ISIS DOES NOT REPRESENT ISLAM

         By Kazi Anwarul Masud( former Secretary and ambassador)

  FOR PUBLICATION ON  FRIDAY 10th OCTOBER 2014

 The emergence of ISIS or ISIL  in Iraq and Syria bringing with it the brutality that  any Hitlerite or Stalinist regime   is accompanied by has now become a serious threat to the civilized world. That ISIS should be destroyed is not even debatable. The US and UK along with some Arab countries in the region are engaged in a fight to deny ISIS the benefits it draws from the territories it has occupied to become a sustainable "caliphate" that challenges the core values of the world order and the UN structure sanctifying the inviolability and sovereignty of the member states. Some in the West have asked questions about the "silence" of the Muslim world to the atrocities committed, in particular the beheading of the two American journalists and a British aid worker,  by ISIS. Lest the Western world unknowingly blames the Muslim countries of complicity through silence in the brutalities committed it would be pertinent to bring to notice  the reaction given by the Muslims. Two of the leading voices in the Muslim world denounced the persecution of Christians in Iraq at the hands of extremists proclaiming a caliphate under the name Islamic State. The most explicit condemnation came from Iyad Ameen Madani, the Secretary General for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the group representing 57 countries, and1.4 billion Muslims. In a statement, he officially denounced the “forced deportation under the threat of execution” of Christians, calling it a “crime that cannot be tolerated.” The Secretary General  distanced Islam from the actions of ISIS, as the actions  “have nothing to do with Islam and its principles that call for justice, kindness, fairness, freedom of faith and coexistence.”Meanwhile, Turkey’s top cleric, the spiritual successor to the caliphate under the Ottoman Empire, also touched on the topic during a peace conference of Islamic scholars. In a not-so-veiled swipe at ISIS, Mehmet Gormez declared that “an entity that lacks legal justification has no authority to declare war against a political gathering, any country or community.” He criticized ISIS for its hostility towards “people with different views, values and beliefs, and regard them as enemies.” Additionally Sunni and Shia clerics in Iraq jointly distributed a religious edict declaring ISIS as an un-Islamic terrorist organization. Over 80 Muslim intellectuals, activists and religious leaders in India jointly urged    the United Nations to hold ISIS accountable for its brutality, which they termed as a "crime against humanity" and "religious cleansing." Over 100 British Sunni and Shia Imams also urged Muslim youth to stay away from ISIS, which they branded as an illegitimate and vicious group. Reports have surfaced about individuals trying to recruit fighters in Bangladesh for ISIS.  In the current UN General Assembly session both the Bangladesh and Indian  Prime Ministers expressed unreserved determination to fight  terrorism in all its forms. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina told the UNGA of maintaining  'zero-tolerance' policy to all forms of terrorism, violent extremism, radicalization and religion-based politics. She expressed her firm resolve to not allowing any terrorist individual or entity to use Bangladesh  territory against any state. "The anti-liberation forces continue to remain active in destroying the progressive and secular fabric of our nation. They resort to religious militancy and violent extremism in every opportunity." Apart from the fact that Prime Minister Hasina's  stated  policy accords with that of the  civilized world this policy would not adversely affect the employment of thousands of Bangladeshis working in the Middle East as the US-UK war on ISIS is being supported by the GCC countries as well.  In the same vein Narendra Modi warned of growing fault lines  In West Asia. Narendra Modi in his  UNGA speech reminded the world  of his country’s abiding battle against extremist groups, and took a swipe at countries that give them shelter. Prime Minister Modi, without naming names, hinted at India’s longstanding contention that its rival, Pakistan, backs groups that have carried out terrorist attacks on Indian soil. “Some countries are giving refuge to international terrorists,” he said. “They consider terrorism to be a tool of their policy.”He  signaled his support for the US' renewed determination to fight terrorism.   Peter Bergen, CNN's National Security Analyst in an article ( should we still fear al-Qaida-Feb 3 2013) downgraded the possibility of terrorism's victory over liberal democracy. Bergen opined that radical Islamists refusal to accept pluralism diminishes  its appeal to general people and such refusal   is invariably a recipe for irrelevance or defeat. Bergen pointed out that in not one nation in the Muslim world since 9/11 has a jihadist militant group seized control of a country. And al Qaeda and its allies' record of effective attacks in the West has been non-existent since 2005.With threats like these, Bergen continues,  "we can all sleep soundly at night". One hopes Peter Bergen's optimism would not be that of Neville Chamberlain's  advice to the British people to go to bed after signing the Munich Agreement in 1938 that Winston Churchill described as a choice between war and shame and Britain having chosen shame would go to war. At the same time one would like to believe that the West in particular would not be gullible to believe in  the anti-Muslim crusade waged by neo-cons like Robert Kagan, Princeton historian Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington of The Clash of Civilizations fame  rekindling the idea of a crusade between the "defeated Islam and the victorious "Christianity" and the superiority of one faith over the other. Leon Hadar a global affairs analyst termed  Islam as the “Green Peril,” green being the symbolic color of the religion, and described the dominant perception of Islam as “a cancer spreading around the globe, undermining the legitimacy of Western values,” as represented by the “Muslim fundamentalist, a Khomeini-like creature armed with a radical ideology and nuclear weapons, intent on launching a jihad.” Benjamin  Barber more bleakly illustrated this discord as a “Jihad vs. McWorld” struggle, in which globalization confronted the “retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed,” in which Islam functioned as a stubborn source of parochial, anti-globalist identity.  However, the most scathing criticism came from  Bernard Lewis, Robert Kaplan, and Samuel Huntington.   Lewis contended that Islam had historically experienced periods of inspired hatred and violence, and that political violence let loose by radical Islamist is partly a revenge on the non-Muslim world, in particular on the Christendom. A wave of anger rampaged through the Muslim world due to its traumatic domination by the West, and many Muslims were thus immanently opposed to Western civilization and its creations—capitalism, democracy, even liberalism.  Lewis  observed that “It should by now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies… This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.” Significantly  Lewis calls secularism and its ‘worldwide expansion’ (that is, globalization) as flashpoints on which the Muslim world would wage a struggle or resistance. Islam operates as one of the more destabilizing factors in the globalized world because globalization unmasks and unleashes previously hidden, obscured tensions. More so than Lewis, Huntington presented his ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis as a thinly veiled polemic against Fukuyama’s  prediction of the victory of Western system of democracy and liberalism over the illiberal society that prevailed during the Cold War and hence the "end of history" in terms of ideological evolution.  He argued that if large parts of humanity still refuse to see the obvious superiority of Western ideas, it is because of deeply rooted incompatibilities in the collective makeup and value systems of their civilizations(Islam and Globalization: Secularism, Religion, and Radicalism-- Sean L. Yom   Columbia Professor late Edward Said,  best known for the book Orientalism (1978), an analysis of the cultural representations that are the bases of Orientalism.  In an article ( The Clash of Ignorance-The Nation) he scathingly critiqued both Lewis and Huntington of being opportunistic for supplying  the Americans with   a thesis about "a new phase" in world politics after the end of the cold war. Said accused both of " the personification of enormous entities called "the West" and "Islam"  recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary. What has to be realized that Islam despite its insistence on subservience to Allah is not static and oblivious to changes in the world. If one were to accept that the fundamental teachings of all religions are basically the same while they may have different rituals then the brutalities committed by ISIS and al-Qaida varieties of military adventures are aberrations of the true teachings of Islam and does more harm to the Muslims world wide than it does to the victims of their brutalities. One also has to understand that Islamism is a contextual phenomenon that seeks to redress that injustice (e.g. Palestinian issue) done to the Muslims and is not a "textual trap door or scriptural loophole".  In the ultimate analysis the Islamic world has to demonstrate in forceful terms that ISIS or any other form of violent expression in the name of Islam has to be rejected and destroyed to convince the skeptics in the West that Islam and modernity are not mutually exclusive but are travelers  of the same train towards global  peace, prosperity and development.