By A.N.

Sheikh Abd al-Aziz al-Badri

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the self-declared Islamic State, was not produced in a vacuum. In fact, he comes from a tribe with a long history of support for Salafism. The following is a brief window into this extended family.

 

In the first letter calling for bay?a (swearing of allegiance) to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Turki Binali needed to prove that Baghdadi was a descendant of the Quraysh in order to establish that he was entitled to become a caliph. Binali, from Bahrain, now holds an important position as one of the top jurists in IS, and despite being very young, is referred to by some as the “grand mufti” of IS. The requirement that a caliph be descended from the Quraysh is based on the dominant understanding of a saying of Mohammad in which he declared that the Quraysh were the best tribe. This has been understood by the Sunni schools to mean that the office of caliph should be exclusive to the descendants of the Quraysh tribe.

In proving Baghdadi’s eligibility, Binali not only attempted to demonstrate that Baghdadi descended from the Quraysh, but traced Baghdadi’s lineage to Mohammad himself, through Ali and Fatima (the daughter of Mohammad), by saying that that Baghdadi is: “From the the descendants of Armoush bin Ali bin Eid bin Badri bin Badr al-Din bin Khalil bin Hussain bin Abdallah bin Ibrahim al-Awah bin al-Sharif Yehia Ez al-Din bin al-Sharif Bashir bin Majed bin Atiah bin Yaala bin Douwed bin Majed bin Abdulrahman bin Qassem bin al-Sharif Idriss bin Jaafar al-Zaki bin Ali al-Hadi bin Mohamad al-Jawad bin Ali al-Rida bin Mossa al-Kazem bin Jaafar al-Sadeq bin Mohamad al-Baqer bin Ali Zein al-Abidin bin al-Hussain bin Ali bin Abi Taleb and Fatima, daughter of Mohammad.”

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Turki Binali did not need to do much research to find this out: this is the lineage that Abu Baker al-Baghdadi’s tribe claims for itself. Abu Bakr’s real name is Ibrahim al-Badri, and his full name is Ibrahim bin Awad bin Ibrahim ibn Ali ibn Mohammad bin Badri bin Armoush (the same Armoush who kicks off the tribe’s lineage). He belongs to the Bou Badri tribe named after Badri who was the son of Armoush.

Bou Badri is an Iraqi tribe present in Samra’, Baghdad, Missan, Wasset, and Diala. The eponymous father of the tribe, Badri, moved to Samaraa from Medina in the 1700s, married locally, and had 5 children. Today the tribe numbers around 25,000 people, most of whom are Sunni, but with a population of about 1,500 Shi?is, as well.

The tribe includes notable figures in Iraqi history, some of which worked toward Islamist objectives and were heavily involved in religious activism. Five of these are profiled below, one of which personally supervised Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s religious studies. Most of the below are direct quotes translated from Arabic sources online. (Note that some members of the al-Badri tribe use the “al-Samera’i” nisba which refers to their town of Samarra, rather than “al-Badri.”)

Sheikh Abdel al-Aziz al-Badri (1929 – 1969) — One of the founders of the Iraqi branch of the Hizb al-Tahrir and later emir of Wilayat al-Iraq (a Hizb al-Tahrir designation)

• He called for the revival of the caliphate
• In the early 1950s, Hizb al-Tahrir approached several Islamic figures in Iraq including Abdel al-Aziz to create an Iraqi branch
• He traveled to Jordan and met with Hizb al-Tahrir founder Taqiuddin al-Nabhani and returned to Iraq to form a Hizb al-Tahrir branch. He presented the party credentials to the Iraqi government, seeking to register the party, but they refused to give the founders a permit and later proceeded to persecute them
• He fought against the Hashemites, the communists, and the Baath party
• He left Hizb al-Tahrir in 1956
• He grew closer to the Muslim Brotherhood and became one of their symbols in Iraq
• He was arrested 14 times in addition to numerous house arrest orders by each of the various rulers that controlled of Iraq during his lifetime
• Baath forces arrested him and tortured him for 17 days until he died, and then returned his body to his family for burial in 1969
• Witnesses have said that he was beaten by Nazem al-Kazaz, head of the Baath regime’s General Security Forces for defying the Baath. Kazaz was later killed after a failed attempt to overthrow Ahmad Hassan al-Baker and his deputy Saddam Hussain in 1973
• He worked with the Shi?a and strove to develop good relations with them. He visited Karbala and Najaf to ask the ulama there to intervene with Gamal Abd al-Nasser to stop the execution of Sayed Qutb
• He wrote several books including The Position of Islam on Socialism (he concludes it is kufr), Islam Between the Scholars and the Rulers (in which he condemns scholars that work for rulers), and Islam: A War Against Capitalism and Socialism

 

Subhi al-Samerai [al-Badri] (1936 – 2013) — One of the founders of Salafi movement in Iraq

• A leading Iraqi muhaddith
• Bin Baz (Saudi mufti) said about him “this man is one of the remnants of the people of hadith in Iraq”
• He was one of the founders of the Salafi movement in Iraq and belonged to the branch that preferred to work independently and focus on combating tashayu? (conversion to Shi?ism) more than other Salafis
• He kept a library full of Shi?i books that became a destination for other Salafi sheikhs who wanted to learn about Shi?i beliefs
• He was a policeman from 1951 until he retired in 1977
• When Baath came to power in 1968, he was forced to cease his anti-Shi?i activities and limited his preaching to a group of his friends and students
• He was finally able to express himself again after he went to Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s, where he taught at al-Masjid al-Haram
• He lectured at university of Mohammad bin Saud
• He also lectured at the King Abdallah University where he gave his most well known lectures in the science of shi?i hadith
• He came back to Iraq in the 80s and was appointed to a mosque in Baghdad. People that attended the mosque knew of his dislike of the rafida (Shiites) and whenever somebody mentioned rafida during his hadith lesson, he would forget about the lessons and start preaching about the rafida in anger
• In 1989, he taught in the University of Islamic Sciences in Baghdad [the same university where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi got his bachelors, and his alleged masters and PhD], where he raised his voice loudly against Shi?a.
• He did not publish many books because of the oppressive regime in Iraq but he did write an introduction to a book in which he tried to prove the Shi?i admission of the existence of Abdallah bin Saba (a supposedly early Jewish convert to Islam who was supposedly the first to call for Ali to become Mohammad’s successor, invoked by Sunnis trying to demonstrate that Shi?ism is a Jewish invention) because some Shi?i and Orientalist authors were publishing books denying his existence
• He lost popularity because of his soft tone towards the Baath regime
• Between 1990 and 2003, Islamic da?wa started spreading in Iraq as the government was being weakened; due to this he gained a bigger following
• He also went on trips with al-Albani (influential and founding Salafi sheikh) in Jordan starting in 1991
• He was elected as an honorary emir of Salafism in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad
• He was part of the Hayat Ulama al-Iraq
• In 2003 he knew that the Shi?a would end up ruling Iraq so he left with his family to Jordan. From there he moved to Syria where warned against the Nusayris saying ,”these people are kuffar and are not of Islam”
• He eventually made it to Lebanon in 2009 where he also preached against Hezbollah and had a small following
• He died in June 2013 at the American University hospital in Beirut
• One funny anecdote that the sheikh would recount is that once while traveling he found a possessed man, so he performed an exorcism on him. During the exorcism he discovered that the jinn that possessed the man was a Iraqi Shi?i rafidi from a well known Shi?i city so he asked him: “What brought you here?” [he had such a great sense of humor]
• He traveled the world in search of Islamic manuscripts and visited Berlin, Dublin, and Princeton
• He supervised Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s studies of the Qur’an and hadith [the Newsweek article linked to misspells Subhi’s nisba]
• Youtube videos of him

 

Lieutenant General Nassif Jassem al-Samerai

• The brother of Subhi al-Samerai
• Nassif Jasem was head of the military academy in the 1960s
• Was head of the logistics unit at the time of the coup against the communists. Played a role on the Baath side
• He executed 25 communists without trial during the coup in February 14, 1963
• He became deputy commander-in-chief of the Iraqi army under the Abdul Salam Arif government
• He played a major role in the Iran-Iraq war
• He became a military adviser to Saddam
• He was arrested by US forces in 2004 along with his son in a raid on his house

 

Haitham Sabah Shaker Mahmoud al-Badri — Mastermind of the 2006 al-Askari mosque bombing; was al-Qaida Emir of Salahudin Province

• Haitham al-Badri was the al-Qaida Emir of Salahudin Province and the Emir of Samarra before that
• His brother was killed in a US air force bombing
• He had connections to the supporters of the fallen Baath regime
• He was connected to Ansar al-Suna before he moved to al-Qaida
• He planned the 2006 bombing of the al-Askeri mosque in Samarra, and extremely important religious site for Shi?is that housed the tombs of two of the twelve Shi?i imams. He gave the order to to 4 Saudis, 2 Iraqis, and one Tunisian to carry out the bombing
• He was accused of killing al-Arabia reporter Atwar Bahjat himself but the Iraqi government later accused and convicted someone else for her killing
• He allegedly refused an offer by Izzat al-Douri in 2006 to coordinate with the Baath
• He was killed in an airstrike in 2007 during a US forces raid in Samarra
• In September 2012, Iraqi police arrested his brother “Hisham Sabaa Shaker” who later became a prominent leader of IS in the Jazeera area. He was preparing to commit a suicide bombing in the center of Mosul when he was captured

 

Abdel Al-Satar al-Badri — Salafi Sheikh

• Pupil of Bin Baz (Saudi mufti)
• He worked to spread Salafism in Dayala
• His son died fighting American forces in 2007
• Possible twitter account
• He, along with another sheikh from the tribe, built the al-Khoder mosque in Dayala. Several people that attended this mosque were killed fighting US forces. Most of them were al-Badris