Blood-red: the material network that is IS is not best understood by parsing its religious discourse. Flickr / Karl-Ludwig Poggemann. Some rights reserved.
The first time
as tragedy, the second time as farce. Yet it is not so much history that
repeats itself this time around, as Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, but rather its
deciphering, as readings of Islamic State (IS) are rehashing all-too-familiar perspectives.
After al-Qaeda
stormed on to the world stage that fateful Tuesday in September 2001, analyses systematically
highlighted its religious fundamentalism, as well as its irrationality and barbarity.
Amid emotional commentary, ideologically amplified, the study of al-Qaeda remained
for a long time confined to journalism and policy planning. When academe fought
its way in, it overwhelmingly erred too, with neo-Orientalist interpretations
of an organisation for whom Islam not only was deployed instrumentally but
always came second to its political and
martial agenda.
Missed were the innovations
in strategic displacement by the first transnational non-state armed group in
history, its offsetting reinvention of
political violence and its lasting influences on a new generation of individual
violent actors (from Anders Breivik to the Kouachi brothers, by way of Malik Nidal
Hassan and the Tsarnaevs) and self-empowered paramilitaries, which came to
control vast territories in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Mali, the Central
African Republic, Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen. The Salafist ideology of al-Qaeda
was endlessly dissected, while, under less scrutiny, its challenging modus operandi was altering the
parameters of early 21st-century international relations.
Logics of
eradication and termination dominated such hybrid, journalistic-policy-scholarly
discourse. And inevitably, at the occasion of Osama Bin Laden’s anti-climactic
disappearance—following the largest manhunt in history, his number two still on
the run—al-Qaeda was decreed defeated
and finished. Seldom had a narrative of closure been so misleading.
Paradoxes
When, nine
months ago, IS announced that it was becoming a latter-day ‘caliphate’,
this sequence was readily rehearsed. Familiar arguments quickly reappeared, once again
advancing savant theses about the
motivations of this new entity and competitively gauging its ‘Islamicity’. For
it is no small paradox that, after 14 years of planetary discussion of al-Qaeda
and dozens of explicit discourses by its leaders, we are still asking the same,
self-serving questions: What does al-Qaeda/IS ‘really
want’? Does it even exist? Is
this all about the ‘liberal west’?
The reification
of the predictable
maturation of a promethean al-Qaeda franchise gone local, before moving to
surpass its begetter, into a fantasy of an inscrutable Islamist force smacks of avoidance. Confining analysis
thus to the religious theatrics of the group provides the ‘expert’ with the
convenience of the familiar, with a ready translation into mainstream
narratives of that ever ‘problematic’ faith, Islam. Yet the insistent logic of al-Qaeda
then and IS today is arguably not so much religion but the transformation of
political violence, an eminently ‘post-modern’ shift made possible first and
foremost by globalisation.
Yes, al-Qaeda
spoke repeatedly of the ‘caliphate’ as a distant aspiration, and IS is formally
pursuing it today, in statements and deeds. Yet if both are ‘religious’ groups,
so are many other irredentist entities: beyond the Middle East and north
Africa, religion
has come to occupy a central place in today’s conflicts—one third of the
countries of the world are experiencing, in one form or another, a ‘religious
conflict’.
This intensified
interface between religion and global politics is merely a historical phase
resulting from cumulative specific episodes over the past 35 years: the decline
and eventual end of the cold war, the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan and the associated rise of transnational Islamism, ‘9/11’ and
its international imprint, and the invasion of Iraq and the opening of
Pandora’s box turning Sunna against Shia. If perceiving IS as a religious actor
is therefore partially warranted, it is necessary to explain why this is a
moment of increased visibility of religion-driven and religion-dominated
conflicts, and also to connect the evolution of the ‘caliphate’
as a specific political project to larger post-colonial
dynamics.
Consequences
The importance of
IS lies elsewhere, in three challenging features inviting modesty on the part
of the analyst.
Familiar arguments quickly reappeared, once again advancing savant theses about the motivations of this new entity and competitively gauging its ‘Islamicity’.
First, the
degenerate consequences of an Iraqi society preoccupied with and occupied by
war for three decades since 1980—the combined aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s
1980s wars, the 1990s United Nations embargo and the US-led invasion of the
2000s have ‘monstered’
a generation, viscerally hitting out amid lasting social dystrophies. Secondly,
the accelerated statisation of an armed
group, inspiring others, and the concomitant swift destatisation of states is yielding a fluid state-society dialectic
to which the ‘international community’ has so far unimaginatively responded by stubborn
interventions, only making matters worse.
Finally, the ability of successively Jama’at
al Tawhid wal Jihad (1999-2004), al-Qaeda in the Land of Mesopotamia
(2004-06) and the Islamic State in Iraq (2006-13) to invoke
and revoke al-Qaeda and be reborn as the Islamic State in Iraq and the
Levant (2013-14) and then the Islamic State (2014-), with an ambition to
re-establish an Islamic caliphate defunct since 1924, is ushering in a second
stage in the transnationalism pioneered by al-Qaeda. The paradoxically
simultaneous pursuit of a territorial ambition (in the Levant) and a globalised
influence (19 pledges
of allegiance and/or support since July 2014) reveals a hybrid entity in the making—one
continuously transformed internally by an open-ended interaction among radical
Islamists, thousands of über-ideologised
and disenfranchised youth coming from round the world, Syrian militants bent on
bringing down Bashar al-Assad, former Ba’athist officers driven by Tikriti vengefulness
and Baghdadi hoodlums tortured in US and Shia militia prisons, all sporadically
allied with tribesmen with economics and social order on their minds.
In the prevailing discourse, however, such
complexity is reduced to musings on the religiosity of the group, inconsequential
debates about its appellation, conspiratorial thinking about its socio-genesis
and premature
announcements of its defeat.
This all comes at an unaffordable cost, as we know—having played this game and intellectually
lost once before.