https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/ribat-truth-behind-muslim-enclaves-raymond-ibrahim/
Last March, 2019, Reuters reported that the “Islamic State’s last enclave in eastern Syria” had fallen. “Its enclave at Baghouz was the last part of the massive territory it suddenly seized in 2014, straddling swathes of Iraq and Syria, where its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a new caliphate.”
While this was welcome news, it also prompted one to wonder: what of all those other Islamic enclaves, those unassimilated ticking time bombs that proliferate throughout the West, which are packed with ISIS-sympathizers, not to mention ISIS members, and which the West largely fails to recognize as such? I am referring to those many so-called “No-Go Zones”: Western cities and regions that have effectively become Islamic ghettoes. There, Sharia is de facto law; Muslims are openly radicalized to hate infidels; non-Muslims, even police, are afraid to enter lest they get mugged, raped, or killed.
In short, the ISIS worldview continues to proliferate—and not in some distant theater of war, but right smack in the West itself (an internet search for terms such as “no-go zones” and “Muslim enclaves” demonstrates the prevalence of this phenomenon).
Although these enclaves are unique to the modern era, they have precedents in history and even a nomenclature within the Islamic consciousness.
Wherever the jihad was stopped, there, on the border with their infidel neighbors, jihadis formed strongholds, hotbeds of jihadi activities. These became known as the ribat (رباط), an Arabic word etymologically rooted to the idea of a tight fastening or joining and found in Koran 3:200: “O you who have believed, persevere and endure and remain stationed [رابطوا] and fear Allah that you may be successful.”
In Islamic history, the ribat referred to the chains of jihadi fortresses erected along and dedicated to raiding the borders of non-Muslims.