ISIS/ISIL/IS: The death rattle of radical Islamism?

[Econoline]

From an article by Jonah Shepp at The Dish:

Graeme Wood isn’t the first writer to touch on the significance of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s declaration of a “caliphate”, but his substantial exploration of the meaning of the term gets to why it’s so weird that Baghdadi has chosen it to describe his so-called Islamic State when other radical Islamist groups have steered clear of such declarations:

Mostly … caliphate declarations have been rare because they are outrageously out of sync with history. The word conjures the majesty of bygone eras and of states that straddle continents. For a wandering group of hunted men like Al Qaeda to declare a caliphate would have been Pythonesque in its deluded grandeur, as if a few dozen Neo-Nazis or Italian fascists declared themselves the Holy Roman Empire or dressed up like Augustus Caesar. “Anybody who actively wishes to reestablish a caliphate must be deeply committed to a backward-looking view of Islam,” says [University of Chicago historian Fred] Donner. “The caliphate hasn’t been a functioning institution for over a thousand years.”

And it isn’t now, either. The designation of the ISIS “caliphate” still smacks of delusional grandiosity more than anything else. There is no downplaying its brutality or denying that it would do great violence to the West if given the chance, but the Islamic State is no superpower: more than anything else, its sudden rise owes mainly to the fact that Syria and Iraq are fragile states, and its savagery has alerted the sleepwalking states of the Arab world to the threat of jihadism like never before. The enemies it is making on all sides, especially among other Muslims, would seem to suggest that ISIS may burn out nearly as quickly as it caught fire. Could the madness of ISIS be the final fever of a dying ideology?

What seems most promising to me in the backlash against ISIS is the extent to which that backlash relies on the genuine principles of Islam itself. We know that some of the fighters traveling from the West to fight alongside ISIS know next to nothing about the religion. We have evidence that jihadist movements like Boko Haram and the Taliban are widely despised in their spheres of influence. Here, Dean Obeidallah takes a look at how leaders of Muslim countries and communities are more or less unanimously condemning the false Islam of the jihadists:

The religious and government leaders in Muslim-dominated countries have swiftly and unequivocally denounced ISIS as being un-Islamic. For example, in Malaysia, a nation with 20 million Muslims, the prime minister denounced ISIS as “appalling” and going against the teachings of Islam (only about 50 have joined ISIS from there). In Indonesia, Muslim leaders not only publicly condemned ISIS, the government criminalized support for the group. And while some allege that certain Saudi individuals are financially supporting ISIS, the Saudi government officially declared ISIS a terrorist group back in March and is arresting suspected ISIS recruiters. This can be a helpful guide to other nations in deterring ISIS from recruiting. A joint strategy of working with Muslim leaders in denouncing ISIS and criminalizing any support appears to be working. And to that end, on Monday, British Muslim leaders issued a fatwa (religious edict) condemning ISIS and announcing Muslims were religiously prohibited from joining ISIS.

This all has me wondering if ISIS, the reductio ad absurdum of radical Islamism, doesn’t herald the downfall of that ideology altogether. Bear in mind that political Islam hasn’t always been exclusively reactionary: the first avowedly Islamic politics of the modern era, first articulated before the Muslim Brotherhood’s founders were even born, was the Islamic Modernism of Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida, and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Here were pious Muslims arguing that Islam was fully compatible with rationalism and making arguments for universal literacy and women’s rights from the same Muslim revivalist standpoint from which Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb would later espouse a more conservative vision of Islamic politics in modernity.

The illiberal strain of Arab Islamism, its Iranian counterpart, and the more radical jihadist movements that grew out of these movements (or alongside them, depending on which historian you ask) have been the major representatives of political Islam in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. There’s no reason, however, to believe that this condition is permanent or that a less reactionary form of Islamic political thought, or even an Islamic liberalism after the model of the Modernists, could not take hold in the Muslim world given the right set of circumstances. Islamism, particularly in its more extreme varieties, has long articulated an Islamic state operating under a “pure” interpretation of Islamic law as a utopian vision. Now, here is an Islamic State, a “caliphate” no less, that claims to do just that, and the outcome is rather dystopian. Torture, gang rape, slave brides, beheadings, crucifixions, and child soldiers are not what most Muslims have in mind when they imagine the ideal Islamic society. I would wager that these horrors will turn more Muslims against radical Islamism than toward it.

[...] The fact that [“Caliph Ibrahim” (Baghdadi)] has attracted enough funding and followers to run roughshod over northern Iraq and eastern Syria is nothing to brush off, but it’s not winning him any friends, and it doesn’t make his ideology any less ridiculous. It’s certainly not “Islam”, at least not as any Muslim I know practices it. That’s why I suspect it will fail, like most grandiose visions of world domination do. And by radicalizing the Islamic heartland against radicalism, as it were, perhaps ISIS will take the entire edifice of radical Islamism down with it.

[rubato]

The extreme brutality of Isil (ISIS) and Al Shabab actually drives other Muslims further into the camp of moderation and liberalism.

A competing Islamist group released their hostage after the first beheading as a way of differentiating themselves.


There was a parallel reform in the United States. We were a very anti-semitic country in the decades leading up to WWII but the full realization of the horror of Nazism motivated people to say "we're not like that" and reduce the level of Anti-semitism post-war.


yrs,
rubato

[dales]

We were a very anti-semitic<sic> country in the decades leading up to WWII

I need graphs and peer-reviewed documentation.

[Econoline]

The fact that ISIS has created enemies among and within most of the Muslim-run nations of the world it quite telling. It indicates that, while the U.S. and other western nations should certainly do what we can to help the anti-ISIS effort, we can and should stay behind the scenes as much as possible, and encourage Muslim nations to lead in the fight.

One suggestion I read a couple of weeks ago (here in Slate) was that the model for the U.S. effort ought to be what the first Bush administration did in the run-up to the first Gulf War: intense diplomatic efforts to get as many nations as possible--and especially as many Islamic nations as possible--on board with diplomatic, financial, and military support.

A good model here is the 1990–91 Gulf War, in which Presidents George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State James Baker assembled a vast coalition to push Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait. Nearly every Arab country in the region—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, even Syria—sent whole armored divisions or air wings. Many of them didn’t do much in the war, but the important point was that they were there. Their presence demonstrated that this wasn’t a war of Western imperialists against Muslim Iraq; it was a multinational war against aggression.

Bush and Baker considered this absolutely essential to the war. It’s also essential today. That tends to be forgotten by the neocon hawks pushing Obama to send tens of thousands of U.S. troops back to Iraq to fight ISIS. First, the Iraqis don’t want tens of thousands of Americans to return. Second, if the fight against ISIS looks like the revival of a U.S. war in Iraq, foreign jihadists will flood the place, and the new Iraqi government—which we’re pressing to be inclusive—will back away.

Baker had to do nonstop shuttle diplomacy to maintain the coalition against Saddam. Assembling joint operations against ISIS should be easier. First, though ISIS has a lot of weapons (mainly captured from Iraqi deserters), it’s not a crack army; it has made very little headway since the first couple weeks of its rampage. Second, at least for now, many of its soldiers continue to fight in large formations, out in the open desert—ripe targets for airstrikes. Third (and this is an essential point), ISIS has no allies among nation-states.

[rubato]

We were a very anti-semitic<sic> country in the decades leading up to WWII

I need graphs and peer-reviewed documentation.

Then go and get them.

Learning how to do research would be good for you and you'll get to enjoy a sense of accomplishment.


Yrs,
Rubato

[rubato]

We were a very anti-semitic<sic> country in the decades leading up to WWII

I need graphs and peer-reviewed documentation.

Then go and get them.

Learning how to do research would be good for you and you'll get to enjoy a sense of accomplishment.


Yrs,
Rubato

[dales]

At least I don't double post.

[Lord Jim]

We were a very anti-semitic country in the decades leading up to WWII but the full realization of the horror of Nazism motivated people to say "we're not like that" and reduce the level of Anti-semitism post-war.

I think that's a valid point, in fact I'd go further...

I think the experience of Nazism went a long way towards starting to change attitudes about racism in general, even beyond anti-semitism.

I also tend to agree that there could be a silver lining in this very grey cloud. For example, I was happy to see recently where Egypt and the UAE launched airstrikes against the radical Islamist guerrillas in Libya, and unquestionably the pressure from the ISIS threat seems to have finally gotten the Iraqi Shiite leadership to realize that they can't govern without having the Sunnis as real partners in the decision making process. (Which is also good news for the West, because it will diminish Iranian influence in the country.)

And in Syria, the ISIS threat seems to have finally gotten the US Administration off of its ass in terms of finally starting to provide some meaningful military assistance to the pro-Western Free Syrian Army, so that we can have a viable partner on the ground to work with.

Of course Obama is right about one thing; going at ISIS isn't just about a military operation. We need large scale international efforts to shut down their income and seize their assets so we can also cut them off financially, and of course we need to be very vigilant about the comings and goings of the Westerners who have been serving in their ranks.

The Brits want to strip people who fight with ISIS of their citizenship; I don't think that would work for us Constitutionally, at least as far as natural born citizens are concerned. But one thing we certainly could do is to make it a crime to fight with this organization, so that we could arrest and charge these folks as soon as they cross the US border. If we can (as we have) pass a law making it illegal for American citizens abroad to have sex with anyone under 18, (even if the age of consent in that country is lower) we can certainly make it illegal to take up arms overseas for an organization that is kidnapping and beheading American citizens.

[BoSoxGal]

Americans who pay for sex with minors while traveling abroad can be prosecuted in the US upon return - I have no idea how often the Feds prosecute such cases.

Americans can have consensual sex with persons who would be minors in the US without breaking any law - when in Rome, . . .

[Lord Jim]

That tends to be forgotten by the neocon hawks pushing Obama to send tens of thousands of U.S. troops back to Iraq to fight ISIS.

Who's suggesting this? I haven't seen it.

I've seen it suggested that Obama should have pushed harder with Maliki to reach the forces agreement that would have allowed a US residual force presence to remain in Iraq, and that if that had been achieved we might have had the leverage to prevent the sectarian course Malki followed that resulted in the Sunni tribal leaders siding with ISIS. (Between 2010 and 2014 the paranoid and incompetent Maliki succeed in undoing the support with these groups that General Petraus successfully forged)

But I haven't seen anybody suggest that at this point "tens of thousands" of US combat troops be re-introduced into Iraq to fight ISIS on the ground...(Not even Obama's strongest foreign policy critics on The Hill like John McCain have proposed such a thing.)

I believe I smell straw...

ETA:

I did a search trying to find out just who these "neo-cons" are that are proposing that we send tens of thousands of combat troops back into Iraq, and the only references I can find are the article quoted in the OP, (which doesn't name anybody) and a statement by Obama about how he's not going to do this. (Nobody named who's supposedly proposing this in that statement either.)

It's reassuring to know that the President has no intention of doing something that no one is calling for him to do...

[Econoline]

“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”

– T.E. Lawrence

[rubato]

Brilliant book in more than one way. One of the great books of the century as literature as ethnography and as history. G.B. Shaw was his literary mentor and Lawrence hand-wrote the whole book only to have it burned up accidentally the first time.


yrs,
rubato