A recent Al-Jazeera Arabic online poll shatters the dominant narrative that the Islamic State enjoys the support of only an isolated fraction of Arab Sunnis. Even
considering the demonstrated online mobilisation of Islamic State supporters, it is sobering that 46,060 people (accounting for 81 percent of poll respondents) voted “Yes” in response to the question “Do you consider the Islamic State’s
advances in Iraq and Syria in the interest of the region?”
Protest calling for the Khlifah in London. Guy Corbishley/Demotix. All rights reserved.
Not surprisingly,
Islamic State followers on social media were quick to circulate the results of
the poll as clear evidence of the group’s popularity. If many of the 19 percent of respondents who selected “No” are non-Sunnis
and/or non-Arabs, the percentage of Sunni readers of Al-Jazeera.net who support
the Islamic State could be even higher than the poll suggests.
In spite of the clear
popularity of the Islamic State—evidenced by the ease with which its fighters
overtook exclusively Sunni-majority areas in Iraq and Syria—it is nonetheless
understandable that observers have largely underestimated this mass appeal.
After all, it is difficult to accept the disturbing truth that there are masses
who not only excuse murder, torture, rape, sexual enslavement,
and genocide against minorities, but also consider them religious duties.
The first step
to addressing any crisis, however, must be to accurately comprehend its scope. Islamism is
not the result of foreign occupation or the recent political mismanagement of
certain countries in the Middle East; it has existed for decades as a primary
rival to Arab nationalism.
The initial rise of
Islamism can be dated to the brutal suppression of secular progressive
movements by Arab military regimes. Although Arab nationalism and anti-Semitism
were on the rise in the region in the 1950s and 1960s, there was also a strong
political current calling for equality and freedoms for men and women of all
backgrounds.
With the eradication
of these competing political movements and the weakening of the Baath regime in
Iraq in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein began integrating Islamist elements into his
nationalist discourse. By the time of the US-led invasion of the country in
2003, Baathists were acutely aware of the unique potentialities of an Arab
nationalist political enterprise grounded in Sunni Islamist rhetoric. Likewise,
after 2003, the Syrian Baath regime, fearing a fate similar to that
of its Iraqi counterpart, began allowing the growth of Islamism and the passage
of jihadists to Iraq to fight the coalition forces.
The Islamic State
thus partly grew out of the deterioration of the Baath regime in Iraq and the
disastrous pragmatism of the Syrian Baath regime, which included the release
of thousands of Syrian Islamists from prison in 2011. Ideologically, the
Islamic State appeals to fanatic Islamist discourse inherited from Al-Qaeda,
and in terms of state organisation and advanced methods of warfare, it relies
on the knowledge of former Iraqi Baathist
officials.
Today, the main rival
of Sunni Islamism is not a secular movement, but another branch of Islamism—namely Shi'a—which differs little in its expansionist ambitions and
rejection of other peoples' right to life. Aside from resistance on the
part of Kurds
and religious
minorities, the power struggle is being waged between two popular forces
that are both rooted in and motivated by the same fatal mythology.
The ultimate point to
be made is that the world is facing the powerful rise of religious
fascism no less dangerous than the Nazism of the 1930s, both in terms of
violence and popularity. In the place of Nazism’s pseudoscientific
justifications of its fascist imperial project, Islamism relies on religious
teachings to justify its genocidal campaigns against the different Other. Like
Nazism, Islamism openly celebrates war and the establishment of an empire on
the mass graves of entire peoples.
Attempts to justify
the popular rise of the Islamic State on the bases of the US-led invasion of
Iraq or Al-Maliki’s sectarian politics are no less problematic than attempts to
reduce Nazism to a reaction to the conditions imposed on Germany after WWI. The
discourse of the complete rejection of the Other has a long history in both
Islamism and Arab nationalism, which is largely independent of contemporary political and
economic crises.
Granted, economic and
political crises in the last dozen years have exacerbated underlying sectarian
divisions—mainly between Sunnis and Shi'a. However, ethnic and religious
intolerance have thrived in the region for decades, as Jews, Kurds, Copts, and
the indigenous people of North Africa know only too well.
International
approaches to confronting Islamism by supporting one faction against another
are neither pragmatic nor ethical. From the western support of jihadists in
Afghanistan against the Soviets, to Syria’s support of jihadists against
coalition forces in Iraq, such strategies have always proven fatal.