This is a cross-post from Jamie Palmer
Some quick thoughts on Mehdi Hasan’s article on the Islamic State.
The article is worth a read and contains a lot of stuff that bears discussion.
For instance, the distinction made between religion as a marker of identity and as a matter of theological belief. This has a direct bearing on the different reasons people join IS – it is certainly true that not everyone will be well-versed or even that interested in the theological/ideological arguments. This is the same for all mass movements, which will have their foot-soldiers and cannon fodder, their philosophers and intellectuals, their pragmatic tacticians, their demagogues, and their true believers.
But a lot of the claims Hasan makes are simply arguments from popularity and appeals to authority. That IS represents a minority or unpopular view does nothing, by itself, to invalidate it as a legitimate interpretation of Islam. Nor does condemnation by a majority of scholars. Protestantism was a reaction to the corruption of the Vatican. Like Qutb and al Banna, Luther rejected scholarship and clerical authority and enjoined the faithful to return to the texts themselves. Protestants viewed themselves as true Catholics. That they were a minority sect and that their insubordination was denounced as heresy by clerical elites is neither here nor there. The theological arguments must be made on their own terms. Only Hasan must realise that to do so is to engage in a dispute about different interpretations of Islam which is precisely what he wishes to avoid. *
The fact that IS has entered into a pragmatic alliance of covenience with Ba’athists is also not dispositive of anything much. Khomeinists entered into similar alliances in order to seize power in Iran in 1979. Once they had consolidated that power, they purged and murdered their more secular allies with ruthless prejudice. The same fate certainly awaits those IS allies whose idelogical purity is found wanting if and when they outlive their usefulness.
Hasan closes with the observation that “To claim that Isis is Islamic…is dangerous and self-defeating, as it provides Baghdadi and his minions with the propaganda prize and recruiting tool that they most crave”. But this is a tactical approach – one currently favoured by the Obama admin – and irrelvant to the question of whether or not such a claim is objectively true. And it is with this question that analysts ought to be preoccupied.
A discussion about the *degree* to which piety informs IS beliefs and actions and membership is one worth having. But that is not the aim of Hasan’s article. As Hasan remarks in the 5th para: “The rise of Isis in Iraq and Syria has been a disaster for the public image of Islam – and a boon for the Islamophobia industry.” Hasan wishes to exonerate Islam entirely and to lay the blame for the Islamic State’s ideas and even its very existence at the feet of the West.
This is not analysis, but apologetics. 5000 words with which to advance a No True Scotsman fallacy. And, if the comments below the line are any indication, people aren’t buying it.
* I’ve since realised that Tom Holland made the Luther analogy in a ‘tweet off’ on the subject with H. A. Hellyer of Brookings, organised by al Jazeera. It can be seen here: http://america.aljazeera.com/…/tweetoff-is-isil-islamic.html
Holland’s reply to Mehdi Hasan’s article will be published in tomorrow’s NS
http://www.newstatesman.com/…/mehdi-hasan-how-islamic-islam…
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