Audaciously Trying To Understand the ISIS
By Maryam Sakeenah
December 11, 2014
When disempowered human beings are subjected to ignominious occupation and oppression, they will seek redress in militant, often frenzied ways
A good deal has been said about the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) being a grotesque travesty of Islam and a defiant rejection of all that is commonly held to be moral and humane. Islamic scholars from a variety of denominations have come forward with a single voice to condemn it as a grave wrong, and this is of course vital and timely. However, condemnation alone misses a vital point: it flatly rests on the surface of a much deeper phenomenon.
It is more helpful to engage in an effort to understand because when groups like ISIS emerge, we are warned that something about our collective humanity as a species has gone terribly wrong somewhere. When human beings take up ruthless violence against one another, it shakes our faith in humanity. And yet the perpetrators and oppressors are not any less human than the rest of us, so what disfigured our humanity that we have become capable of systematically inflicting pain and celebrating it in the name of ideology?
Phenomena like ISIS are not rare in human history. But to begin to solve a recurring problem we do not need to just offer censure but to understand. A serious and honest understanding is essential because when we engage in it we identify the deep-seated grievances and pent-up feelings of being wronged without redress that fuel the vicious cycle of reactionary violence. However, understanding becomes difficult when we ‘otherise’ and then condemn the ‘other’, something we create in our morally superior self-perception. The interconnectedness of a globalised world shows the error in viewing phenomena in isolation from contexts and other events, contemporary or historical. So much of what we see happening today can somehow or the other be traced to events that took place in the recent or not-so-recent past.
It certainly adds a deeper dimension to our understanding to remind ourselves that ISIS was born in the detention camps of the US in Iraq and got recruits from refugee facilities during and shortly after the US invasion. This gives context to the radicalisation of the human beings who now associate themselves with the group. Lest we forget, Iraq was invaded in 2003 on an utterly false pretext of the perceived threat of what was virtually a dysfunctional and impotent weapons programme. The official strategy of the invasion was “shock and awe”, which explicitly called for ‘paralysing the country by destroying food production, water supplies and infrastructure. The strategy involved the use of chemical weapons — white phosphorus, to name one — in civilian areas that has, so far, led to hundreds of thousands of stillbirths and birth defects other than instant fatalities. As many as 740,000 women are war widows and 4.5 million were rendered homeless. Hundreds of thousands were made refugees during the brutal invasion of Fallujah alone that left 70 percent of the town’s buildings completely destroyed. Prison abuse and torture by US soldiers in Iraq has been brought to light but so much remains still shrouded in history’s oblivion. However, while mass deception may hide this narrative from public perception, it lives and rankles in the memories and consciousness of the victims and the witnesses.
When disempowered human beings are subjected to ignominious occupation and oppression, they will seek redress in militant, often frenzied ways. They will cling on to ideologies that legitimise and glorify the revenge that they believe is the vent. The direct experience of torture and killing desensitises sensibilities from the use of violence on others, and routinises it. The mistake we make is when we locate the root of the problem with violent groups in the ideology they associate with. In doing so, we fail to see the roots that run deeper. Violent ideologies triumph in violent contexts.
When we condemn such groups and vow to strike back with force against them, we again miss a point: to stem violence we need to understand what fuels it and, in most cases, what fuels it is not ideology but the ignominy of defeat and oppressive occupation. Ideology helps later to corroborate, legitimise and sanctify. Hence, military operations against such organisations have not yielded stable and enduring peace.
At the terrible risk of being judged as the devil’s advocate, I dare to understand that it may at times, and in part, be the work of our own hands that nurtures extremist violence. As long as such wrongs continue to be committed by the powerful to human beings, violent groups seeking lost pride will continue to proliferate in multifarious forms, sometimes as Khmer Rouge, sometimes as ISIS or as the undiscovered many who may just be in various stages of their genesis that contemporary global politics foster.
Maryam Sakeenah is a freelance columnist
Source: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/11-Dec-2014/audaciously-trying-to-understand
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-terrorism-jihad/audaciously-trying-understand-isis/d/100432