Mogahed suggested that the relationship between Islamic texts and ISIS’s brutality is actually the reverse of what both ISIS and many of its enemies may claim. It’s not, she said, the group’s interpretation of Islamic texts driving its brutality—its the group’s desired brutality driving its interpretation of the texts. “We start at the violence we want to conduct, and we convince ourselves that that this is the correct way to interpret the texts,” she said.

If that implies it’s not terribly informative to question the degree of ISIS’s Islamic-ness, it still leaves the question of why ISIS has emerged now. Mogahed said one possible reason was Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “He has massacred far more people than ISIS has,” she said. A key variable in the group’s seemingly sudden emergence, then, is not its interpretation of Islam. “I think it’s the product of the brutality of this war that we’ve ignored.”