Does it matter what we call things?
Shakespeare told us in Romeo and Juliet that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
But the Bard wasn’t trying to figure out how to fight back against the existential threat of the Islamic State without inflaming the rest of the Muslim world.
To that end, President Obama has chosen his words carefully when describing ISIS, too carefully his critics have charged. “And we are not at war with Islam,” the President said last week during his summit on violent extremism. “We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”
It’s a safe and perhaps diplomatically judicial line, but it’s not necessarily accurate.
A comprehensive and thought-provoking piece by Graeme Wood in the March issue of The Atlantic peels away the politically correct generalizations about the Islamic State in an attempt to clarify what it is and what it wants. Read story here.
“The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,” Wood writes. “Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from 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.”
The Islamic State’s principles are rooted in 7th century Islam and its followers are “faithfully reproducing its norms of war,” including punishing apostates (anyone who doesn’t abide by their beliefs, including most other Muslims) by crucifixions and beheadings, and enslaving their conquered enemies, including women and children.
Wood says the Islamic State also has a faith-based view of the apocalypse. “The armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam in northern Syria; and that Islam’s final showdown with the anti-Messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest,” writes Wood. (Apparently “Rome” can mean the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire, the United States or any non-believers.)
ISIS has succeeded in one important way that al-Qaeda failed; it has established a geographic foothold. The Islamic State covers an area of Syria and Iraq about the size of England, complete with a governing bureaucracy that’s divided into civil and military units.
Osama bin Laden seeded terror to try to, among other things, drive the U.S. out of Saudi Arabia, while the Islamic State is building a Koran-inspired caliphate, a gathering place for Muslims who believe the end-of-days prophecy is at hand. As such, Wood writes, the Islamic State carries religious and intellectual appeal for other Muslims.
“That the Islamic State holds the imminent fulfillment of prophecy as a matter of dogma at least tells us the mettle of our opponent,” says Wood. “It’s ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succor if it stays true to the Prophetic model.”
In the end, it may not matter much what President Obama, or anyone else, calls it. What’s more important is what the Islamic State believes that it is—a growing movement of Islamist holy warriors–and how it presents itself to the world.
When we accept that, we’ll begin to understand the seriousness of the threat.