88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
Why would I be scared of Muslims? You're acting like a child.
What ISIS Really Wants [Long Read]
Why would I be scared of Muslims? You're acting like a child.
88m3
Fast Money & Foreign Objects
What The Atlantic Left Out About ISIS According To Their Own Expert
BY JACK JENKINS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 20, 2015 AT 3:20 PM
Since Monday, much has been said in print, radio, and television about Graeme Wood’s recent front-page feature piece for The Atlantic entitled “What ISIS Really Wants.” The article, which is lengthy and highly descriptive, and is essentially an exhaustive examination of the ideology that shores up the cruel vision, messages, and tactics of ISIS, the radical militant group currently terrorizing entire sections of the Middle East. But while the article was initially met with widespread praise, it has since become the subject of staunch criticism and even condemnation from several groups, including Muslim academics, scholars of Islamic law, Muslim leaders and high-profile politicalpundits.
Critics have elucidated a slew of issues with the piece, but many are rooted in quotes by Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University who Wood quotes extensively to justify his claims. When ThinkProgress spoke with other scholars in Haykel’s field, however, at least one expressed surprise at his involvement with the piece, and indicated curiosity about the scholar’s thoughts on the final product.
With this in mind, ThinkProgress reached out to Haykel, who agreed to an interview to help dispel any misconception that he is trying to score “political” points, explaining, “my approach is a scholarly one and not motivated by an agenda.” He admitted that he had initially read Wood’s article quickly — “it’s a long piece,” he joked — and declined to directly address most of Wood’s claims other than to insist the piece was ultimately “[Wood’s] argument … not my argument.” Still, he didn’t shy away from expanding on some things the author left out or possibly misrepresented, and offered a revealing examination of what’s at stake when fighting ISIS.
ISIS is ahistorical, revisionist, but not inevitable
One of the oft-mentioned criticisms of The Atlantic piece is that it echoed the inaccurate belief that since ISIS’s theology draw upon Islamic texts to justify its horrendous practices, it is an inevitable product of Islam. Haykel didn’t say whether or not he thought Wood’s article says as much, but when ThinkProgress asked him directly whether Islamic texts and theology necessitated the creation of groups like ISIS, he was unequivocal.
“No,” he said. “I think that ISIS is a product of a very contingent, contextual, historical factors. There is nothing predetermined in Islam that would lead to ISIS.”
He was similarly unambiguous when responding to the related critique that Muslims who disavow ISIS are somehow “deluded” or not “real” Muslims.
“I consider people … who have criticized ISIS to be fully within the Islamic tradition, and in no way ‘less Muslim’ than ISIS,” he said. “I mean, that’s absurd.”
Haykel’s position also helped explain several problematic constructions and omissions in Wood’s article. At one point, for instance, Wood quotes Haykel as saying, “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid.” The journalist then adds the following conclusion: “That really would be an act of apostasy.”
interview with ThinkProgress.
“Mohammad Fadel, for instance, would say, when you talk about Islamic law, you have to talk about a tradition that is many centuries old and is extremely sophisticated, that has a multiplicity of views and opinions and is not cut and dry the way ISIS presents Islam, in an ahistorical fashion, and in a completely monolithic way,” Haykel said. “So ISIS’s view of Islam is … unhistorical. They’re revising history.”
Is ISIS Islamic?
Haykel expanded on some of his comments from Wood’s piece, but he also fervently stood by others, especially his belief that ISIS is, in fact, an Islamic group. Wood’s article includes the following paragraph citing Haykel as he expressed frustration with people — including President Barack Obama — who disavow ISIS as “unIslamic”:
But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”
Haykel told ThinkProgress that he still supported these claims, although he explained he is specifically referring to two groups of people who declare ISIS unIslamic: Muslims he says are “just ignorant” of Islam’s legal and political history, and Christians who engage in what he called “the Christian tradition of interfaith dialogue” and declare Islam a “religion of peace.”
Haykel singled out CNN talk show host Fareed Zakaria as an example of the former, who recently said that ISIS’s public execution of a Jordanian pilot by burning him to death — which at least one prominent Muslim cleric in the Middle East also decried as “away from humanity, much less religions” — is “entirely haram,” or forbidden in Islam.
“That’s actually factually wrong — the burning apostates is in the [Islamic] legal code,” Haykel said.
(Zakaria, for his part, also took a swipe at Haykel in a Washington Post Op-Ed on Friday, saying the following of the scholar’s rejection of those who decry ISIS as unIslamic: “Haykel feels that it is what the 0.0019 percent of Muslims do that defines the religion. Who is being political, I wonder?”)
a lengthy letter signed by over 120 prominent Muslim leaders and scholars that refers to the Islamic State only in quotation marks and repeatedly rebukes their beliefs as “forbidden in Islam.” Several of the signers have openly declared ISIS unIslamic, and Egypt’s Grand Mufti Shawqi Allam — the highest official of religious law among Sunni Muslims in Egypt, the most populous state in the Middle East — told CNN in February that “everything ISIS does is far away from Islam. What it is doing is a crime by all means.” Dar al-Ifta, the premiere school of Islamic law and thought that Allam oversees, has also launched a campaign asking journalists not to call ISIS the “Islamic State,” preferring instead “al-Qaeda Separatists in Iraq and Syria,” or QSIS, which intentionally removes the word “Islamic” from the title.
Despite this, Haykel insisted that this is actually a qualified critique by the scholars, not a wholesale rejection of ISIS as unIslamic. The difference, he contends, is in their approach.
ISIS is constantly saying that Fadel and others are not Muslim, because they don’t agree with them. Sunnis don’t normally do that.
“[The people who signed the letter] are not actually in the quote that I was mentioning,” Haykel said. “The [Islamic] jurists … of the world, are not saying that ISIS is unIslamic, but that they have a perverted interpretation of Islam. But [ISIS is] rooted in Islam, and they are Muslim, and they are just either Muslims in grave error or they are Muslims who have strayed into heresy. People who actually know the tradition and who are engaging with this group from within the tradition are not in any way singled out in that quotation. It’s only people who say that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam — it’s unIslamic.”
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/02/20/3625446/atlantic-left-isis-conversation-bernard-haykel/
tp posted this a few hours ago. it goes on further in the article too many characters
BY JACK JENKINS
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 20, 2015 AT 3:20 PMSince Monday, much has been said in print, radio, and television about Graeme Wood’s recent front-page feature piece for The Atlantic entitled “What ISIS Really Wants.” The article, which is lengthy and highly descriptive, and is essentially an exhaustive examination of the ideology that shores up the cruel vision, messages, and tactics of ISIS, the radical militant group currently terrorizing entire sections of the Middle East. But while the article was initially met with widespread praise, it has since become the subject of staunch criticism and even condemnation from several groups, including Muslim academics, scholars of Islamic law, Muslim leaders and high-profile politicalpundits.
Critics have elucidated a slew of issues with the piece, but many are rooted in quotes by Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University who Wood quotes extensively to justify his claims. When ThinkProgress spoke with other scholars in Haykel’s field, however, at least one expressed surprise at his involvement with the piece, and indicated curiosity about the scholar’s thoughts on the final product.
With this in mind, ThinkProgress reached out to Haykel, who agreed to an interview to help dispel any misconception that he is trying to score “political” points, explaining, “my approach is a scholarly one and not motivated by an agenda.” He admitted that he had initially read Wood’s article quickly — “it’s a long piece,” he joked — and declined to directly address most of Wood’s claims other than to insist the piece was ultimately “[Wood’s] argument … not my argument.” Still, he didn’t shy away from expanding on some things the author left out or possibly misrepresented, and offered a revealing examination of what’s at stake when fighting ISIS.
ISIS is ahistorical, revisionist, but not inevitable
One of the oft-mentioned criticisms of The Atlantic piece is that it echoed the inaccurate belief that since ISIS’s theology draw upon Islamic texts to justify its horrendous practices, it is an inevitable product of Islam. Haykel didn’t say whether or not he thought Wood’s article says as much, but when ThinkProgress asked him directly whether Islamic texts and theology necessitated the creation of groups like ISIS, he was unequivocal.
“No,” he said. “I think that ISIS is a product of a very contingent, contextual, historical factors. There is nothing predetermined in Islam that would lead to ISIS.”
He was similarly unambiguous when responding to the related critique that Muslims who disavow ISIS are somehow “deluded” or not “real” Muslims.
“I consider people … who have criticized ISIS to be fully within the Islamic tradition, and in no way ‘less Muslim’ than ISIS,” he said. “I mean, that’s absurd.”
Haykel’s position also helped explain several problematic constructions and omissions in Wood’s article. At one point, for instance, Wood quotes Haykel as saying, “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid.” The journalist then adds the following conclusion: “That really would be an act of apostasy.”
interview with ThinkProgress.
“Mohammad Fadel, for instance, would say, when you talk about Islamic law, you have to talk about a tradition that is many centuries old and is extremely sophisticated, that has a multiplicity of views and opinions and is not cut and dry the way ISIS presents Islam, in an ahistorical fashion, and in a completely monolithic way,” Haykel said. “So ISIS’s view of Islam is … unhistorical. They’re revising history.”
Is ISIS Islamic?
Haykel expanded on some of his comments from Wood’s piece, but he also fervently stood by others, especially his belief that ISIS is, in fact, an Islamic group. Wood’s article includes the following paragraph citing Haykel as he expressed frustration with people — including President Barack Obama — who disavow ISIS as “unIslamic”:
But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the group’s theology, told me, embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion” that neglects “what their religion has historically and legally required.” Many denials of the Islamic State’s religious nature, he said, are rooted in an “interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.”
Haykel told ThinkProgress that he still supported these claims, although he explained he is specifically referring to two groups of people who declare ISIS unIslamic: Muslims he says are “just ignorant” of Islam’s legal and political history, and Christians who engage in what he called “the Christian tradition of interfaith dialogue” and declare Islam a “religion of peace.”
Haykel singled out CNN talk show host Fareed Zakaria as an example of the former, who recently said that ISIS’s public execution of a Jordanian pilot by burning him to death — which at least one prominent Muslim cleric in the Middle East also decried as “away from humanity, much less religions” — is “entirely haram,” or forbidden in Islam.
“That’s actually factually wrong — the burning apostates is in the [Islamic] legal code,” Haykel said.
(Zakaria, for his part, also took a swipe at Haykel in a Washington Post Op-Ed on Friday, saying the following of the scholar’s rejection of those who decry ISIS as unIslamic: “Haykel feels that it is what the 0.0019 percent of Muslims do that defines the religion. Who is being political, I wonder?”)
a lengthy letter signed by over 120 prominent Muslim leaders and scholars that refers to the Islamic State only in quotation marks and repeatedly rebukes their beliefs as “forbidden in Islam.” Several of the signers have openly declared ISIS unIslamic, and Egypt’s Grand Mufti Shawqi Allam — the highest official of religious law among Sunni Muslims in Egypt, the most populous state in the Middle East — told CNN in February that “everything ISIS does is far away from Islam. What it is doing is a crime by all means.” Dar al-Ifta, the premiere school of Islamic law and thought that Allam oversees, has also launched a campaign asking journalists not to call ISIS the “Islamic State,” preferring instead “al-Qaeda Separatists in Iraq and Syria,” or QSIS, which intentionally removes the word “Islamic” from the title.
Despite this, Haykel insisted that this is actually a qualified critique by the scholars, not a wholesale rejection of ISIS as unIslamic. The difference, he contends, is in their approach.
ISIS is constantly saying that Fadel and others are not Muslim, because they don’t agree with them. Sunnis don’t normally do that.
“[The people who signed the letter] are not actually in the quote that I was mentioning,” Haykel said. “The [Islamic] jurists … of the world, are not saying that ISIS is unIslamic, but that they have a perverted interpretation of Islam. But [ISIS is] rooted in Islam, and they are Muslim, and they are just either Muslims in grave error or they are Muslims who have strayed into heresy. People who actually know the tradition and who are engaging with this group from within the tradition are not in any way singled out in that quotation. It’s only people who say that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam — it’s unIslamic.”
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2015/02/20/3625446/atlantic-left-isis-conversation-bernard-haykel/
tp posted this a few hours ago. it goes on further in the article too many characters
Futuristic Eskimo
All Star
#criticalthinkerdigga
Marl0 Stanfield
Yeshua Ben YHWH
Our own fukking intelligence guys just came out and said Al Baghdadi is not a real person. How, in a world of 24 hour surveillance of any area of significance and any group of resources of significance (large amounts of guns/vehicles/food/medicine/MONEY) is the origin of Isis a fukking Ancient Aliens mystery?!?
Family Dollar Fudge Covered Grahams Fun Fact: C0me up off the bullshyt. This is a Mossad/CIA/Saudi intelligence operation. The EU's rejection of Greece is gonna get this party started.
When Russia gets full use of Cyprus, watch Iran and Turkey form a Playaz Circle with Russia and China and some other 
Middle Eastern countries. Just remember kids, even as teh nukes are raining, it's all a set up.
Family Dollar Fudge Covered Grahams Fun Fact: C0me up off the bullshyt. This is a Mossad/CIA/Saudi intelligence operation. The EU's rejection of Greece is gonna get this party started.
When Russia gets full use of Cyprus, watch Iran and Turkey form a Playaz Circle with Russia and China and some other Middle Eastern countries. Just remember kids, even as teh nukes are raining, it's all a set up.
Berniewood Hogan
IT'S BERNIE SANDERS WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
The first article was a good read.
I dismissed much of the academic consensus because they seemed a bit too "pointed" about their critiques of Islam. However I like the comparison of the different sects.
I think the article paints a good narrative. It definitely helps you draw pictures and connect the dots.
Moving on to the thinkprogress article now
I dismissed much of the academic consensus because they seemed a bit too "pointed" about their critiques of Islam. However I like the comparison of the different sects.
I think the article paints a good narrative. It definitely helps you draw pictures and connect the dots.
Moving on to the thinkprogress article now
Great read. Great read. As I said in my previous post, Woods made Haykel seem like a mad man. He seemed less like an academic and more like a Bill Mahr.
I loved the ending. Great way to round out the article:
“I see ISIS as a symptom of a much deeper structural set of problems in the Sunni Arab world,” he said. “Which have to do with politics. With education, and the lack thereof. With authoritarianism. With foreign intervention. With the curse of oil … I think that even if ISIS were to disappear, the underlying causes that produce ISIS would not disappear. And those would have to be addressed with decades of policy and reforms and changes — not just by the west, but also by Arab societies as well.”
Ultimately, Haykel appeared to argue that effectively combating ISIS will require more than discerning what “ISIS wants,” theologically speaking. Instead, it also requires a deep, abiding dedication to providing what most Muslims in the region want, and what Wood only briefly addresses in his article: stability, jobs, education, and, most of all, peace.
Mohammed Sindhi
a really simple admirer
ISIS is not Islam at all. ISIS wants to kill Shi'ites.
ORDER_66
I dont care anymore 2026
Like batman says: follow the money....
Marl0 Stanfield
Yeshua Ben YHWH
"People" are being deliberately obtuse in here by not fact0ring in Eretz Israel and jerking the rest of you off.
Eretz aka Greater Israel
This is about Israeli control of the most valuable resource of the modern industrialized world. Why do you think CACz have turned Mexico upside down trying to get that shale oil? Lmao @both the cartels AND Isis being stronger and more resourceful than the US Government and the Israeli government. Guess everyone needs to give up their sovereignty so we can get that oi-- cough I mean gol-- cough cough Whoo I mean punish these savages and bring a stabilizing international peacekeeping force to protect the safety and freedom of the poor huddled masses! Why I think I see some Soviet savages over there!
www.mintpressnews.com/zionism-and-isis-opposing-forces-or-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/199482/?desktop-version=on
www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/the-yinon-plan-greater-israel-syria-iraq-and-isis-the-connection/99135
Eretz aka Greater Israel
This is about Israeli control of the most valuable resource of the modern industrialized world. Why do you think CACz have turned Mexico upside down trying to get that shale oil? Lmao @both the cartels AND Isis being stronger and more resourceful than the US Government and the Israeli government. Guess everyone needs to give up their sovereignty so we can get that oi-- cough I mean gol-- cough cough Whoo I mean punish these savages and bring a stabilizing international peacekeeping force to protect the safety and freedom of the poor huddled masses! Why I think I see some Soviet savages over there!
www.mintpressnews.com/zionism-and-isis-opposing-forces-or-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/199482/?desktop-version=on
www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/the-yinon-plan-greater-israel-syria-iraq-and-isis-the-connection/99135
dennis roadman
nuclear war in my bag
my boy used to always joke about ordering burger king delivery right before he kills himselfIn a funnier world, Pizza Hut would advertise this fact.
Who the fukk would eat their last dinner at pizza hut
didn't even realize atta created the blueprint
notPsychosiz
I started this gangsta sh-
"People" are being deliberately obtuse in here by not fact0ring in Eretz Israel and jerking the rest of you off.
Eretz aka Greater Israel
This is about Israeli control of the most valuable resource of the modern industrialized world. Why do you think CACz have turned Mexico upside down trying to get that shale oil? Lmao @both the cartels AND Isis being stronger and more resourceful than the US Government and the Israeli government. Guess everyone needs to give up their sovereignty so we can get that oi-- cough I mean gol-- cough cough Whoo I mean punish these savages and bring a stabilizing international peacekeeping force to protect the safety and freedom of the poor huddled masses! Why I think I see some Soviet savages over there!
www.mintpressnews.com/zionism-and-isis-opposing-forces-or-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/199482/?desktop-version=on
www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/the-yinon-plan-greater-israel-syria-iraq-and-isis-the-connection/99135
Exactly.
The west controls Saudi Arabia. They took Egypt via coup. Syria is being targeted as we speak. Once the west controls Syria, Palestine will be completely surrounded by jewish puppets at which point israel/usa can finally crush Hamas and massacre what little Palestineans remain.
Its unfortunate that Iran is unwilling to persue the means to wipe evil from this world. They are almost the only ones left who can still fight. Eventually an American coup will succedde in turning them into a puppet government as well. They are esentially on a timer until they are no longer in control of thier country, no longer oppose evil, or are under attack by it. Those are there options if they refuse to pro-actively combat the skirges of mankind.
ill
Superstar
Greater Israel is never going to happen. Only crazy people believe that shyt. fukk does Israel want with more Arab lands? They would have no way to maintain control over Egypt, Syria, or Iraqi territory. Some of you guys just follow that biblical bullshyt a little too much. Its never going to happen. Iran will not be overthrown either.
Marl0 Stanfield
Yeshua Ben YHWH
The control is through weakened surrounding Arab states' sanctioning of policies that support Israel's interests to the detriment of both Palestinians and Arabs as a whole. You know damn well no one's talking about "acquisition" of entire Arab countries, nikka.
And you know damn well you better hope for a goddamned Iranian coup because our fukkboy president keeps appeasing them parallel to Isis' campaign, that's if Isis truly is what you lying ass nikkas keep saying it is.
Why do you guys always act like fukkboys about a basic fact of human existence, a country's pursuit of it's interests at all cost? I don't understand being secular but then shrinking away from acknowledging an obvious strategy on the world chessboard by a highly skilled nation. If goddamned Zimbabwe launched a geopolitical strategy to establish absolute dominance in America on the scale of Greater Israel in the Middle East, I'd be overjoyed.
In fact, I would be so happy that, knowing everyone who wasn't black would immediately start hating me, I would skip the persecution in whatever non-Zimbabwe-controlled state I was in and just move to Greater Zimbabwe. shyt, main, I'm sure the gov't of Greater Zimbabwe would even encourage it as persecution ramped up and they need more nikkas to fight for the final fulfillment, whether divine or secular, of Greater Zimbabwe.
And before you get sand in your vagina, think for a second and realize that is how colonialism and imperialism haas ALWAYS worked for ANY country who has pursued. It just so happens Israel's policies appear to match up with many so-called divine prophecies, not the least of which are the ones DIRECTLY MENTIONED IN THE MOST WIDELY DISTRIBUTED VOLUME OF LITERATURE IN THE HISTORY OF TIME AND SPACE.
