The inhumane humans of ISIS

With an authorization looming in Congress for our ongoing war against the so-called Islamic State, a muddled conversation has sprung up about the group’s relationship to mainstream Islam, its relationship to American and European policy in the region, and the military and political measures needed to counter it. Graeme Wood interviewed scholars and activists to shed light on what ISIS is trying to accomplish and why. His resulting story—a long tour through the theology, history, and practice of this particularly brutal offshoot of Salafist Islam—is alarming, not least to Wood himself:

The Salafis I met in London are unstumpable: no question I posed left them stuttering. They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win…. These men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else.

In part the story has fed into a no-true-Scotsman argument about whether ISIS should, in fact, be called “un-Islamic.” The more important challenge ISIS poses, in Wood’s depiction, is to the implicitly secular understanding so many of us have of the motive forces behind violence of the sort that ISIS practices. We tend to think that “religious” movements, at least in the developing world, are a proxy for economic deprivation, social marginalization, and/or nationalism. Ameliorate the underlying cause, and the pathology will go away.