While it would be ridiculous to allow the West the moral high ground, it is even more absurd for the Muslim world to transfer the responsibility for ISIS on to the West.
While it would be ridiculous to allow the West the moral high ground, it is even more absurd for the Muslim world to transfer the responsibility for ISIS on to the West
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is emulating al Qaeda, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Boko Haram and pretty much every single Sunni Islamist militant organisation in the world by taking up arms vying to establish a regional – and eventually global – caliphate.
Many in the West and the lion’s share of the Muslim intelligentsia, meanwhile, are relentlessly filling column spaces putting almost the entire blame for the Iraq crisis on George W Bush and Tony Blair.
Had Bush and Blair not decided to invade Iraq in 2003, would ISIS be wreaking havoc right now? Of course not. Health permitting, it would be Saddam Hussein who would be taking care of the wreaking bit. And, with Saddam at the helm, why would there be any need for a Sunni militant reactionary movement? Plus Saddam wasn’t a fan of militancy that wasn’t orchestrated via his command.
If Barack Obama had not hastily removed the US forces in 2007, would we witness the ongoing crisis? That might be slightly more difficult to answer; but it is hard to imagine any amount of sectarian diplomacy bridging the Shia-Sunni divide in Iraq in the last seven years.
The sectarian conflict has been there for 14 centuries. And if history, and the rest of the Middle East, is anything to go by, the odds are that a Shia prime minister like Nuri al-Maliki is not keeping his nose to the grindstone endeavouring to create an inclusive government or military.
While it would be ridiculous to allow the West the moral high ground that it is hankering after ever since ISIS began flexing its muscles, it is even more absurd for the Muslim world to transfer the responsibility for our own mess on to the West.
Lethally absurdity one might add.
Because the problem isn’t the US adhering to its national self-interests; the issue is that most Muslim countries don’t pay much heed to theirs.
It is always amusing to witness opinion makers in the Muslim world clamouring for the US to take responsibility for creating disharmony in their states, laying the burden of rectification on the Americans, all while bellowing about their sovereignty being breached.
It is even more amusing to witness the Pakistani intelligentsia that has finally warmed up to the idea of owning its own war against the Taliban, preferring to blame the US for the mess in Iraq.
The roots of the ongoing conflict in Iraq predate the American invasion. They actually predate Christopher Columbus discovering America by seven odd centuries. The roots are sectarian and the war over who is the true follower of Islam began when the first caliph of Islam was taking oath. The ‘true and false’ sectarian fault lines were established in 680 AD at Karbala. The fault lines have since been branching out, causing religious quivers for the past 1400 years.
Sectarian fault lines are more conspicuous than any nationalistic unity in almost every Muslim state.
It is no coincidence that sectarian demographics are at the heart of the various crises in the Middle East.
It is no coincidence that ISIS, TTP, Boko Haram, et al are following an identical ideology wherein outlawing and massacring everyone who disagrees with you has been god sanctioned.
It is no coincidence that Iraq, Nigeria and Pakistan, countries that are so different in everything barring their religious identity, are facing a common predicament.
It is also not a coincidence at all that the Muslim world hasn’t managed to solve its problems while ignoring the elephant in the room.
It is a no brainer then that tracing the commonalities among ISIS, TTP and Boko Haram, might give us all a ‘hint’ as to what that elephant in the room is.
When a religion’s political doctrine is being used as the rationale behind nationwide terrorism in a country, it is suicidal to incorporate said religion in politics. The political policy of the religion bolsters the religion’s inherent superiority complex, leading to antediluvian modes of suppression for the ‘wrong’ followers and non-believers.
Outlawing and butchering over ideological differences is as medieval as actions get, and the modern day solution to this particular problem is making religion irrelevant as a political entity. Sectarianism and religious extremism in turn are nipped in the bud.
Sectarianism and Takfir is at the heart of the quagmire that the Muslim world is precipitously sinking into. Any attempts to look elsewhere for either the problem or the solution will throw us into the vicious circle that we have hogged for almost a millennia and a half.
Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is a journalist and writer. Follow him on Twitter
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22 Responses to “The responsibility for ISIS doesn’t lie with the West”
carol_wilcox
Saudi Arabia is the real culprit, but who supplies them? See this in FT on Friday:
Look beyond Saudi Arabia for Sunni leadership
David Gardner
When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the jihadi leader whose blackshirts overran swathes of northern and central Iraq in June, gave his Ramadan rant last month after proclaiming himselfcaliph, he had it translated into English, French, German, Turkish, Russian – and Albanian. Why did his Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant(known as Isis), which now styles itself narcissistically as the Islamic State, take the trouble?
Since the end of the cold war and after the wars of the Yugoslav succession, the western Balkans – in particular Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia and even bits of Bulgaria
– have been carpeted with Saudi-financed Wahhabi mosques and madrassas. This is moving local Muslim culture away from Turkic-oriented, Sufi Islam towards the radical
bigotry of Wahhabi absolutism, which groups such as Isis have taken to its logical conclusion. This is fertilised ground for jihadi ambition.
Saudi Arabia not only exports oil, but tanker-loads of quasi-totalitarian religious dogma and pipelines of jihadi volunteers, even as it struggles to insulate itself from the
blowback; and King Abdullah, in his end of Ramadan address, warns against the “devilish” extremism of “these deviant forces”. Jihadi extremism does present a threat to the kingdom. But in doctrinal terms it is hard to see in what way it “deviates” from Wahhabi orthodoxy, with its literalist and exclusivist rendering of Sunni Islam. Its extreme
interpretation of monotheism anathematises other beliefs, in particular the “idolatrous” practices ofChristians and Shia Muslims, as infidel or apostate. That can be read as limitless sanction for jihad. The modern jihadi is a Wahhabi on steroids. His main grievance with the House of Saud is that it deviates:its profligate deeds do not match its Wahhabi words.
The late King Fahd, Abdullah’s predecessor, for example, acquired a reputation as a playboy and gamblerin his youth. Yet during his reign he built 1,359 mosques abroad,
together with 202 colleges, 210 Islamic centres and more than 2,000 schools, according to official Saudi data.
There seem to be no figures for Wahhabi “outreach” under Abdullah, a more austere and ecumenical figure. Anecdotal evidence says Saudi mosque-building is powering ahea
wherever believers are found, especially in south, central and southeast Asia, home to about 1bn of the world’s 1.6bn Muslims.
The House of Saud, facing a potentially wrenching succession to the ailing Abdullah at a time of upheaval across the Arab world, is in a delicate position. As custodian
of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, it is the closest modern equivalent to the old Islamic caliphate. It thus abominates the violent presumption of Isis as much as it abhors the rival brand of pan-Islamic fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the kingdom still spews out the corrosive poison that helps fuel religion-based fanaticism. The
Isis rampage of destruction of shrines and mosques,
for instance, continues the two centuries-old record of Wahhabi
iconoclasm. Nor should it be forgotten that the House of Saud used
Wahhabi zealots as its shock troops in the last century to unite by
force most of the religiously diverse Arabian peninsula – won by the sword
in 52 battles over 30 years. There are no churches in Saudi Arabia, and
permits to build Shia mosques are rarer than desert rain.
Saudi Arabia is not solely responsible for the result; resurgent jihadism amid the virulent battle within Islam between the majority Sunni and minority Shia is playing outacross the Levant, down into the Gulf and across to the Indian subcontinent. But it is a primary source of doctrinal bigotry, as Saudi schoolbooks enjoining believers to shun all but their own well attest.
The worldwide surge in Wahhabi mosques began in response to Iran’s attempts to export the Shia radicalism of its 1979 revolution. The Anglo-American overthrow of
Iraq’s minority Sunni regime in the 2003 invasion of Iraq – which installed a Shia majority and ignited sectarian carnage – and the west’sfailure to support the rebellion of the Sunni majority in Syria, have fed Sunni grievances, sharpened by the Iran-backed Shia axis across the region. It is uncertain whether the Saudi state
and its Gulf allies finance groups such as Isis, but their citizens do, encouraged by the Sunni supremacist discourse and tactical promiscuity of their rulers, fearful of being
outflanked from the religious right.
Saudi Arabia’s position as the world’s leading oil exporter, a leading purchaser of western arms and a counterweight to Iran in the Gulf has shielded it from criticism. In the
current turmoil in the Middle East – characterised by an absence of state and institutions, a loss of shared national narrative in mosaic countries such as Syria and Iraq, and the feebleness of previously influential big powers – there is a lack of mainstream Sunni leadership.
The petrodollar theocracy of Saudi Arabia, in its contest with the petrodollar theocracy of Iran, has smothered Sunni space – except for the vacuum in which Isis is building its (also oil-rich) cross-border caliphate, now striking east into Kurdistan and west into Lebanon.
Previous generations of mainstream Sunni Arabs gave their allegiance to pan-Arab nationalists such as Gamal Abdel Nasser, tarnished paladins of a dead-end ideology. The potential disaster now facing the Arabs demands a new generation of Sunni leaders,
able to defeat extremism within their own camp. That is something Saudi Arabia, whose Wahhabi absolutism is part of the genetic code of groups such as Isis, cannot do.
Just Visiting
> In Oman Ibadis, Sunnis, Shias coexist
Oman has only 4M inhabitants – and are neither Sunni nor Shia
Wiki ‘the only country with a majority Ibadi population.’
The Independent have a good article:
“Sunni-Shia tensions are increasing across the world. They
are on the rise in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Bahrain, Libya, Tunisia, Malaysia, Egypt, and even in London as issues
of identity, rights, interests and enfranchisement find sectarian
expression.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-vicious-schism-between-sunni-and-shia-has-been-poisoning-islam-for-1400-years–and-its-getting-worse-9139525.html
Ortega
Oman has only 4M inhabitants
So does Lebanon, the DRC and Bosnia??
and are neither Sunni nor Shia
Wiki ‘the only country with a majority Ibadi population.’
The Ibadis only make up 75% of muslims there. The remaining 25% are Sunni/Shia.
Guest
“The West”. As you try and conflate this failing nation with the Nordics, or Germany…heck, even America.
Your economics has failed.
Guest
You’re ignoring Qatar’s role there.