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[ by Charles Cameron — really just a note to myself, but you may read it over my shoulder ]
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Joas Wagemakers, blogging on Jihadi-Salafi views of the Islamic State at the Washington Post, was talking about the “caliphate” today, and as usual, I went off on my own DoubleQuoting tangent:

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Here’s Wagemakers’s para that triggered the above:

In 2014 the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria set itself apart from most other radical Islamist groups by actually settling in a certain territory and establishing a state there. The group even declared a caliphate on June 29 and changed its name simply to the Islamic State (IS). Even al-Qaeda, which has long had similar ambitions to establish a caliphate encompassing all Muslims, has never achieved this. In its justification for the announcement of its caliphate, IS has made use of classical Islamic concepts: its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been vetted by a group of scholars described as “the people who loosen and bind” (ahl al-hall wa-l-aqd), was found by them to be a pious Muslim ruler who fit all the criteria for a caliph and was therefore worthy of believers’ oath of allegiance (baya).

Do I detect an echo here, between the two phrases — or is the concept of loosing and binding so basic to human experience that it crops up all over?

It’s a question at the intersection of two of my fields of special interest — depth psychology and cultural anthro — see for example Anthony Stevens, writing under the subtitle Archetypes versus cultural transmission:

Essentially, the theory can be stated as a psychological law: whenever a phenomenon is found to be characteristic of all human communities, it is an expression of an archetype of the collective unconscious. It is not possible to demonstrate that such universally apparent phenomena are exclusively due to archetypal determinants or entirely due to cultural diffusion, because in all probability both are involved. However, the likelihood is that there will be a strong bias for those phenomena which are archetypally determined to diffuse more readily and more lastingly than those that are not.

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Now go read Wagemakers.

[ by Charles Cameron — A DoubleTweet on earth, air and water, with IS for fire — plus a Gary Snyder poem ]
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The ability to scale, including but not limited to ratio, is one of the great human cognitive skills:

The Daily Mail:

ISIS has doubled the land it controls in just a few months http://t.co/6yJsaoeUQy pic.twitter.com/gaJ1mUWiXq

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) January 17, 2015

John Robb:

Wow. All the world's water and air shown to scale. pic.twitter.com/7PfhQXJkl2

— John Robb (@johnrobb) January 16, 2015

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Or as Gary Snyder so excellently has it:

As the crickets’ soft autumn hum
is to us
so are we to the trees

as are they

to the rocks and the hills.

[ by Charles Cameron — analysis of religious violence requires the skilled use of both mind and heart if it is to comprehend passion with clarity ]
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There is a lot of discussion of the complex relationship between religion and politics — presumably including the continuation of politics by other means — these days.

Here Abu Usamah al-Maghribi of ISIS, the immediate precursor of IS, recites the Qur’an:

This clip, incidentally, nicely illsutrates the dilemma facing those poor folks at YouTube who are responsible for determining what videos should be withdrawn for breach of their user contract. On the one hand, it shows a militant leader encouraging his subordinates towards martyrdom, while on the other it is something quite other, turned to that purpose: a recitation from the revealed scripture of a global and diverse religion, one and a half billion people strong…

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The text of the recitation is that of the Qur’an, Sura 9, 38-39:

O you who have believed, what is [the matter] with you that, when you are told to go forth in the cause of Allah , you adhere heavily to the earth? Are you satisfied with the life of this world rather than the Hereafter? But what is the enjoyment of worldly life compared to the Hereafter except a [very] little.

If you do not go forth, He will punish you with a painful punishment and will replace you with another people, and you will not harm Him at all. And Allah is over all things competent.

The reciter, Abu Usamah al-Maghribi, was killed last year by fighters from Jabhat al-Nusra.

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I’m not sure that language alone can ever quite sort the different strands that rise and fall in the human beings involved, nor that the distinction we draw between heart and mind is even close to a subtle enough instrument to account for human process. What I want to present here, though, is not an answer or even the suggestion of an answer to such questions, but a vivid evidence of the coexistence of militant intent with religious fervor.

After years of monitoring and reporting on religious violence, it is not its existence but its potential for overwhelming sincerity that I would like to communicate, so that we do not underestimate it — our analysts being, as John Schindler put it in his brilliant piece, Putin’s Orthodox Jihad, “mostly secularists when not atheists” — and thus liable to pay matters of religious passions little or no attention.

More on Schindler’s piece shortly.

[ by Charles Cameron — just noting the apparent blurring of a significant distinction, although it’s still early to draw conclusions ]
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Raffaello Pantucci tweets:

French TV interviewed Cherif Kouachi who states clearly I was directed by AQAP and funded by Awlaki. Same French TV channel spoke to Coulibaly who they say told them he was linked to ISIS. And Coulibaly claims that the brothers and himself were coordinated.

Here’s the video (in French) that Pantucci linked to:

[ by Charles Cameron — with application to today’s tragic massacre in Paris, to IS, AQ, Breivik, whoever ]
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That’s George Smiley describing Karla‘s fatal flaw, in the crucial scene from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the film version with Gary Oldman as George Smiley.

We are not so very different, you and I. We’ve both spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another’s systems. Don’t you think it’s time to recognize there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine? Never said a word. Not one word.

And that’s how I know he can be beaten. Because he’s a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.

The Le Carré book version has it a little differently, FWIW:

And if you want a sermon, Karla is not fireproof, because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.

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Bonus: Smiley on symmetry and asymmetry:

Smiley speaks to Karla<, wishing to turn him:

We are not so very different, you and I. We’ve both spent our lives looking for the weaknesses in one another’s systems. Don’t you think it’s time to recognize there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine? Never said a word. Not one word.