The West has been left in shock by the Paris attack, only the latest in a string of massacres by the self-proclaimed Islamic State, just as it has been each time terrorists perpetrate this kind of vicious atrocity.
This is because we fail to understand the motivation behind such attacks. Western leaders have contributed to this misinformation, portraying terrorists as violent nationalists or radical ideologues, but refusing to conclusively link this global phenomenon to Islam.
If someone is yelling “God is great!” moments before they blow themselves up in a crowd, I find it rather misleading for leaders to blame their attacks on reprehensible political ideology. Political extremism does not promise a plush afterlife to someone who dies for the cause. That is commonly understood to be the domain of religion.
It is not just disillusionment, boredom or poverty that leads young men and women to join terrorist organizations like ISIS, but a deep religious attraction. ISIS is flourishing in large part because of its ability to portray itself as a reincarnation of the war-like (and militarily successful) early Islam. To deny or ignore the militaristic nature of early Islam is to remain ignorant of the modern appeal of ISIS and therefore to be ineffective at stopping its flow of recruits.
Taking a broad historical perspective of Islam shows that the peaceful, mainstream Islam of today is a rather recent development. For hundreds of years after the founding of Islam, Muslim armies conquered huge swaths of the Middle East, North and East Africa and Central and South Asia, steadily increasing the influence of Islam through military means. At different periods in the Middle Ages, Muslim armies even captured and held territory in what is now Europe, occupying the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans, and swaths of Eastern Europe for centuries.
To all this you might reply that this was just warfare carried out by those who happened to be of a certain faith. Early Islamic culture, however, was heavily influenced by warlike passages in the Quran and teachings of the hadith that gave instructions for conquering and subjugating non-Muslim lands.
Many would argue that modern terrorist groups are fundamentally driven by the desire to repel Western meddling in the region and that if we would just get out of the Middle East, terrorists would leave us alone. But ISIS, the most virulent metastasis of radical Islam yet, turns such conventional wisdom on its head. It did not come to prominence until after the U.S. withdrew from Iraq and its leaders want the West to recommit militarily. Islamic State’s avowed purpose is to bring about the apocalyptic struggle between Muslims and infidels that will occur in the end times, a tradition deeply rooted in Islamic scripture.
Now, Western leaders’ refusal to identify radical Islamic movements as such is actually based on a well-intentioned strategy of not alienating the majority of Muslims who do not condone such acts of violence.
But to effectively deal with terrorists, we must confront them for what they are while making a distinction between Islam as practiced by a majority of the world’s Muslims and its radicalized form.
Graeme Wood writes in The Atlantic “Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.”
Is modern mainstream Islam violent and anti-West? No. Are groups like ISIS remotely within the fold of mainstream Islam? No.
But does ISIS have historical and textual precedent for its bloody attempt to establish a caliphate and wage war on the west? Absolutely.
Until both Western governments and moderate Muslim leaders can accept that the so-called Islamic State is in fact a radical Islamic movement and work together to curb its religious appeal to disaffected young Muslims, we cannot hope to defeat it.