On some level, I can understand what President Obama is trying to do. He wants to avoid falling into the liberal narrative of the “western world fighting against Islam.” He doesn’t want to give ISIS the underdog status that “persecuted” religions so easily drape around their shoulders.
However, his strategic double-talk doesn’t change the fact that ISIS is simply another religious mutation, and is therefore just as legitimate as any other sect.
You can’t “pervert” Islam unless there is a singular Islam to pervert. And, as everyone knows, there are a whole lot of Islams out there.
It works the same way for the other monotheistic religions, too. In the 1980s, the difference between Catholic and Protestant could have meant the difference between death and life at the hands of the IRA.
So, who’s to say which one sect is right?
There are several different possible criteria one can use to determine the “truth” of a religion.
The first measure is determining how closely the practitioners of the religion follow the original texts.
In this sense, ISIS seems to be a more legitimate form of Islam, despite Obama’s protestations to the contrary.
In Graeme Wood’s excellent piece “What ISIS Really Wants” in The Atlantic, Bernard Haykel, a Princeton University professor and an expert on ISIS’s ideology, is quoted as saying: “Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,” but “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”
So, if one considers the original texts to determine the veracity of a religion, ISIS seems to beat out more modern versions of Islam.
Any other criteria to determine a “true” Islam are too nebulous to be used seriously. As religion drops unnecessary and outmoded tradition, they go farther away from the barbarity of their original texts and closer towards modern morals.
On a different note, It’s hard to believe Obama said something as Bush-level stupid as “They are not religious leaders — they’re terrorists.”
He doesn’t want to grant ISIS “legitimacy,” and I can sympathize.
But there is no way of determining the “legitimacy” of a religion except, perhaps, through adherence to its original texts. Just because ISIS is evil doesn’t disprove their religious philosophy. If it were that, nobody would have followed them.
If Obama truly thinks he has the power to determine which specific sects of Islam are true or false, (as a Christian at that!) then he claims to have the kind of religious authority that is more suited to a pope than a president.