By Dr Khalid Al Haroub
Instead of interpreting the Islamic State’s actions from an Islamic perspective and condemning it for deviating from the scripture, something they are often criticised for, it would be better to return to the original religious text and reflect on the interpretations and explanations that have prevailed, leading to the creation of IS.
Such a reading will lead us to the shocking conclusion that the IS is a natural product of the rigid and intolerant interpretations of religious text that have been spreading in Arab and Muslim communities for centuries and have gained influence during the past half century.
Popular, simple, friendly and mystic religiosity that characterised social, cultural and everyday life has disappeared from the religious scene in the Arab world.
The unilateral Salafi interpretation of religious text attacks creative and ingenious thought in our communities aimed at understanding the role of religion in daily life.
In this free space, different sections of society, regardless of their degree of religiosity, coexisted peacefully. Therefore, sectarian forces retreated to the background. But now, religious groups armed with thoughts of exclusion and claiming that others are disbelievers or religiously corrupt have taken centre stage, resulting in deep rifts between different sections of society.
This is just one religious interpretation, characterised by Salafism, which claims for itself perfection and ownership of “absolute truth” while labelling the rational, mystical and tolerant interpretations, including those of different sects, as void and unacceptable as they don’t have the “desired Salafi strictness.”
It is easy to see how narrow fundamentalism and Salafism has led to extremism.
Such thinking, which emphasises strict interpretation of religious text, represents the “soft IS,” which nestles in our midst without us paying attention to stopping its spread. That is the IS that created the environment for the creation of the killer and savage IS, which I will talk about later.
The “soft IS” has expanded and rooted itself in the Arab region by “religionising” politics and politicising religion — processes carried out by regimes that have used religion to gain political legitimacy, and by Islamist movements that have deepened the confusion between religion and politics, creating an explosive social and political situation.
The competition between these two forces led to an increase in extremism and the use of the language of exclusion, with the result that the views of the “soft IS” have spread in all directions.
The result of the gradual and firm “IS-isation” of our religious culture is the creation of a favourable environment for the emergence of the “savage IS”, which has ideas and convictions of the “soft IS”, which has been growing among us for decades.
The ideas of the “savage IS” are similar to those of other genocidal ideologies, which claim to provide the only path to salvation and have a messianic zeal. Those who believe in genocidal ideologies such as Nazism, and in the divine law, as in the case of IS, think they have a natural right to rule the world.
Their intellectual and ideological extremism is intolerant and not open for discussion, debate or compromise. You are either with the Nazis (who profess the superiority of the Aryan race) or against them, or you are with the IS, because they represent the “absolute truth”, or are “misguided.”
If you are in neither camp, you are considered an “obstacle” in the path of the cosmic project and deserve displacement and killing with cold-blooded certainty and conviction.
According to the Nazis, genocide served their project to lead humanity to a better future. For the IS, it leads the world to a caliphate and rule over the world.
The genocidal mania that took over Nazi Germany consumed European Jews and affected all the countries and communities that rejected and opposed Nazism. So Hitler fought in all directions, north, east, south and west, from the Soviet Union to Britain.
The genocidal mania of the IS, which wants to “cleanse the ranks of hypocrites”, doesn’t spare anyone. It is an awful obsession which the IS uses as justification for not fighting Israel, saying it cannot do so before cleansing the ranks of hypocrites.
Before fighting the “enemy”, the “savage IS” has its own projects that distinguish it from any prior purveyors of murder. It boasts of its killings and slaughter, unlike most practitioners of genocide, who tried to hide their crime.
In the case of IS the number of killings has been much less than that in other cases of genocide because their strategy is to deter and scare by spreading terror in the ranks of the “enemy.” That’s why they publicise their killings.
They do their slaughter and burning in front of cameras, showing blood dripping and the victims in the hands of their executioners before they become lifeless corpses. Such hideous “slaughter” is seen by hundreds of millions of people.
The IS wishes to win through terrorism, which is another issue that requires us to go back to the interpretation of religious text and its application from the perspective of the “savage IS”.
The author is a columnist and academic
