Figure: Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir. That name is an active alias of John Thomas Georgelas. (A muhajir is someone who has immigrated to the Islamic State, a foreign fighter rather than a Syrian or an Iraqi.) The title inherited by “Abu al-Hassan” is mutahaddith, or “spokesman.”
John Thomas Georgelas’ story is one that shatters the official American and western European security analyst profile of potential terrorists. Graeme Wood profiled Georgelas in a piece for The Atlantic, taken from his book The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State:
“I first heard the name Yahya Abu Hassan in 2014, while reporting on an article for this magazine about the rise of the Islamic State. I was in a suburb of Melbourne, talking with Musa Cerantonio, an Australian convert to Islam who has served as an unofficial spiritual guide to many English-speaking followers of the group, about its history and theology. (He is now in jail, charged with attempting to travel to Islamic State territory.)
In our earliest conversations, Cerantonio had mentioned a fellow convert—a “teacher” or “leader,” he called him—who had done much to prepare Muslims for the religious obligations that would kick in once a caliphate had been established. Cerantonio spoke of his teacher with awe. Yahya was deeply devoted to the idea of the caliphate, he said, and showed a staggering mastery of Islamic law and classical Arabic language and literature. Jihadists in Syria knew him by reputation, and they honored him when they met him.
Cerantonio said that in early 2014, Yahya had pressed the leaders of what was then the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) to declare a caliphate. He began preaching that the conditions for the declaration of a valid caliphate had been met—the group held and governed territory, and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was a physically and mentally fit male of Qurayshi descent, capable of ruling according to Sharia. Delaying further would mean disregarding a fundamental obligation of Islam.
Yahya had developed a relationship with Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the group’s spokesman, chief strategist, and director of foreign terror operations. “Yahya was like this with Adnani,” Cerantonio told me, pressing his fingers together. Yahya met with Adnani near Aleppo and warned him that Baghdadi would be in a state of sin if he did not promote himself to caliph immediately. Yahya and his allies had prepared but not yet sent a letter to the emirs of the ISIS provinces, airing their displeasure at his failure to do so. They were ready to make war on Baghdadi if he delayed further. Adnani replied with good news—that a caliphate had already been declared secretly, months before, and that it would soon be publicly announced”.
What follows is a quote from a website featuring writings of Georgelas or Yahya abu-Hassan amongst others: “He then shared a link to a website that featured a collection of Dhahiri writings by Cerantonio and a few others—including a “Yahya al-Bahrumi.” In fluent Arabic and English, Yahya wrote prolifically about many jihadist subjects. He projected calm even in his most grotesque opinions, and wore the label irhabi (“terrorist”) with pride:
This word (“terrorist”) has also been cast as an insult and has been received as such. But irhab [“terror”] itself is something notable scholars have declared obligatory and supported verbatim by the Qur’an itself.
He called for emigration to lands where Sharia would be fully enforced, and wrote that choosing not to do so was a form of apostasy:
Call me extreme, but I would imagine that all of those who willingly choose to live among those with whom Muslims are at war are themselves at war with Muslims—and as such, are not actually Muslims.
Get out if you can—not only in support of your brothers and sisters whom your taxes have been killing, but also to protect yourselves from the punishment Allah has ordained for those who betray the nation.
He called for Muslims to hate, fight, and kill infidels—among whom, he said, were many so-called Muslims who nullified their faith by neglecting prayer, deviating from the narrow literalism of his interpretation of scripture, or, in the case of rulers, not instituting the brutal system of justice for which the Islamic State was then becoming famous.
In dozens of articles posted over several years, Yahya demonstrated knowledge of classical Arabic—the notoriously difficult language of educated religious speech—and familiarity with Islamic sources and history. His Arabic was stunning even to Cerantonio, a notoriously self-confident religious autodidact. Cerantonio told me that another Muslim in their internet discussion group had once challenged a theological point Yahya had made. “Then Yahya did something that shocked us all,” Cerantonio said. “He responded to the guy in traditional Arabic poetry that he devised off the top of his head, using the guy’s name in the poetry, explaining the situation and answering his objections.” For any claim, it seemed, Yahya could instantly spout textual support, and confronted with any counterclaim, he could undercut the argument with a sweep of the leg.
One of the first hits on Google for John Georgelas was an August 15, 2006, press release from the Department of Justice. “Supporter of Pro-Jihad Website Sentenced to 34 Months,” it crowed. At the time of his conviction, he lived in North Texas, near Plano, 20 minutes’ drive from the house where I grew up.
In December 1983, John Thomas Georgelas was born into a wealthy family with a long military tradition. His grandfather Colonel John Georgelas was wounded twice in the Second World War and worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tim Georgelas spent three years in the U.S. Army, then accepted an Air Force commission to attend medical school. He retired as a colonel in 2001, and now practices radiology in a north-Dallas breast-imaging clinic. He is politically conservative, as is Martha, his short, dark-haired wife, whose Facebook cover photo shows her standing proudly in front of the George W. Bush Presidential Library, near downtown Dallas.
Like many a military brat before him, John experimented with the counterculture. He smoked pot, dropped acid, and ate magic mushrooms. He hated his father for punishing his drug use and hated the U.S. government for criminalizing it. By the time he graduated from high school, his primary interest was the voracious consumption of psychedelics. His grades were miserable, Tim says, but his standardized-test scores were better than those of his high-achieving sisters. John ended up studying philosophy at the College Station branch of Blinn College, an open-admission junior college in central Texas. He passed only a few classes.
Notwithstanding his poor academic performance in his younger years, Georgelas excelled in Arabic studies to such an extent that he mastered Arabic, even the notoriously difficult classic Arabic associated with the Quran. Here is a quote confirming such from Graeme Woods’, The Atlantic profile: “He acquired The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, a cuboid volume that is the standard Arabic-English reference work. It is not meant to be read through. The typical student of Arabic keeps the Hans Wehr on a corner of his desk and consults it as needed for the rest of his natural life. Yahya memorized it in six months. Then, as a chaser, he memorized Kitab al-Ayn, the eighth-century Arabic dictionary by al-Khalil al-Farahidi. He wandered through Damascus, chatting up everyone and learning classical Arabic to a level of proficiency rarely achieved even by educated native Arabic speakers”.
Georgelas shatters the established western intelligence community narrative to bits. How did a military brat, with a father who is a Westpoint graduate, the scion of a long military tradition, an Anglo Caucasian American male described as upper middle class, become radicalized? Graeme Wood’s research shows that Georgelas an exceptionally brilliant, talented and priviledged American converted to Islam, then went to the Middle East, particularly Syria ostensibly to learn Arabic and to become more grounded in his new found faith, Islam. As a result of his mastery of Arabic, and his Quranic knowledge he rose in the ranks of the Islamic State, to where he now occupies a leading role, probably as the replacement for the second most powerful man in IS, for an American to occupy such a vaunted position in the terror group speaks volumes to the person that Georgelas is. Georgelas will prove crucial if he is not killed soon, as a key figure within IS who will be instrumental in furthering IS’ understanding of the West, and in particular how to connect with , inspire and recruit young Americans of his social status and level of education in America. IS’ appeal is not merely as a terrorist group, ISIS is championing a narrative not only of global conquest, they are reintroducing Quranic discourse from a fundamentalist perspective, that was already espoused by the likes of Qutb and many others before him. ISIS is the vanguard that Qutb wrote about, the inheritors of the mantle of Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi.
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