"So often in history, it is ideas that kill ... " How did the Islamic State arise? What are the ideas that define it? How does this movement of apocalyptic violence justify its actions? The Mind of the Islamic State offers a condensed and gripping history of political jihadism - from its birth in the 1960s prison writings of Sayyid Qutb all the way to IS's glossy magazine of horror, Dabiq. Along the way Robert Manne considers such terrifying texts as The Management of Savagery and such diabolical figures as al-Zarqawi, who devised the strategy of pitting Sunni against Shia in Iraq, thereby helping to pull the country apart. Manne traces the way ideas and events have intersected to produce the Islamic State, and shows that both left and right in the West have failed to understand what we are dealing with.