Since everybody is talking about it, I figured I needed to set aside some time to read Graeme Wood’s article about ISIS in the March issue of The Atlantic.
I’ll have something to say later.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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I’m just curious, but have we had more than a couple months since WWII without an official “enemy”? Maybe the time between the fall of the USSR and 9/11, but I’m trying to remember if we had an enemy then.
1990 has been cited as year zero for the end of the Cold War. Here’s the list of US military operations for the subsequent decade. Of course, Iran, Libya, and N. Korea remained official enemies. There were also all those “narco-terrorists” that officials in DC were “fighting” on multiple fronts.
My reaction is always the same: they need to be destroyed by other arabs. They are a threat to the Iraqis, the Syrians, the Iranians and the Saudi’s. Let them grab a gun and fight them.
They want US intervention – it confirms their nationalist ambitions.
“Non-muslims cannot tell Muslims how to practice their religion properly. But Muslims have long since begun this debate within their own ranks.”
Essentially we are trying to intervene in someone else’s religious argument.
As a Muslim convert, I have some sense of what the debate within the community and I find it ridiculous that a man who doesn’t even claim to be a scholar dismisses those who say ISIS is in no meaningful sense Islamic. All the great scholars within the faith have made clear that groups like this take selected snippets from the Qu’ran out of context and ignore the heart of the message.
For example, yes there was slavery at the time of the prophet. Yes, he had slaves. But it wasn’t slavery in the sense we think of. First, slaves ate at the same table with the people they served and ate the same food. There were rules governing their treatment. They were paid wages and could buy their freedom.
Mohammed, judged by the standards of his time, was nothing if not progressive in his treatment of others. This includes slaves, racial minorities, women, people of other religions. Blood letting was carefully circumscribed. I can think of only one instance in which the men of another tribe was put to death, and that was after that other tribe disavowed an alliance and allied with the enemy in a way that almost resulted in the massacre of Mohammed’s people. In those days there were no prisons or means of keeping oneself safe from such an enemy other than to kill them. The method was beheading but not in the horrible way ISIS does it, with men screaming in agony as their necks are severed with a hand knife. They were whacked off in one swift move because this was deemed the most painless and merciful method of killing.
It seems to me from the way outside that the Da’esh theologians have a good deal in common with some of our rightwing Christians–cherrypicking the sacred texts for little nuggets of hatred and ignoring all the love and the spiritual nourishment. Both are not so much Muslims and Christians as Islamists and Christianists, making a fetish out of the words of the doctrine and ignoring its content (like idolator Justice Roy Moore making a graven image out of a text that says “thou shalt make no graven images…”).
Thanks for the point about the beheading. In Europe down to the 17th century that was reserved for aristocrats like King Charles I, while the lower class were tortured and hanged and burned, and of course the French Revolution revived beheading for all with the guillotine for the same reason of “humanity” (though a lot of them knew it would be better to get rid of capital punishment altogether).
I don’t understand what Woods is up to with that article, but it’s not quite decent.
Interesting article. In making the case that the Islamic State is in fact, well, Islamic, the author is countering the narrative that seems to be most common on the left.
I find a lot of similarities between the Islamic State and what is going on in this country with the hyper-religious right. And as the author points out it is hard for those of us who don’t ‘believe’ to understand their rhetoric. If we can’t see the world through their eyes, it becomes almost impossible to so much as have a conversation with them. Or them with us for that matter.
What bothers me about the thought of further intervention is that yes, we had a hand in making this mess. But it goes back much farther than the Iraq invasion. Any intervention I read about only seems to want to return to the status quo of nation states created by the West and the continued support of dictators friendly to our business interests. In other words, continuing the fertilization of the fields from which this fundamentalism has grown.
He comes awfully close, though, to suggesting that IS’s version of Islam is the only truly authentic one, as though one were to claim that Westboro Baptist is the only truly Christian church. A lot of very knowledgeable scholars have already taken him to task for this.
I agree. That part confused me and perhaps showed the author’s own bias coming through. As with any fundamentalists, the Islamic State is trying to harness an extreme interpretation of their faith.
Yes. He thinks he’s arguing that Da’esh is Islamic, but he’s really arguing that Islam is Da’eshic. And it’s not true at all.
Why is it that Graeme Wood the author of this lacks a biography? He writes for New Republican and now Atlantic, but no background about where he’s been.
But I’m pretty sure he’s not the cricketer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_C.A._Wood. Not a lot of info but some links.
We know that Maj. Gen. Nagata is one of his sources.
And then we come to this:
Whoa. He spoke to Islamic State supporters? Where, when, and how? [It seems to be Musa Cerantonio, interviewed in Australia. Also a group of UK jihadis.]
Haykel:
Important point for those who generalize and stereotype.
Wood:
Imagine a Christian sect as a military army with the Christian doctrine of 700. Either Western European or Byzantine. So the US religious right isn’t quite atavistic in quite that same depth of time.
The mythological structure of a medieval fantasy novel is that of a quest, what Joseph Campbell called “the Hero’s Journey” in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It is mainlined romanticism; after all the form is best known the the French romans that popularized the form in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Wood:
Is there evidence that ISIL has actually implemented those services?
Wood then drags in Will McCants. Briefly.
NATO embraces both Turkey and the US, and has four letters.
This dovetails neatly with the Christian evangelical apocalyptic narratives even down to the victory of Jesus.
Isn’t ferreting out stuff like this why we spend $60 billion a year on an intelligence community? Is this only clear in hindsight or was the US intelligence community so busy invading the privacy of innocent Americans that it failed at its primary duty?