“We hate you, first and foremost, because you are
disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah – whether you realise it or not.”
From ‘Reasons why we hate you’, in Dabiq, issue 15.
There
is a scene at the start of Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings wherein
a youthful Moses, still a member of the Egyptian royal household and unaware of
his own past, visits the Israelites to try and understand their ways.
“What
do you pray for?” he asks an uncommunicative group of elders.
“We
pray to see Canaan again,” reluctantly answers one (Ben Kingsley). Moses
assures them that they have no chance of return – “…it’s inhabited by tribes
fiercer than Egypt’s military…” – but gets a swift response – “God says
otherwise.”
“Which
God? Your God? The God of Abraham – the one that says you are special? Chosen?” The rationalist Moses then summons the elder up onto his feet to deliver some
home truths:
“You’re
wrong,” says Moses, searching the elder’s face for reaction. “I can see you’re
unconvinced and that’s a problem…because next to unrealistic belief lies
fanaticism, and next to that sedition, and next to that revolution.”
Fast
forward to the present and the very same tensions - between religious and sceptical
minds, and modern states wrestling with burgeoning fifth columns – remain persistent
sores. But how should such populations be handled? With diplomacy, tea and
sympathy? Or by calling a spade an effing spade? Or some mixture thereof –
classic ‘good cop bad cop’? All this comes to the fore with one very modern
question: how Islamic is the Islamic State? With most Muslims desperate to put
clear blue water between themselves and what must be the world’s ultimate Marmite
entity – Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria - the framing
of ISIS has become a highly sensitive issue.
Enter
the British historian Tom Holland,
whose Channel 4 documentary, ISIS:
The Origins of Violence, unpicks this very question. He starts by visiting
Paris, scene of several recent ISIS attacks including those on the Bataclan, whereupon
he observes that ‘…these were not simple murders; these were murders in the
service of an idea’ (i.e. killing in the name of God). Travelling east, he
reads from an ISIS manual, ‘The Management of Savagery’: We need to massacre others…hostages must be eliminated in a terrifying
manner. The circumstances we are now in resemble those faced by the first
Muslims.
He
then looks back at those first Muslims: at Constantinople, capital of the
Christian Roman empire in the early 8th Century AD, and suggests
that the Quranic concept of Jihad – struggle in the name of God – was rebooted
into violent struggle, ‘sacred violence’, in order to take the city. Holland’s
point is clear – that the progenitors of ISIS can be found at the very formation
of the Ottoman empire.
Having
laid down his premise, Holland shifts focus to those who have fallen within
ISIS’s crosshairs. He visits Mar Mattai, a monastery in northern
Iraq, in what was once the beating heartlands of Christendom – and which today
stands on the very edge of ISIS-held territory. Throughout the documentary, the
historical account is interwoven with heavy emotion, and in interviewing Father
Youssef, a lone figure looking every bit like the last Quagga, the point is
painfully evident.
But
Christians are ‘People of the Book’ whereas the Yazidis, for ISIS, are mushrikun – Pagans – and in August 2014, ISIS attempted to expunge them off the face
of the earth. Why? Because according
to their weltanschauung, they were
simply implementing God’s injunctions – as per their interpretation of Sharia
(Islamic law) – something which even Middle-Eastern Christians are being killed
for:
‘Mr Speaker,’ beseeched a Yazidi woman in
front of the Iraqi parliament, in what was one of the most harrowing moments in
the documentary, ‘we are being slaughtered under the banner of la ilaha illallah.’
Holland
sees such injunctions as ‘…unexploded bombs lying in wait in the rubble, and something
then happens to trigger them. And there are clearly verses in the Qur’an and
stories told about Mohammed, that are like mines waiting to go off.’ Which then
prompts him to ask, ‘What has triggered them?’
To
answer, Holland again looks back in time, this time to the modern West’s first
conqueror of Muslim lands – Napoleon, who in 1798 invaded Egypt and began a
project to not simply colonise their land but, as Holland emphasizes, to
colonise Muslim minds – to remake the East in a Western image. And from that
point in time, with the Muslim world’s curve in freefall and post-Enlightenment
Europe going from strength to strength, the hard and ‘soft’ influence that the
West has exercised over Muslim societies, has proven intolerable for some. And this, for Holland, is the trigger for
ISIS: ‘…that they dream, like us, of seeing their values triumph across the
world, and they fear that they are losing. Democracy, the tolerance of other
religions, universal human rights – that millions of Muslims believe in these,
is precisely what makes ISIS dread that Islam is being corrupted – makes them
determined to scour it clean…’
Is
this credible? Undoubtedly, ISIS express their motivations in just such terms
(see the Dabiq excerpt at the top). However twenty years ago,
ISIS did not even exist. Even if Holland is right re. their self-proclaimed
mandate, and its basis, an even more fundamental question has been left begging - how have
they been able to storm the stage?
In
his book The New Threat from Islamic
Militancy, the journalist Jason Burke puts a wider set of trigger points on
the table:
“…much remains unclear about al-Baghdadi’s
background, but what we do know is this: the environment in which he grew up
during his formative years was one of religious resurgence, increasing regime
brutality and corruption, ruinous Western-backed sanctions and airstrikes, and
extremist proselytisation. All, of course, before the invasion of 2003…”
Surely,
it’s obvious – for a 360-degree understanding of the genesis of the ‘Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria’, it might be instructive to look at the recent
histories of Iraq and Syria. Denis Halliday, the former UN co-ordinator for
Iraq once remarked that ‘…the death toll for Iraqi children under-five over
1990-1998 – the period of the 1st Iraq
war followed by economic
sanctions - was probably close to 600,000. And if you included adults, it’s
well over one million Iraqi people.’ In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then United
States Ambassador to the United Nations, was asked during 60 Minutes: ‘We have heard that half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the
price worth it?" To which she answered, ‘I think this is a very hard
choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.’ As with the Bataclan
atrocity, this too is death ‘in the service of an idea’… Writing in the
aftermath of the Manchester
bombings, Burke speculated
that “…even al-Qaida would probably consider killing teenagers at a concert to
be beyond the pale. Not ISIS however. The group relies on escalating brutality
to terrorise target populations, whether in the west or the Middle East.” Thus
their strategy is one of ‘total war’ - but one can only conclude that ISIS are
mere amateurs at ‘total warfare’, when compared to the Americans.
In
the aftermath of what looks very much like yet another terrorist attack, this
time in
the heart of London, Douglas Murray and others are calling out the facile routine we have been herded into.
They have a point – the pat response is looking increasingly ridiculous.
Beyond
taking on the barbed ‘Is the Islamic State Islamic?’ question, Holland had a
secondary motive – to not be bowed by ‘political correctness’; cowed by
accusations of racism / Islamophobia. And he is absolutely right – when
free-speech, even free-thought is harried, it’s stifling. So in that spirit,
it’s time to be clear – the deliberate ruination of Iraq is not
responsible for the virus that spawned ISIS – as Holland lays out, that’s theirs
alone. However, by turning that whole country into a petri dish within which
that virus could take hold, the US and UK are absolutely culpable for it spreading.
And moreover, the ‘political correctness’ that prevents leaders from
acknowledging this, feeds into the idea that all Muslims are implicated. It
obscures the reality – that most Muslims, including most Sunni Muslims, view
al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State as intellectually and morally bankrupt, and the
Salafi mindset that underpins it as theological corruption. This is crucial –
that Muslims in general aren’t appalled by terrorism because of mere
embarrassment, or because they are Muslim-lite / have been corrupted by the
West – they are appalled because they do not share the same religious /
theological space as these perpetrators. For them, the Saudi brand of Islam and
its variant expressions, of
which ISIS is most definitely one, is pure fucking poison. But the cod response
to terrorism – which ignores the elephant in the room of foreign policy - effectively
tars them all.
None
of this invalidates, or even diminishes Holland’s narrative in ISIS: the Origins of Violence.
Personally, I saw nothing to challenge in the conclusions he reached – just in
those that he did not. (One wonders how, after explicitly asking, ‘What has
triggered them?’, Holland failed to finger the ‘war on terror’. Clearly,
history is a pliable whore…)
Post-religious nations are embroiled
in a legitimate debate re. their ‘elasticity’ – how much difference can they
accommodate, and at what rate. And there is no shame in calling out a very real
fifth-column – those who seek to live under a foreign flag, benefit from shared
resources – and then wage war on the very people who gave them a new home. But
that constituency is not ‘the Muslims’.
From
Napolean to the present day, a strain of Western thought has sought to control
- subjugate - the wider world. And what those armies taking Constantinople and
ISIS show, is that there’s a strain of Muslim thought that has exactly the same
ambitions. That’s where the fault-line lies – not between Islam and the West,
but between opposing imperialisms. And there is no inconsistency in seeing
oneself as secular, or Western, or Muslim, and outright rejecting both.
