Pondering ISIS

Day by day we read reports on the Middle East and its attendant chaos. It is oil production and wealth on the one hand coupled with political disagreements among the caliphates, kingdoms and ancient lands that have been there since prehistory. Thousands of years of prehistory; biblical epics in private and public, then in scrolls handed down through millennia. That’s how history began, the recorded facts and happenings of people large and small in scrolls, deep thinking persons, and finally encapsulated in their institutions.

Those institutions morphed into other forms, overheads and followers through some thousands of years. Today’s religious institutions are the results of that long history. And the history continues as it always has, changing and morphing yet into newer versions of yesterday’s beliefs and rites.

Radical Islam – today, yesterday and tomorrow – is a topic with the world’s rapt attention. We are paying attention precisely because we think we know the roots of Islam, and think about radical behavior, put the two together and then think we understand radical Islam. We don’t.

More importantly we don’t know how to deal with it. Not just ‘we’ in America, but the global ‘we’. Leaders throughout the globe do not understand Islam let alone Radical Islam. Yet we have to live with it in some manner, defend our respective borders from incursions of ‘evil and disruption’. In the doing of that defense, however, we are broadcasting our misunderstanding of the enemy. We don’t know the enemy. We think we do; but we don’t.

Perhaps we ought to change that right now.

Current media reports are of course riddled with political sentiment. That’s one thing we have to avoid in the future. Political discourse and dis-ingenuousness are distractions we can ill afford as a nation let alone the global community. Such is a scourge on the potential and well being of mankind. It is time we understood this.

Netanyahu doesn't know better how to deal with radical Islam than President Obama. Neither does John McCain or any other self-serving politician out of power. Their voices are noise. They produce chaos and an expansion of ignorance that adds to the chaos.

Instead we should pay attention to those voices among us that focus on matters of social organizations, religions, theology and culture. Other disciplines should be included as well.

For starters, Graeme Wood is a Canadian journalist and a political science lecturer at Yale. He has written extensively for high quality intellectual journals and magazines on topics related to world concerns. His latest scholarly work is a paper entitled “What ISIS Really Wants” as published in the National Journal. I picked it up on a news feed through MSN’s daily news website.

Wood’s article is deep. Its complexity mirrors the Gordian maze of Islam itself and its many rivers of followers throughout the religion. Islam is not just one thing or institutions. It is many things, organizations, religions and so on. Dealing with it as one is a major strategic error. And Graeme Wood points this out.

How is the world to deal with such radicalism when it appears to be entrenched in a major religion? Precisely the issue, Wood avers, and warns that we have done it wrong. Not just the UN or America, but the entire global community. We have done so because we don’t understand the ‘enemy’.

Read his article, then ask yourself the horde of questions that surely follow. Eventually we wind up with this prophetic (and pathetic) query: “What is the appropriate response of the global community to the threat of any radicalized religious sect? And then how do we craft a response that is both realistic and reassuring to all of the combatants embroiled in the effort?”

Educate ourselves so we are better thinkers and doers. It begins with understanding those we do not understand. And it also requires us to open our minds and think through the complexities of cultural and religious beliefs of those same people. It won’t hurt understanding our own cultural and religious beliefs (biases?) as well.

Then and only then can we resume doing the work that the world deserves of us. Stop complaining. Start understanding. Then get to work.

February 20, 2015