{"id":54212,"date":"2015-02-23T12:24:02","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T12:24:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=54212"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:03","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:03","slug":"the-atlantic-ignores-muslim-intellectuals-defines-true-islam-as-isis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/02\/the-atlantic-ignores-muslim-intellectuals-defines-true-islam-as-isis\/","title":{"rendered":"The Atlantic Ignores Muslim Intellectuals, Defines \u201cTrue Islam\u201d As ISIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"atlantic-cover-isis-article-display-b<\/a><\/p>\n

20 Feb 2015 – <\/em>Despite what its many critics (including President Obama) will\u00a0tell you, the Islamic State is indeed Islamic, and actually very<\/em> Islamic, according to ISIS\u00a0itself \u2014 and also according to The Atlantic<\/em>, which\u00a0endorsed the group\u2019s\u00a0narrative in a\u00a0widely circulated\u00a0essay published this week entitled \u201cWhat ISIS Really Wants<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the piece, author Graeme Wood makes the case that the militant group \u2014 whose actions have sparked protests and widespread revulsion around the world \u2014 represents a highly authentic version of Islam. Far from being an aberrant or deviant offshoot of traditional Islamic beliefs, it is described as being a faithful expression of them \u2014 representing \u201ca coherent and even learned expression of Islam.\u201d While the author notes that\u00a0the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not share the views of Islamic State, and indeed see the group as un-Islamic, he denies\u00a0that their version of the religion is more genuine.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics,\u201d Wood writes, citing the example of Edward Said and others who called for academics to focus on the social conditions in which religious extremism takes root. \u201cBut focusing on [social conditions] to the exclusion of ideology reflects another kind of Western bias: that if religious ideology doesn\u2019t matter much in Washington or Berlin, surely it must be equally irrelevant in Raqqa or Mosul.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wood is right in pointing out that there are people in the world today \u2014 including those carrying black banners in\u00a0places like Raqqa and Mosul \u2014 who take religion very seriously.<\/p>\n

But just as a failure to recognize this fact may represent the bias of a Western observer, there is also a glaring bias in dismissing or ignoring the great mass of established and recognized religious scholars of Islam in the Muslim world whose theological conclusions are starkly at odds with the radical revisionism\u00a0of Islamic State.<\/p>\n

Indeed, there are actually people alive in our modern world who have spent their entire lives studying and practicing Islam in conjunction with philosophy, history and linguistics, and who also take seriously the idea of being \u201cvery Islamic.\u201d They\u00a0also happen\u00a0to represent an established tradition of mainstream religious scholarship\u00a0which millenarian groups like ISIS\u00a0have made it their stated mission to eradicate.<\/p>\n

One prominent example of this is the\u00a0\u201cLetter to al-Baghdadi<\/a>,\u201d in which some of the most prominent Islamic scholars in the world condemned the actions of ISIS\u00a0on a purely theological\u00a0basis as representing\u00a0a heretical\u00a0version of Islam. Far from being a reflexive or apologetic statement, the arguments contained therein are\u00a0grounded in long-established precepts of religious jurisprudence intended to prescribe the rules and bases of\u00a0personal and social conduct for practicing Muslims.<\/p>\n

What makes groups like Islamic State \u201cradical\u201d in the first place is that they reject all these centuries of scholarship and tradition, and innovate a newly \u201creformed\u201d Islam \u2014\u00a0often pieced together with\u00a0concepts of ideology and organization drawn from contemporary fascist and Marxist-Leninist movements.\u00a0Such freelancing is a\u00a0common characteristic of Islamic extremist groups, and despite their pretensions to ancient\u00a0revivalism it is also a reflection of their inescapably\u00a0modern revolutionary heritage.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, however,\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0chooses to elide\u00a0this context and accept the self-definition\u00a0of Islamic State without question. In the article,\u00a0arguments put forward by I.S.\u2019s Muslim critics are invoked without content,\u00a0only to be dismissed\u00a0as \u201cembarrassed and politically correct\u201d and a \u201ccotton-candy view of their own religion.\u201d<\/p>\n

The beliefs of Islamic State on the other hand are expounded upon\u00a0at length. In arguing the case for Islamic State\u2019s religious legitimacy, The<\/em> Atlantic<\/em> quotes exactly one Western academic, Bernard Haykel, a Princeton scholar of Near Eastern Studies, whom the author says he approached because \u201cevery academic I asked about the Islamic State\u2019s ideology sent me to [him].\u201d<\/p>\n

From there, Wood does a brief tour of several Western cities where he has serious sit-downs with the world\u2019s most hyperbolic and media-friendly Islamic extremists. This entails traveling to places like London and Melbourne to seek out the opinions of people such as British radical Anjem Choudary and Musa Cerantonio, who lack any religious credentials or\u00a0mainstream\u00a0following, and whose qualifications seemingly\u00a0do not extend past their\u00a0ability to behave provocatively in front of journalists.<\/p>\n

Despite his extensive travels, however, Wood evidently did not\u00a0deem it necessary to speak with anyone recognized by Muslims as an authority in their own religion, or to hear out any religiously-based arguments which might make a counterpoint to his thesis.<\/p>\n

It seems like a fairly consequential oversight to ignore the views of influential and traditional scholarly figures like Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, Zaid Shakir and Sayyid Hossein Nasr \u2014 all of whom who have spoken at length in religious terms against the Islam preached by Islamic State, and who are easily\u00a0accessible to an English-language, American publication.<\/p>\n

At worst, such an\u00a0approach replicates the\u00a0irritating\u00a0practice of writing about foreign or minority populations as though they are passive subjects with no voice of their own, save for fringe characters who can be relied upon to confirm a particular narrative.<\/p>\n

Such a style of writing and argumentation may make for\u00a0enjoyable reading to a casual observer\u00a0attempting to gauge the relationship between ISIS and Islam from the outside. And indeed, the piece is erudite, well-written, and one may even say well-intentioned despite its flaws.<\/p>\n

But the underlying premise is nonetheless poorly substantiated.<\/p>\n

While Wood\u00a0is correct to push back against the flawed notion that Islamic State has absolutely no relation to Islam, he neglects to engage\u00a0the predominant\u00a0view that the group embodies\u00a0one of the heretical versions of the religion that\u00a0have\u00a0cropped up periodically<\/a> throughout\u00a0history.<\/p>\n

The end result is a 10,000-word exercise in confirmation bias. If the Islamic State is indeed, as Wood\u00a0claims, \u201cvery Islamic,\u201d his\u00a0essay\u00a0makes an unconvincing\u00a0case of it to anyone familiar with the historical and religious context in which the group has arisen.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

Email the author: murtaza.hussain@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the piece, author Graeme Wood makes the case that the militant group represents a highly authentic version of Islam. Far from being an aberrant or deviant offshoot of traditional Islamic beliefs, it is described as being a faithful expression of them \u2014 representing \u201ca coherent and even learned expression of Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}