Is the Islamic State in fact Islamic?
[ by Charles Cameron — a couple of nuances for a sometimes stubborn debate ]
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How can #ISIS have "an apocalyptic end-of-days strategic vision that will…have to be defeated" (Gen. Dempsey) yet be unIslamic, #Obama?
— Timothy Furnish, PhD (@Occidentaljihad) February 19, 2015
Tim Furnish, who tweeted this about ten days ago, is of course not the only one to question the wisdom of a non-Muslim head of state fudging the issue of religion with respect to IS / Daesh — I’m using his tweet as a stand-in for the entire debate, and this post is offered as a contribution to that debate.
Here, I would just like to drop in two notes that will hopefully make for a more nuanced discussion of the pros and cons.
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First, I recently ran across Anthony Flew‘s concept of the true Scotsman:
Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the “Brighton [(England)] Sex Maniac Strikes Again”. Hamish is shocked and declares that “No Scotsman would do such a thing”. The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen [(Scotland)] man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, “No true Scotsman would do such a thing”.
That explains why a whole lot of Muslims are disinclined to call the islamic State “Islamic” — it may be a fallacy, but it’s a fallacy deeply interwoven with a sense of identity and honor.
My second point comes from Caner Dagli‘s piece in The Atlantic, The Phony Islam of ISIS:
The first thing I teach my undergraduates is that the English word “Islam” has two distinct but related meanings: the “Islam” that corresponds to Christendom (the civilization) and the “Islam” that corresponds to Christianity (the religion). The result is that the term “Islamic” has two separate but related uses, as does “unIslamic.”
It might be wise to bear these two distinctions in mind…
Tim Furnish:
March 3rd, 2015 at 11:47 am
Charles,
Yes, Islamic civilization and Islam the religion are not entirely coterminous–but to act as if the former can be entirely detached from the latter is to engage in sophistry of an absurd degree.
You know why ISIS is Islamic? Because almost everything it says and does is backed up by copious references to Qur’an, Hadiths, sirat and Islamic scholars across the ages. It’s literalist in doing so–but that is what in fact makes its “Islam-ness” so hard to refute by other Muslims.
The pretzel logic deployed by those attempting to dissociate ISIS (and BH and AQ and the Taliban and LeT and…..well, you get the picture) from Islam is frankly inane.
Grurray:
March 3rd, 2015 at 5:35 pm
The two distinctions between civilization and religion only exist for Westerners and Nationalists who have established these boundaries.
They’ve historically been combined until relatively recently. Maybe we should say that Daesh isn’t modern, compartmentalized Islam?
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The problem is, as has been pointed out, that not calling them Islamic encourages policies and strategies which ignore the religious motivations of the ones who don’t hold the modern distinctions. The immediate concern is that it will ignore the threats that otherwise may have been recognized with a clear understanding of the religious meanings.
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It’s all very well intentioned. The feeling is that this ‘Disnomer Campaign’ is necessary in order to prevent any ‘High Horse’ tactics such as internment camps or segregation. Although globalism seems to have created these de facto conditions in Europe already.
Ken Hoop:
March 3rd, 2015 at 8:31 pm
Well globalism was responsible for the destruction of Europe in the precise form it was, in 1945.
Globalism is engineered from Washington, New York, Hollywood and Tel Aviv.
As Buchanan demonstrated in “The Unnecessary War” Hitler and Stalin would have fought to a standstill and come to terms were it not for US intervention.
You can extrapolate from that the absence of demographic challenges which now exist because the US turned on its mother civilization.
As for ISIS, how can we discuss it without mentioning the CIA-imperial attempted use of it to destroy Syria, which failed, ISIS flowing into Iraq
instead?It is like exploring the Islamic doctrines of AQ without noting
the funding and training of jihad in anti-Soviet manuevers, ultimately the hijackers’ ability to do so and revenge motives in attacking the WTC-Pentagon complex leading to the intensification of the American Imperial NSA-Police State so well revealed by Snowden. They listed US support for Israel as among their chief motivations, as Ron Paul emphasized, making Rudy Giuliani, a GOP primary debating rival practically fall off the podium in righteous amazement.
Grurray:
March 3rd, 2015 at 9:21 pm
Had the United States not entered the war, Russia would have lost. Montgomery would have never gotten fresh American trucks and tanks in Egypt, and Rommel would have steamrolled him. Rommel would have then made a left turn, hooked up with Vichy French forces in the Levant and charged right up Stalin’s arse to the Caspian oil fields, well before Hitler would have any chance to make a suicidal mistake in Stalingrad.
Lynn C. Rees:
March 4th, 2015 at 2:19 am
If the Senate hadn’t decided to intervene in Sicily in 264 BC at the Mamertines’ request, Carthage and Syracuse would have fought to a standstill and eventually made piece.
I blame the Zionist Entity…and possibly neutrinos.
dreamtimer:
March 4th, 2015 at 9:18 am
It looks like one tries to engineer this distinctions for reasons of political strategy – the vast majority of Muslims should not be offended through colonial chauvinism and western arrogance – but various interviews show that Salafi Djihadists look through this easily and point to social and cultural realities of arrogance, bigotry and harassment. In my opinion their left-leaning political analysis of the position of Islam in modern societies is basically correct. OBL was famous for quoting Chomsky but the analysis is not a hard problem to solve in the first place.
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It is much harder to gain esteem from there. They try to enter the esteem game through fear, terror and victorious warring and this could in principle work in their favor. Instead of being a dead-end in a decaying civilization they mobilize the aspect of this civilization that allows them to turn into ruthless barbarians like the Huns, Vandals, Vikings and others before them – an aggressive, restless swarming phase like that of the polyphenic, gregarious locust relative to the harmless solitary grasshopper.
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As a general hypothesis, polyphenism seems to be a possibility of all mature civilizations, even for otherwise peaceful ones such as Buddhism with its compassion for all the living and a founder who was quite the opposite of a warrior king. It raises their chance of survival under high environmental stress.
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So the options would be to either crush Djihadi Salafism through massive violence or let them go and await them to fall back into another phenotype. The former helped in case of defeating Nazi Germany, the latter with Soviet-Communism.
Charles Cameron:
March 4th, 2015 at 6:02 pm
Hi, Dreamtimer:
Who is “one”, and which of the two distinctions I mention are you referring to?
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Your suggestion re polyphemism is an intriguing one. Thanks.
dreamtimer:
March 5th, 2015 at 5:43 am
‘Who is “one”, and which of the two distinctions I mention are you referring to?’
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Those anonymous transmitters are of course the media who are downstream from politics. Since the infamous after-9/11 speech of G.W.Bush where he made the unlucky use of the word “crusade” it has become a common pattern of neurotic communication to only talk about the peaceful and moderate Islam, its high cultural tradition and so on, while presenting it as a scary, reactionary, oppressive and broken/splintered religious framework which missed modernity by far in the actual news items which is the only source of information for the common reader. It is almost like watching the conflict between the Freudian Id and the Super Ego, which censors all the upstream material produced by the Id. This is so remarkable because it happens in the very same magazines, often even at the same day. Touting the shrillest Islamism “unislamic” is a form of psychological dissociation which is a well known self-defense mechanism.
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Strategic but also diplomatic thinking permits purposeful reality distortions. Those who easily feel offended and respond violently to offense should be soothed, further confrontation should be prevented. Everyone looks through this but it is still important to not give the opponent a handle. For that reason the No-True-Scotsman fallacy has long been embedded into political rhetorics. Mrs Merkel reiterated that “The Islam belongs to Germany” short after the Charlie Hebdo attacks and the coincidental PEGIDA walks. She isn’t a stupid. She learned from Helmut Kohl to sit out problems she cannot solve anyway.