Moral interrogation of Islam in general cannot explain groups such as ISIS and their violence. On the contrary, it is incumbent on scholars and pundits alike to pursue the knotted political causes that give rise to political violence. In this respect, Mamdani’s argument concerning al-Qaida and political violence in South Asia is equally applicable to ISIS today. Just as al-Qaida was the outcome of a specific political history and context, so too is ISIS. Concomitantly, there is a political explanation for the violence committed by ISIS in the name of Islam. Such a political history is not easy to narrate, especially not in the lexicon of sound bites and pixels with which the mass media speaks. But in order to comprehend ISIS, this history must be told. Minimally, it entails an account of the decades of communitarian inequality and war in Iraq and Syria, where two Ba‘thist regimes—Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq and that of the Asad’s in Syria—yoked political representation and economic privilege to sectarian and ethnic identity, Sunni Arab in the case of Iraq and Alawite in the case of Syria. The sectarian resentments that have fueled ISIS’ advance stem from these two distinct histories: on the one hand, the reversal of political fortunes that Sunni Arab Iraqis have experienced since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and on the other, the grievances and sense of second-class citizenship on the part of marginalized Sunni subjects of the Asad regime. ISIS enjoys a degree of legitimacy in northern Iraq and Syria not because the resident Sunni Arabs of these areas are bloodthirsty lovers of beheadings—the moral explanation favored by the mass media—but because of their situation within these fraught political contexts and histories. jadaliyya/pages/index/19907/the-poverty-of-moral-answers-to-political-questionn
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 19:04:13 +0000
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