Knowing the Enemy, Part II

Beware Uniting the Entire Family Against You

Whilst the West is failing miserably to come to terms with ISIS, remaining confused and bemused, ironically ISIS is no shrinking violet.  It boldly declares itself and wants everyone in the West to understand it and what animates it.  But because its roots are theological and religious, the Western Commentariat--wilfully ignorant of all things religious--has gone into an "It does not compute" mode. 

Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic, nails the essence of the issue.

In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.

Returning civilisation to the seventh-century and helping to engineer the last days, the Apocalypse, are beliefs and objectives so ludicrous to the modern Western secularist that ISIS cannot be taken seriously.  Consequently the West invents objectives and beliefs for ISIS that make them more understandable.  To the Western mindset ISIS exists because of oppression and exploitation (by whom, no-one is quite sure); it is a native reaction to systemic injustice and poverty--and so forth.  In other words, the West constantly attempts to fit ISIS into its peculiar narrative and perspective upon the world.  Yet how foolish is this:

In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics—notably the late Edward Said—who pointed out that calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose—the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil.

Without acknowledgement of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete. But focusing on them to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn’t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul. When a masked executioner says Allahu akbar while beheading an apostate, sometimes he’s doing so for religious reasons.

We presume Wood is being sarcastic in the last sentence. 

Imagine how foolish and naive it would have been if Neville Chamberlain and the appeasers had sought to placate Hitler on the grounds that Germans in the nineteen thirties were suffering from systemic injustice and poverty and oppression, and that as Hitler's panzers advanced, the appropriate response would be to roll out the Marshall Plan. Yet that is pretty much where the West is today with respect to Islam in general and ISIS in particular. Sure we need to drop a few bombs to tickle them up a bit and get their attention, but the real solution lies in redistribution of global wealth, from the West to the poverty stricken Middle East (Israel excepted, of course.) Hence the New Zealand Labour leader saying the real challenge presented by ISIS is not military in nature, but how we will manage to teach them New Zealand farming techniques. 

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted (sic), has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.

Precisely.  

In the second place, ISIS is necessarily at odds with other streams of Islam, most noticeably Shia Islam and its offshoots.  "At odds" in this context means opposed to the point of killing Shia adherents for their apostasy and unbelief.  But, faced with the real world--that is, Shia adherents demonstrate their godlessness by drinking a bit of alcohol or the odd bit of shaving the beard--these practices become reasons for execution.  The end result is that ISIS is more committed to killing Shia Muslims than it is to killing Christians and Westerners.

Denying the holiness of the Koran or the prophecies of Muhammad is straightforward apostasy. But Zarqawi and the state he spawned take the position that many other acts can remove a Muslim from Islam. These include, in certain cases, selling alcohol or drugs, wearing Western clothes or shaving one’s beard, voting in an election—even for a Muslim candidate—and being lax about calling other people apostates. Being a Shiite, as most Iraqi Arabs are, meets the standard as well, because the Islamic State regards Shiism as innovation, and to innovate on the Koran is to deny its initial perfection. (The Islamic State claims that common Shiite practices, such as worship at the graves of imams and public self-flagellation, have no basis in the Koran or in the example of the Prophet.) That means roughly 200 million Shia are marked for death. So too are the heads of state of every Muslim country, who have elevated man-made law above Sharia by running for office or enforcing laws not made by God.

Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.

The ISIS strategic priority of killing fellow (deviant) Muslims ought to give the West its clearest clue to a winning strategy.  If Islamic nations have more at stake that Western nations in the defeat of ISIS, then Western front line engagement is never going to succeed.

As the old adage has it, never step in to stop a fight between brothers, unless you are prepared for the entire family to unite and turn upon you.