Post by Willow on Aug 22, 2014 11:09:07 GMT 9.5
I know CC, like me is fan of fantasy novels - and a lot of the dreadful acts happening in Syria and Iraq are the type of things liberally sprinkled throughout any fantasy epic - it is quite another thing to be reading about them or seeing them in the news
NEVER before has it been so easy to publicise a beheading. A click on a smartphone, a short tweet, and the image of a severed head can go viral around the world.
Yesterday, Twitter showed the decapitation of a kidnapped American journalist, James Foley.
Last week, a seven-year-old Australian boy was photographed in the Syrian city of Raqqa awkwardly holding up a severed head with both hands. “That’s my boy!” Dad tweeted proudly.
A few days later, it was the turn of a rapper from Maida Vale, west London. Standing in the same square as the Australian boy had done, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary (or Abu Kalashnikov, as he prefers to be known) was pictured in combat fatigues, pointing to the sky with one hand and clutching a head in the other. “Chillin’ with my homie,” he boasted, “or what’s left of him.”
While the social-media technology is modern, these atrocities have a primordial pedigree. In the Middle East, beheadings have been used by empire-builders to terrorise their opponents into submission for millennia. Across the border from Syria, in the Iraqi city of Mosul, fighters have been sticking heads on spikes in a manner chillingly reminiscent of kings who ruled there thousands of years ago.
Assyria, between the ninth and seventh centuries BC, was the greatest power in the Middle East and the advance of its armies invariably left behind a trail of headless corpses. “I hung heads on trees around the whole city,” boasted one king. When the followers of two rebel leaders were paraded through the capital wearing the heads of their masters around their necks, the news of it was assiduously publicised across the whole empire. The kings of Assyria would have loved Twitter.
It is this blurring of the ancient and the modern, the intrusion into a 21st-century war of nightmarish images reminiscent of antiquity, that renders the crisis in Syria and Iraq so disorienting.
Clearly, the circumstances that have enabled people to pose with severed heads in Raqqa and Mosul reflect particular circumstances: the civil war in Syria, the sectarianism in Iraq. Rotting states invariably breed young men with guns. Nevertheless, there is more than a simple breakdown of order in play. There are psychopaths aplenty loose in Syria and Iraq at the moment, but not every headhunter ranks as a madman.
The truth is altogether more disturbing. By their own lights, what these fighters are doing is not merely justified but right. They believe themselves to be fighting a darkness bred of many centuries: a darkness that it is their heaven-sent mission to dispel.
They certainly have long memories. The Western intervention that most obsesses them is not the US invasion of Iraq, or even the establishment of Israel, but a secret agreement signed back in 1916 by British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French opposite number, Francois Georges-Picot.
Lines drawn on a map by the two men divided what at the time were provinces of the Ottoman Empire into rival spheres of interest and ensured, when the Middle East finally won its independence from the British and the French, that the Arab world would remain diced up into separate countries. This is the settlement the fighters who have crossed from Syria into Iraq have pledged to erase.
Photographs released last week on Twitter showed them waving swords and guns in celebration as the border between the two countries was ceremonially bulldozed. Even the name of their organisation has been changed to mark what one of their propaganda videos gleefully terms “The End of Sykes-Picot”. After all, with the border gone it no longer makes sense for them to pledge loyalty to an Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. What was ISIS is now simply IS: the Islamic State.
It may seem startling that a ragtag army of a few thousand should call time on a diplomatic settlement that has lasted almost 100 years. In the Fertile Crescent, though, a century ranks as barely the blinking of an eye. The ambitions of the Islamic State, unlike the attempt to impose Western-style nation-states on the Middle East, go with rather than against the grain of the region’s history.
“This is not the first border we will break,” one Islamic State fighter vowed. “We will break other borders too.” This is the kind of boast an Assyrian king easily might have made.
The exercise of cruelty on its own, though, has never been sufficient to maintain conquests once won. If the Assyrians demonstrated just how effectively terror could be deployed in the cause of building an empire, then subsequent superpowers in the region illustrated a complementary truth: that the surest way to maintain a supremacy was to cut the defeated people some slack.
First the Persians and then the Romans were able to preside over immense multi-ethnic dominions by providing peace and order to the dutifully submissive. Security in exchange for taxes: that was the bargain. As a result, in antiquity the notion that a people might be entrusted by the heavens with a charge to spare the vanquished and to overthrow the haughty became increasingly taken for granted by successful imperialists. Religions in which a single god held sway over the universe evolved to provide a sanction for the fantasy of global empire. Autocrats laid claim to their thrones by virtue of right as well as might.
The empire the Islamic State dreams of re-establishing was recognisably bred of these cultural presumptions. “Caliph”, the rank that its leader awarded himself 1½ months ago, is one redolent of godliness as well as earthly power. The title means “successor”: successor to the prophet Mohammed who was himself, in the opinion of Muslims, the mouthpiece for that incomparable revelation of God, the holy Koran.
It was under the first four caliphs, so Muslim tradition teaches, that the Arabs, a people hitherto despised by the haughty superpowers of the day, had swept out from their desert fastnesses to conquer the Fertile Crescent and far beyond. Such a feat, coming from nowhere, seemed to the faithful then, as it has done since, a palpable miracle. “We went to meet our enemies with small abilities and weak forces,” as one medieval scholar put it, “and God made us triumph and gave us possession of their lands.”
Now, after a year in which they have routed forces many times their size, conquered a swath of territory and grown flush with gold and oil, the fighters of the Islamic State can justifiably make the same boast. They believe themselves the heirs of the first Muslims, charged by God with restoring to the world the pristine Islam of the days of Mohammed and his immediate successors.
The conviction is one that has inspired them to win great victories; but it also has brought inordinate pressure. The perceived failure of Muslims to live in a way worthy of the example provided by the early caliphate hangs heavy over the Islamic State. Why, after all, had God permitted the division of Arab lands in the first place, if not as a punishment?
“This blessed advance will not stop,” so the caliph of the Islamic State declared in a sermon last month, “until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy.”
Victory, though, cannot be secured on the battlefield alone. Only by living as the first Muslims had done and following God’s law to the letter will it be ensured. Obedience to the path followed by Mohammed, his deen , is what will enable the Islamic State to unite the faithful everywhere in a single caliphate and to rule the world.
None of which is good news. Armed to the teeth with Humvees and smartphones the Islamic State may be; but the literalism with which it interprets the inheritance of Muslim scripture obliges its fighters to live by the moral standards of antiquity. Islam was born into a world that took for granted the right of conquerors to extort tribute from the conquered; to capture and keep slaves; to maim and execute rebels.
Scattered through the Koran are verses that, read in isolation, may seem to justify these practices. The implications for those the Islamic State condemns as kuffar, or non-believers, are therefore ominous in the extreme.
Muslims deemed to be inadequately Islamic have been crucified or shot. Christians, on the say-so of a Koranic verse that grants them tolerance in exchange for acknowledging their own submission and paying a tax, have had their churches stolen and been stripped of their belongings. Yazidis, the adherents of an ancient faith that has no mention in the Koran, have been condemned as pagans and targeted for slaughter.
Nasser Muthana, a former medical student from Cardiff now fighting with the Islamic State, spelled out the details in a chilling tweet: “Kuffar are afraid we will slaughter yazidis, our deen is clear we will kill their men, take their women and children as slaves insha Allah.”
And so it is coming to pass.
The brute literalism of those who would interpret the Koran as a licence to maim, enslave and kill represents a challenge to everyone who prizes it as a revelation from God, supremely compassionate and wise. The more successful the fighters of the Islamic State are on the battlefield, the more urgent it becomes to defeat them in mosques and seminar rooms. Victory over them cannot be secured militarily.
This battle has to be fought and won by theologians.
Why, for instance, do Islamic militants think a beheading is something to revel in?
Not just because it terrifies their enemies; not just because it demonstrates their own martial prowess. Nothing is permissible in the Islamic State, after all, unless it is believed to be divinely licensed — and beheadings, in the opinion of its fighters, are indeed sanctioned.
“I will instil terror into the hearts of the unbelievers,” God declares in the Koran. “Strike off their heads, then, and strike off all their fingertips.” Mohammed is said to have ordered the decapitation of 700 rebellious Jews. His sword — after which the Iranian battle tank Zulfiqar is named — translates into English as “cleaver of vertebrae”.
That there are other, richer, more nuanced interpretations of these various verses and traditions in Islam goes without saying. Indeed, so completely does it go without saying that there is a temptation to take it for granted.
This, amid the horrors of what is happening in the Fertile Crescent, would be a mistake. The appeal of the brutal and murderous literalism of the Islamic State is too lethal to permit such complacency.
Non-Muslims may well find it startling that a debate over Islamic scriptures could have any significance beyond the mosque.
We live in an age, though, when antiquity has begun to intrude on the present more bruisingly than it has done for many centuries.
What the various shades of opinion among communists were during the Cold War, the disputes among Muslims are now: a motor driving world events.
Already, as the wretched Yazidis and Christians of Iraq can vouch, they have become a matter of life and death.
The Sunday Times
Tom Holland is a British historian.
NEVER before has it been so easy to publicise a beheading. A click on a smartphone, a short tweet, and the image of a severed head can go viral around the world.
Yesterday, Twitter showed the decapitation of a kidnapped American journalist, James Foley.
Last week, a seven-year-old Australian boy was photographed in the Syrian city of Raqqa awkwardly holding up a severed head with both hands. “That’s my boy!” Dad tweeted proudly.
A few days later, it was the turn of a rapper from Maida Vale, west London. Standing in the same square as the Australian boy had done, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary (or Abu Kalashnikov, as he prefers to be known) was pictured in combat fatigues, pointing to the sky with one hand and clutching a head in the other. “Chillin’ with my homie,” he boasted, “or what’s left of him.”
While the social-media technology is modern, these atrocities have a primordial pedigree. In the Middle East, beheadings have been used by empire-builders to terrorise their opponents into submission for millennia. Across the border from Syria, in the Iraqi city of Mosul, fighters have been sticking heads on spikes in a manner chillingly reminiscent of kings who ruled there thousands of years ago.
Assyria, between the ninth and seventh centuries BC, was the greatest power in the Middle East and the advance of its armies invariably left behind a trail of headless corpses. “I hung heads on trees around the whole city,” boasted one king. When the followers of two rebel leaders were paraded through the capital wearing the heads of their masters around their necks, the news of it was assiduously publicised across the whole empire. The kings of Assyria would have loved Twitter.
It is this blurring of the ancient and the modern, the intrusion into a 21st-century war of nightmarish images reminiscent of antiquity, that renders the crisis in Syria and Iraq so disorienting.
Clearly, the circumstances that have enabled people to pose with severed heads in Raqqa and Mosul reflect particular circumstances: the civil war in Syria, the sectarianism in Iraq. Rotting states invariably breed young men with guns. Nevertheless, there is more than a simple breakdown of order in play. There are psychopaths aplenty loose in Syria and Iraq at the moment, but not every headhunter ranks as a madman.
The truth is altogether more disturbing. By their own lights, what these fighters are doing is not merely justified but right. They believe themselves to be fighting a darkness bred of many centuries: a darkness that it is their heaven-sent mission to dispel.
They certainly have long memories. The Western intervention that most obsesses them is not the US invasion of Iraq, or even the establishment of Israel, but a secret agreement signed back in 1916 by British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French opposite number, Francois Georges-Picot.
Lines drawn on a map by the two men divided what at the time were provinces of the Ottoman Empire into rival spheres of interest and ensured, when the Middle East finally won its independence from the British and the French, that the Arab world would remain diced up into separate countries. This is the settlement the fighters who have crossed from Syria into Iraq have pledged to erase.
Photographs released last week on Twitter showed them waving swords and guns in celebration as the border between the two countries was ceremonially bulldozed. Even the name of their organisation has been changed to mark what one of their propaganda videos gleefully terms “The End of Sykes-Picot”. After all, with the border gone it no longer makes sense for them to pledge loyalty to an Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. What was ISIS is now simply IS: the Islamic State.
It may seem startling that a ragtag army of a few thousand should call time on a diplomatic settlement that has lasted almost 100 years. In the Fertile Crescent, though, a century ranks as barely the blinking of an eye. The ambitions of the Islamic State, unlike the attempt to impose Western-style nation-states on the Middle East, go with rather than against the grain of the region’s history.
“This is not the first border we will break,” one Islamic State fighter vowed. “We will break other borders too.” This is the kind of boast an Assyrian king easily might have made.
The exercise of cruelty on its own, though, has never been sufficient to maintain conquests once won. If the Assyrians demonstrated just how effectively terror could be deployed in the cause of building an empire, then subsequent superpowers in the region illustrated a complementary truth: that the surest way to maintain a supremacy was to cut the defeated people some slack.
First the Persians and then the Romans were able to preside over immense multi-ethnic dominions by providing peace and order to the dutifully submissive. Security in exchange for taxes: that was the bargain. As a result, in antiquity the notion that a people might be entrusted by the heavens with a charge to spare the vanquished and to overthrow the haughty became increasingly taken for granted by successful imperialists. Religions in which a single god held sway over the universe evolved to provide a sanction for the fantasy of global empire. Autocrats laid claim to their thrones by virtue of right as well as might.
The empire the Islamic State dreams of re-establishing was recognisably bred of these cultural presumptions. “Caliph”, the rank that its leader awarded himself 1½ months ago, is one redolent of godliness as well as earthly power. The title means “successor”: successor to the prophet Mohammed who was himself, in the opinion of Muslims, the mouthpiece for that incomparable revelation of God, the holy Koran.
It was under the first four caliphs, so Muslim tradition teaches, that the Arabs, a people hitherto despised by the haughty superpowers of the day, had swept out from their desert fastnesses to conquer the Fertile Crescent and far beyond. Such a feat, coming from nowhere, seemed to the faithful then, as it has done since, a palpable miracle. “We went to meet our enemies with small abilities and weak forces,” as one medieval scholar put it, “and God made us triumph and gave us possession of their lands.”
Now, after a year in which they have routed forces many times their size, conquered a swath of territory and grown flush with gold and oil, the fighters of the Islamic State can justifiably make the same boast. They believe themselves the heirs of the first Muslims, charged by God with restoring to the world the pristine Islam of the days of Mohammed and his immediate successors.
The conviction is one that has inspired them to win great victories; but it also has brought inordinate pressure. The perceived failure of Muslims to live in a way worthy of the example provided by the early caliphate hangs heavy over the Islamic State. Why, after all, had God permitted the division of Arab lands in the first place, if not as a punishment?
“This blessed advance will not stop,” so the caliph of the Islamic State declared in a sermon last month, “until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy.”
Victory, though, cannot be secured on the battlefield alone. Only by living as the first Muslims had done and following God’s law to the letter will it be ensured. Obedience to the path followed by Mohammed, his deen , is what will enable the Islamic State to unite the faithful everywhere in a single caliphate and to rule the world.
None of which is good news. Armed to the teeth with Humvees and smartphones the Islamic State may be; but the literalism with which it interprets the inheritance of Muslim scripture obliges its fighters to live by the moral standards of antiquity. Islam was born into a world that took for granted the right of conquerors to extort tribute from the conquered; to capture and keep slaves; to maim and execute rebels.
Scattered through the Koran are verses that, read in isolation, may seem to justify these practices. The implications for those the Islamic State condemns as kuffar, or non-believers, are therefore ominous in the extreme.
Muslims deemed to be inadequately Islamic have been crucified or shot. Christians, on the say-so of a Koranic verse that grants them tolerance in exchange for acknowledging their own submission and paying a tax, have had their churches stolen and been stripped of their belongings. Yazidis, the adherents of an ancient faith that has no mention in the Koran, have been condemned as pagans and targeted for slaughter.
Nasser Muthana, a former medical student from Cardiff now fighting with the Islamic State, spelled out the details in a chilling tweet: “Kuffar are afraid we will slaughter yazidis, our deen is clear we will kill their men, take their women and children as slaves insha Allah.”
And so it is coming to pass.
The brute literalism of those who would interpret the Koran as a licence to maim, enslave and kill represents a challenge to everyone who prizes it as a revelation from God, supremely compassionate and wise. The more successful the fighters of the Islamic State are on the battlefield, the more urgent it becomes to defeat them in mosques and seminar rooms. Victory over them cannot be secured militarily.
This battle has to be fought and won by theologians.
Why, for instance, do Islamic militants think a beheading is something to revel in?
Not just because it terrifies their enemies; not just because it demonstrates their own martial prowess. Nothing is permissible in the Islamic State, after all, unless it is believed to be divinely licensed — and beheadings, in the opinion of its fighters, are indeed sanctioned.
“I will instil terror into the hearts of the unbelievers,” God declares in the Koran. “Strike off their heads, then, and strike off all their fingertips.” Mohammed is said to have ordered the decapitation of 700 rebellious Jews. His sword — after which the Iranian battle tank Zulfiqar is named — translates into English as “cleaver of vertebrae”.
That there are other, richer, more nuanced interpretations of these various verses and traditions in Islam goes without saying. Indeed, so completely does it go without saying that there is a temptation to take it for granted.
This, amid the horrors of what is happening in the Fertile Crescent, would be a mistake. The appeal of the brutal and murderous literalism of the Islamic State is too lethal to permit such complacency.
Non-Muslims may well find it startling that a debate over Islamic scriptures could have any significance beyond the mosque.
We live in an age, though, when antiquity has begun to intrude on the present more bruisingly than it has done for many centuries.
What the various shades of opinion among communists were during the Cold War, the disputes among Muslims are now: a motor driving world events.
Already, as the wretched Yazidis and Christians of Iraq can vouch, they have become a matter of life and death.
The Sunday Times
Tom Holland is a British historian.