Every week, The WorldPost asks an expert to shed light on a topic driving headlines around the world. Today, we speak with Dr. Hussein Ibish about the Islamic State group’s ideology.
American media has been dominated this week by a renewed debate over the way we should understand the Islamic State group. The brutal militant group also known as ISIS has claimed control over parts of Syria and Iraq and was behind the beheadings of 21 Christian Egyptians in Libya this weekend. In part spawned by the cover story of this month’s issue of The Atlantic, titled “What ISIS Really Wants,” there has been much hand-wringing over whether journalists and policy makers have got the militants’ ideology all wrong.
At the heart of this argument are conflicting views on the group’s relationship to Islam, the role religion plays in its success and the best way of analyzing it in order to guarantee its defeat. The WorldPost discussed the issue with Dr. Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. Ibish published an op-ed on the group in the New York Times this week, titled “The ISIS Theater Of Cruelty.”
What are some of the key ideas that the Islamic State group stands for and how should we understand their ideology?
The way to understand them is by looking at where they converge and where they diverge from the more familiar violent radical Islamist groups such as Al Qaeda. What ISIS shares with Al Qaeda is the basics of its take on Islam. This is a very strict, literalistic and harsh interpretation, influenced by Saudi Wahhabism but taken to an extreme. Theirs is a narrative about Muslims and the rest of humanity that emphasizes a kind of paranoid and chauvinistic reading of the world. It asserts that Muslims are under attack from Christian, Jewish and atheist forces and that Muslims have to organize to fight back.
The idea is that through massive violence, Muslims can change the regional and global order to their benefit, that they don’t have a stake at all in the regional and global order as it is and can create radical change on religious grounds. That’s what ISIS shares with the other groups that call themselves Salafists and radical jihadists — the typical Muslim terrorist groups we’ve been familiar with since 9/11 and before.
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I do strongly think that the best framework for understanding them is as a millenarian identity group, but at the same time I don’t see anything to be gained by dismissing the Islamic component in this.
You mentioned in your piece in the New York Times that there is a lack of counter-narratives. Are there precedents for something like this or will it have to be thought up?
I think largely it has to be thought up. If Sunnis believe that ISIS is the best bet of protecting themselves from Syrian President Assad or defeating Assad they will have a powerful recruiting tool. The same goes in Iraq, where people in the Sunni areas need to feel they can empower themselves without ISIS, but it’s very hard to do that when Shiite militias are conducting massacres.
It’s more complicated on the level of the international recruitment drive, where ISIS propaganda becomes more important. This is where I think we certainly need a counter-narrative, and it’s going to take a good deal of planning and coordination to come up with it.
Ultimately, though, I think you need a different political reality for the region. As long as the politics of the region are as dysfunctional and bleak as they are now, it’s going to be hard to look forward to a day without ISIS or ISIS-like groups. Much better functioning polities and governments in the region is something that is going to take decades, but it’s necessary.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
