‘Islamic State’ as a
Western Phenomenon: Reimagining the IS
Debate
By Ramzy Baroud
March 19, 2015 "ICH"
- It is as if leaders of the so-called
“Islamic State” (IS) are getting tips on
demonising Muslims from world leading
Islamophobes and as if they are trying to
live up to the expectations of
hate-mongering organisations like that of
Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense
Initiative, whose latest ads all over San
Francisco
compared Muslims to Nazis.
Yet, no matter how one
attempts to wrangle with IS’s rise in Iraq
and Syria, desperately seeking any political
or other context that would validate the
movement as an explainable historical
development, things refuse to add up.
Western Connection
Not only is IS to a degree
an
alien movement in the larger body politic of
the Middle East, it also seems to be a
partly western phenomenon, a hideous
offspring resulting from western neocolonial
adventures in the region, coupled with
alienation and demonisation of Muslim
communities in western societies.
By “Western phenomenon,” I
refrain from suggesting that IS is largely a
creation of western intelligence
as many conspiracy theories have
persistently advocated. Of course, one
is justified in raising questions regarding
funds, armaments, black market oil trade,
and the ease through which thousands of
western and Arab fighters managed to reach
Syria and Iraq in recent years. The crimes
carried out by the Assad regime, his army
and allies during the four-year long Syria
civil war, and the unquenchable appetite to
orchestrate a regime change in Damascus as a
paramount priority for Western powers made
nourishing the anti-Assad forces with
wannabe “jihadists” justified, if not
encouraged.
The
latest announcement by Turkey’s foreign
minister Meylut Cavusoglu of the arrest
of a spy “working for the intelligence
service of a country participating in the
coalition against ISIS” – presumably Canada
– allegedly for helping three young British
girls join IS, was revealing. The accusation
feeds into a growing discourse that locates
IS within a western, not Middle Eastern
discourse.
Still, it is not the
conspiracy per se that I find intriguing, if
not puzzling, but the ongoing, albeit
indirect conversation between IS and the
West, involving French, British and
Australian so-called “Jihadists”, their
sympathisers and supporters on one hand, and
various western governments, intelligence
services, right-wing media pundits, etc on
the other.
Much of the discourse –
once upon a time located within a narrative
consumed by the “Arab Spring”, sectarian
divisions and counter revolutions – has now
been transferred into another sphere that
seems of little relevance to the Middle
East. Regardless of where one stands on how
Mohammad Emwazi morphed into a “Jihadi
John”, the conversation is oddly largely
removed from its geopolitical context. In
this instance, it is an essentially British
issue concerning alienation, racism,
economic and cultural marginalization,
perhaps as much as the issue of the “born,
raised and radicalised” attackers of
Charlie Hebdo is principally a French
question, pertaining to the same
socioeconomic fault lines.
The Other ‘Roots
of IS’
The conventional analysis
on the rise of IS no longer suffices.
Tracing the movement to Oct 2006 when
the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) – uniting
various groups including al-Qaeda – was
established, simply suggests a starting
point to the discussion, whose roots go back
to the dismantling of the Iraqi state and
army by the US military occupation
authority. Just the idea that the Arab
republic of Iraq was led from 11 May 2003
until 28 June 2004 by a Lewis Paul Bremer
III, is enough to delineate the unredeemable
rupture in the country’s identity. Bremer
and US military chiefs’ manipulation of
Iraq’s sectarian vulnerabilities, in
addition to the massive security vacuum
created by sending an entire army home,
ushered in the rise of numerous groups, some
homegrown resistance movements, and other
alien bodies who sought in Iraq a refugee,
or a rallying cry.
Also conveniently missing
in the rise of “jihadism” context is the
staggering brutality of Shia-dominated
governments in Baghdad and militias
throughout Iraq, with full backing by the US
and Iran. If the US war (1990-1), blockade
(1991-2003), invasion (2003) and subsequent
occupation of Iraq were not enough to
radicalise a whole generation, then
brutality, marginalisation and constant
targeting of Iraqi Sunnis in post-invasion
Iraq have certainly done the job.
The conventional media
narrative on IS focuses mostly on the
politicking, division and unity that
happened between various groups, but ignores
the reasons behind the existence of these
groups in the first place.
The Syria
Expansion
The Syria civil war was
another opportunity at expansion sought
successfully by ISI, whose capital until
then was Baquba, Iraq. ISI was headed by Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi, a key player in the
establishment of Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Nusra
Front). The highly cited breakup between
al-Baghdadi and al-Nusra leader Mohammed
al-Golani is referenced as the final stage
of IS’s brutal rise to power and ISI
becoming ISIL or ISIS, before settling
finally at the current designation of simply
“Islamic State”, or IS.
Following the division,
“some estimates suggest that about 65
percent of Jabhat al-Nusra elements quickly
declared their allegiance to ISIS. Most of
those were non-Syrian jihadists,”
reported Lebanon’s al-Safir.
Militants’ politicking
aside, such massively destructive and highly
organised occurrences are not born in a
vacuum and don’t operate independently from
many existing platforms that help spawn,
arm, fund and sustain them. For example,
IS’s access to oil refineries says nothing
about its access to wealth. To obtain funds
from existing economic modes, IS needed to
tap into a complex economic apparatus that
would involve other countries, regional and
international markets. In other words, IS
exists because there are those who are
invested in their existence, and the highly
touted anti-IS coalition has evidently done
little to confront this reality.
Intellectual
Arrogance and Western Muslim Debate
Particularly interesting
is the rapidly changing focal point of the
debate, from that pertaining to Syria and
Iraq, to a western-centric discussion about
western-styled jihadists that seem removed
from the Middle East region and its
political conflicts and priorities.
In a
letter signed by over a hundred Muslim
scholars that was published last
September, the theologians and clergymen
from around the Muslim word rightly disowned
IS and its
bloodthirsty ambitions as un-Islamic.
Indeed, IS’s war tactics are the reverse of
the
rules of war in Islam, and have been a
godsend to those who made successful careers
by simply bashing Islam, and advocating
foreign policies that are predicated on an
irrational fear of Muslims. But particularly
interesting was the
Arabic version of the letter’s emphasis
on IS’s lack of command over the Arabic
language, efficiency in which is a
requirement for making legal Islamic rulings
and fatwas.
“Who gave you authority
over the ummah [Muslim people]?” asked the
letter. “A group of no more than several
thousand has appointed itself the ruler of
over a billion-and-a-half Muslims. This
attitude is based upon a corrupt circular
logic that says: ‘Only we are Muslims, and
we decide who the caliph is, we have chosen
one and so whoever does not accept our
caliph is not a Muslim.’”
The letter confronts the
intellectual arrogance of IS, which is based
mostly on a misguided knowledge of Islam
that is rarely spawned in the region itself.
But that intellectual arrogance that has led
to the murders of many innocent people, and
other hideous crimes such as the
legalisation of slavery – again,
to the satisfaction of the numerous
Islamophobes dotting western intellectual
landscapes – is largely situated in a
different cultural and political context
outside of the Middle East.
In post-11 September
attacks, a debate concerning Islam has been
raging, partly because the attacks were
blamed on Muslims, thus allowing politicians
to create distractions, and reduce the
discussion into one concerning religion and
a purported “clash of civilizations”.
Despite various
assurances by Western leaders that the
US-led wars in Muslim countries is not a war
on Islam, Islam remains the crux of the
intellectual discourse that has adjoined the
military “crusade” declared by George W
Bush, starting with the first bomb dropped
on Afghanistan in 2001.
That discourse is too
involved for a transitory mention, for it is
an essential one to the IS story. It is one
that has involved various schools of
thought,
including a breed of Muslim “liberals”,
used conveniently to juxtapose them with an
“extremist” bunch. Yet between the
apologists and the so-called jihadists, a
genuine, Muslim-led discussion about Islam
by non-coopted Muslim scholars remains
missing.
The intellectual vacuum is
more dangerous than it may seem. There is no
question that while the battle is raging on
in the Middle East region, the discourse
itself is increasingly being manipulated and
is becoming a Western one. This is why IS is
speaking English, for its language complete
with authentic western accents, methods,
messages and even the orange hostage
jumpsuits, is centred in some other
sociopolitical and cultural context.
It is strange, but
telling, how a discussion that began with
uprisings for freedom and equality in Arab
countries has been reduced to those
concerning Islamic revival – liberal western
Muslims vs extremists, Jihadi Johns, and
western “spies” recruiting western Muslim
youth, escaping marginalisation in their own
communities. Yet, instead of serving as a
wake-up call and urgent need for
introspection by the West, there is a
stubborn insistence on using IS as a
springboard for more interventionism in the
Middle East, thus feeding the cycle of
violence, without confronting its roots.
- Ramzy Baroud – www.ramzybaroud.net –
is an internationally-syndicated columnist,
a media consultant, an author of several
books and the founder of
PalestineChronicle.com. He is currently
completing his PhD studies at the University
of Exeter. His latest book is My Father Was
a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story
(Pluto Press, London).