the time for Islamic prayers.
And there is no recourse within the Islamic State itself. No political parties or armed groups are allowed other than the Islamic State. The ruling elites exert control over their people so tightly as to arouse the envy of Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot: inside the caliphate’s capital of Raqqa, in the experience of one man who lived there, “the once colorful, cosmopolitan Syrian provincial capital has been transformed…Now, women covered head to toe in black scurried quickly to markets before rushing home. Families often didn’t leave home to avoid any contact with the ‘Hisba’ committees, the dreaded enforcers of the innumerable ISIS regulations.”
Raqqa’s central square is now known as Hell Square, as it is where the Islamic State carries out public executions, often leaving the dead bodies on display for days, as a warning to the living.
There is no end in sight. “People hate them,” said one man whose family lives in the Islamic State, “but they’ve despaired, and they don’t see anyone supporting them if they rise up. People feel that nobody is with them.” In fact, lots of people are with them: Barack Obama, who has vowed to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State, but done little to make good on his vow; the Iranians, the Shi’ite regime in Baghdad, the Assad regime in Damascus, the Kurds, and a host of others. None of them, however, have the will or the means so far to deliver the knockout blow to this evil state. And so the citizens of the caliphate are in for, at very least, a second year of misery.