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The Clash of Civilizations That Isnt - The New Yorker

2/28/15, 7:42 PM

The Clash of Civilizations That Isnt

The leader of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, preaches during Friday prayer at a mosque in Mosul, Iraq.
Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY AL-FURGAN MEDIA/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY

Last week, the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen published a piece under the
headline Islam and the West at War. Something seemed amiss here. Surely a more-orless liberal columnist at the Times wasnt going to say what even George W. Bush was
unwilling to say: that we are at war with Islam itself. Maybe this was one of those cases
where the headline is meant ironically, and the piece goes on to show as much?
No such luck. The point of the column was to dismiss as empty talk the claim that
were not at war with Islam. Elaborating, Cohen wrote, Across a wide swath of territory,
in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, the West has been or is at war,
or near-war, with the Muslim world.
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The Clash of Civilizations That Isnt - The New Yorker

2/28/15, 7:42 PM

You might ask: How could it be a war against the Muslim world if its confined to five
countries that house only a minority of the worlds Muslims? Or: How could it be a war
against the Muslim world if most of the Muslims even in these five countries are not
the enemy?
Beats me. Anyway, heres a more pressing question: Is this a sign of things to come? Is
the clash-of-civilizations narrative, long favored on the right, starting to drift into the
mainstream? The Cohen column isnt the only data point suggesting as much.
On the same day Cohens column was posted, The Atlantic (where I was once a blogger)
unveiled a cover story called What ISIS Really Wants. The piece, by Graeme Wood, a
contributing editor at the magazine, was in part a response to President Obamas
longstanding refusal to use the kind of language favored by clash-of-civilizations
aficionados. Wood quoted Obama insisting that the so-called Islamic State is not
Islamic, and wrote, The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. The
Fox News Web site, among other venues, excerpted Woods article and linked to it. The
piece went viral.
For purposes of virulence, indeed, the timing was excellent. The article appeared right
before President Obama hosted a conference on violent extremism, at which he again
refused to call ISIS or any other extremists Islamic. His critics, as usual, took issue, and
the Atlantic piece helped feed the conversation.
While there are good reasons that a judicious President might not want to call ISIS
Islamic, there are also reasons that many scholars of religion look at the question
differently. All major religions have changed so much over time, and sprouted so many
branches, that a common rule of thumb is: if they say theyre Muslim, Christian, or
Buddhist and dont reject the most essential tenets of the faith, then thats what they are.
Mother Teresa and David Koresh, in this view, were both Christians. So calling ISIS
Islamic isnt novel enough to constitute news. But what did Wood mean by saying that
ISIS is very Islamic?

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The Clash of Civilizations That Isnt - The New Yorker

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He rested this claim about the deeply Islamic character of ISIS largely on the views of a
single scholar, Bernard Haykel, of Princeton. Haykels main point seems to have been
that ISIS isnt just making up an ideology and grafting it onto Islamic beliefs. ISIS draws
(if selectively) on the Koran and later Islamic texts; indeed, if you went back far enough
in time, you would find its views more widely accepted by Muslims and Muslim scholars
than has been the case in recent centuries.
After the Atlantic piece appeared, Haykel was interviewed by Jack Jenkins, of
ThinkProgress. Haykel emphasized that the Atlantic piece as a whole represented
Woods views, not his, and he qualified his views in ways Wood hadnt. This is
something I did point out to [Wood] but he didnt bring out in the piece: ISISs
representation of Islam is ahistorical. Its saying we have to go back to the seventh
century. Its denying the legal complexity of the [Islamic] legal tradition over a thousand
years.
Also: Wood had quoted Haykel emphatically dismissing the notion that Islam is a
religion of peace. (As if there is such a thing as Islam! Its what people do, and how
they interpret their texts.) In the ThinkProgress interview, fleshing out his view more
fully, Haykel said that what he had meant was that no religion is a religion of peace,
because all religions can have violent manifestations.
Scholars often consider journalistic treatments of their work insufficiently subtle, and I
have no way of knowing how clear Haykel made his views to Wood. Still, there are
subjects and times that demand particular fastidiousness on the part of journalists, even
if that means interrogating sources with inordinate thoroughness. My own view is that
the questions of whether Islam is a religion of peace and whether ISIS is very Islamic
coming, as they do, amid no small amount of anti-Muslim bigotryare perfect
examples. (This defacing of an Islamic school in Rhode Island was reported the day
before the Atlantic article was posted.)
In any event, the nuanced version of Haykels views will never fully catch up with the

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The Clash of Civilizations That Isnt - The New Yorker

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Graeme Wood version. The ever louder voices that depict Islam itself as in some sense
the problem will thus find it easier to cite even the liberal Atlantic. Just as, if they take
the next step and describe a war between the West and Islam, they can cite even the
liberal New York Times.
In 1996, when I reviewed Samuel Huntingtons book The Clash of Civilizations for
Slate, I fretted that Huntingtons world view could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This was before 9/11, and I wasnt thinking about Islam in particular. Huntingtons book
was about fault lines dividing various civilizations, and I was just making the general
point that if we think of, say, Japanese people as radically different from Americansas
Huntingtons book, I believed, encouraged us to dowe were more likely to treat Japan
in ways that deepened any Japanese-Western fault line.
Since 9/11, Ive realized that, in the case of Islam, the forces that could make the clash of
civilizations a self-fulfilling prophecy are particularly powerful. For one thing, in this
case, our actual enemies, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, themselves favor the clash-ofcivilizations narrative, and do their best to encourage it. When the Atlantic tells us that
ISIS is very Islamic and the New York Times runs the headline Islam and the West at

War, its party time in Mosul. Order up another round of decapitations! Get Roger
Cohen more freaked out! Maybe hell keep broadcasting a key recruiting pitch of both Al
Qaeda and ISIS: that the West is at war with Islam! (Wood noted, a week after his article
appeared, its popularity among ISIS supporters.)
People who insist on linking terrorism to Islam often say that only by doing thisonly by
seeing the problem for what it iscan we figure out what to do about it. Really? Long
before last week, we knew that ISIS does a good job of convincing some young Muslims
that its cause is authentically Islamic. What value has been added if we grant Woods
point that ISIS, in doing this job, can quote selectively from Islamic texts and point
selectively to ancient Islamic traditions? I guess this helps us understand one rhetorical
advantage that ISIS has in its recruiting. But since that particular advantagewhat
ancient texts say, what ancient people didis something we cant change, where do we
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The Clash of Civilizations That Isnt - The New Yorker

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go from there?
The part of ISISs rhetorical power that seems more worth pondering is the part that we
can do something about. When recruiters for ISIS and Al Qaeda say that the West is
fighting a war against Islam, they cite U.S. policies: drone strikes in Muslim countries,
the imprisonment of Muslims in Guantnamo, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
perceived U.S. support for Israels treatment of Palestinians, and so on. Obviously, we
shouldnt abandon any policy just because our enemies criticize it. But, when the policies
help our enemies with recruitment, that should at least be added to the cost-benefit
calculus.
Of course, many other factors also feed jihadi recruiting channels: political and
economic dysfunctions in some Arab nations, the economic and social status of
European Muslims, and so on. We may have less leverage over these things than over
American drone strikes, but theyre worth understanding and working to change.
Which leads to what may be the biggest problem with the views conveyed by Cohen and
Woodespecially as those views seep into Fox News and beyond and become further
simplified, if not warped. When people think of extremism as some kind of organic
expression of Islam, the belligerence of radical Muslims starts to seem like an
autonomous, intrinsically motivated forcesomething whose momentum doesnt derive
from mundane socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. Its something that you can stop,
if at all, only with physical counter-force. In other words: by killing lots of people. I dont
think its a coincidence that commentators who dismiss attempts to understand the
root causes of extremism tend to be emphatic in linking the extremism to Islam, and
often favor a massively violent response to it.
By the way, the wind is at their backs. Last week, CBS News reported that, for the first
time, a majority of Americans polledfifty-seven per centfavored sending ground
troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Havent we seen this movie? The Iraq War, more than any other single factor, created
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The Clash of Civilizations That Isnt - The New Yorker

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ISIS. After the 2003 invasion, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who led an obscure

group of radical Islamists, rebranded it as an Al Qaeda affiliate and used the wartime
chaos of Iraq to expand it. Al-Zarqawis movement came to be known as Al Qaeda in
Iraq, and then evolved into ISIS. Haykel confirmed by e-mail that the Iraq War was the
kind of thing that he had in mind when he said, in the ThinkProgress interview, that ISIS
is a product of very contingent, contextual, historical factors, and that there is nothing
predetermined in Islam that would lead to ISIS.
No, there isnt. But ISIS is here. And its here, in part, because we got all freaked out
about Al Qaeda and overreacted to it. And now were getting freaked out about ISIS.
As freakouts go, this one is certainly understandable. ISIS wants to terrify us, and in the
service of that mission has carried tactical atrocity to new heights of grotesqueness. And
both ISIS and Al Qaeda have inspired atrocities far from their home bases.
Its natural, when youre freaking out, to accept simple and dramatic, even
melodramatic, explanations. Its a clash of civilizations! Deep within this alien thing
known as Islam is an apocalyptic belligerence that is only now emerging in full form!
Nobody at The Atlantic or the New York Times has put it this way. (Wood, in fact, notes
that a large majority of Muslims reject ISIS, and neither Cohen nor Wood entirely
dismisses political and socioeconomic contributors to religious extremism.) But when
lite and generally liberal publications start broadcasting dubious catch phrases that
dovetail nicely with such explanations, I start to worry.
And the process feeds on itself. The more scared we get, the more likely our government
is to react with the kind of undiscerning ferocity that created ISIS as we know itand the
more likely Western extremists are to deface mosques, or worse. All of which will help
ISIS recruit more Muslims, thus leading to more atrocities in the West, as well as in the

Middle East, and making the whole thing seem even more like a clash of civilizations
between the West and Islam. And so on.
Woods Atlantic article has some interesting details about ISIS. For example: the groups
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The Clash of Civilizations That Isnt - The New Yorker

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leader believes that he is the eighth legitimate caliph, and that the apocalypse will
happen during the reign of the twelfth. Wood considers a clear understanding of this
apocalypticism very valuablea primary reason that its worth dwelling on the groups
religious character. But you could also argue that, if something like an apocalypse is
possible, putting undue emphasis on the groups religious character could hasten it.

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