Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Volkerball
Oct 15, 2009

by FactsAreUseless
I've decided to make this thread so people can finally gently caress off get into this debate in a thread where it wouldn't be a derail for the first time ever. The topic is whether there is something fundamentally wrong with Islam that inherently creates terrorism. Today, that debate revolves around the lovely, regressive terrorist assholes we call ISIS, who are bringing about an unprecedented level of shittiness, regressiveness, and terroristness. As far as that goes, there are two articles I would consider must reads when it comes to understanding both sides of the debate.

The first, "What ISIS Really Wants," played a huge role in reigniting this debate, and was widely circulated. Its central thesis is that ISIS is a natural progression of Islam, as its creation is based around a group of zealots trying to follow a valid, perhaps the most valid, interpretation of Islamic Law. As such, we need to address the root of the problem, Islam, in some way, in order to truly deal with extremists like ISIS.

quote:

To take one example: In September, Sheikh Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Islamic State’s chief spokesman, called on Muslims in Western countries such as France and Canada to find an infidel and “smash his head with a rock,” poison him, run him over with a car, or “destroy his crops.” To Western ears, the biblical-sounding punishments—the stoning and crop destruction—juxtaposed strangely with his more modern-sounding call to vehicular homicide. (As if to show that he could terrorize by imagery alone, Adnani also referred to Secretary of State John Kerry as an “uncircumcised geezer.”)

But Adnani was not merely talking trash. His speech was laced with theological and legal discussion, and his exhortation to attack crops directly echoed orders from Muhammad to leave well water and crops alone—unless the armies of Islam were in a defensive position, in which case Muslims in the lands of kuffar, or infidels, should be unmerciful, and poison away.

The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.

Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.

The second, The Clash of Civilizations That Isn't, was written as a response. It argues that believing ISIS is very Islamic, and acting accordingly, will make that a self-fulfilling prophecy, as ISIS' recruiting thrives on the belief that the West is on a crusade against Muslims.

quote:

Since 9/11, I’ve 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-of-civilizations 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,” it’s party time in Mosul. Order up another round of decapitations! Get Roger Cohen more freaked out! Maybe he’ll 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 this—only by seeing the problem “for what it is”—can 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 Wood’s 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 advantage—what ancient texts say, what ancient people did—is something we can’t change, where do we go from there?

Which leads to what may be the biggest problem with the views conveyed by Cohen and Wood—especially 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 force—something whose momentum doesn’t derive from mundane socioeconomic and geopolitical factors. It’s something that you can stop, if at all, only with physical counter-force. In other words: by killing lots of people. I don’t think it’s 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.

So with all this in mind, what is the role, if any, that Islam plays in creating terrorism?

As a last note, this is not stormfront. If you intend to make a massive, sweeping generalizations about 1.6 billion people, one way or the other, back it up with a source. If you're going to make a claim about how many Muslims are or aren't sympathetic to ISIS' ideology, find a poll and post it, or shut up. They're out there. I promise. There's facts and there's stereotypes, and discussion is going to go a lot smoother if it's based around the former.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Invicta{HOG}, M.D.
Jan 16, 2002
I don't know how long this thread will last or whether it will turn into a cesspool but while it is here I figure I will post a question I've wanted to ask for awhile in the Middle East thread but did not want to start a derail.

Is there a book or a series of articles or even a well-regarded webpage which collects the various theologic arguments made by suicide bombers, salafist groups, etc. and examines them in light of Islamic jurisprudence, textual support, etc.? One of the thing which might help frame this discussion is if someone has already objectively looked at the various published motivations and examined how they fit with what is found in the Qur'an, the hadith, or the more commonly accepted schools. For instance, if a verse is taken out of context it might look like it supports an action but if all of the schools interpret it differently it might help put the passage in a more nuanced light.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



I don't think Islam has anything much to do with terrorism, though I suppose some aspects of the religion's teachings might hinder or support certain forms of actions.

The IRA was doing most of this poo poo well before ISIS did, and if you had more occupied/colonized Christian nations you'd probably have more groups of this sort with a Christian flavoring.

Rigged Death Trap
Feb 13, 2012

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

Perhaps the same could be said of all religions!
But for reals Islamist terrorism and the Salafist rise is a product of geopolitics and proxy warfare rather than an the result of an equivalent of Martin Luther nailing his theses to the door.

Peel
Dec 3, 2007

Rigged Death Trap posted:

Perhaps the same could be said of all religions!

Yeah basically.

Given that Christianity (to take just one example) has varied between the crusades and pacifism, the prosperity gospel and liberation theology, chattel slavery and abolitionism and more, it's not clear to me why, even if it were to be demonstrated that X ISIS position follows fairly directly from some authority and requires interpretive gymnastics to avoid, this should be considered important to non-Muslims.

The claim that Islam is inherently bad in some fashion requires a great deal of legwork beyond just pointing to how you prefer to interpret chunks of Islamic theology and history. I find the wandering preacher on the corner far more Christlike than the Pope - but so what? And given how islamophobia is a major vector of bigotry in the modern West, anyone who wants to claim it had better put in that legwork first before carrying water for racists.

Peel fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Jul 4, 2015

Zulily Zoetrope
Jun 1, 2011

Muldoon

Volkerball posted:

The topic is whether there is something fundamentally wrong with Islam that inherently creates terrorism.

I'm pretty sure religious law as it is written is entirely divorced from how it's interpreted and implemented.

The principal religion of the western world centers on parables about a magical socialist, which gave us devout Christians like Reagan, Thatcher and Hitler, and was used to justify things like slavery, witch trials and capitalism.

I'm no Qu'ran scholar, but I do know several Muslims who haven't poisoned my crops or run me over, and I have encountered (on the internet, mostly) Christians who propose nuking the middle east away and, hey, remember the Crusades?

Narciss
Nov 29, 2004

by Cowcaster

Kajeesus posted:

hey, remember the Crusades?

Those wars that resulted in a few small crusader states being established because the Turks were harassing Christian pilgrims? That's pretty small potatoes compared to what the Muslims did before and after that. How about the arab conquests?



On the topic of completely divorcing religion from behaviors, there seems to be a trend for left-leaning people to do that and I don't get it. Right-wingers do a similar thing where they ignore economic effects on an individual or cultural group. Is it really that shocking that a religion whose holy text (handed down word-for-word by God, or so they say) endorses slavery, rape, and systematic murder of heathens result in it's believers performing those actions? Come on now.

----------------
This thread brought to you by a tremendous dickhead!

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

Narciss posted:


On the topic of completely divorcing religion from behaviors, there seems to be a trend for left-leaning people to do that and I don't get it. Right-wingers do a similar thing where they ignore economic effects on an individual or cultural group. Is it really that shocking that a religion whose holy text (handed down word-for-word by God, or so they say) endorses slavery, rape, and systematic murder of heathens result in it's believers performing those actions? Come on now.

This isn't a very strong thesis because this sort of behavior exists independent of any particular religion, even the supposedly "peaceful" ones (Hinduism, Buddhism, etc).

Narciss
Nov 29, 2004

by Cowcaster

computer parts posted:

This isn't a very strong thesis because this sort of behavior exists independent of any particular religion, even the supposedly "peaceful" ones (Hinduism, Buddhism, etc).

Hindus and Buddhists never overran a third of the known world in violent conquest after founding their religion. They may form violent sects and butcher Muslims in their own country, but I'm having trouble thinking of holy wars that took place on anywhere near the same scale as the Islamic conquests. The closest I can think of are the crusaders in the pagan slavic/baltic states.

----------------
This thread brought to you by a tremendous dickhead!

Kim Jong Il
Aug 16, 2003
There's a difference between arguing about abstract notions of religious first principles (where it's correct to state that Islam is inhumane and barbaric in the way that the overwhelming majority of religions are), and the reality of what the majority of its believers think and practice. Clearly, what's currently seen as Islamic-motivated political violence owes a lot to the war, political repression, and poverty in the Middle East. I think that explains the majority of it, but it's not really helpful for the Glenn Greenwalds of the world to reflexively criticize people like Dawkins who are coming more from the "all religions are barbaric" side than the "let's use this as convenient excuse to bomb and and use drones" side, and this sort of mischaracterization does quite a bit to damage their credibility.

Peel
Dec 3, 2007

I absolutely love the Crusades. Every time, every single time you get someone oozing out of the woodwork to whine that they did it too, miss, as if that wasn't the very point being advanced.

Peel
Dec 3, 2007

Narciss posted:

Hindus and Buddhists never overran a third of the known world in violent conquest after founding their religion. They may form violent sects and butcher Muslims in their own country, but I'm having trouble thinking of holy wars that took place on anywhere near the same scale as the Islamic conquests. The closest I can think of are the crusaders in the pagan slavic/baltic states.

What's your point?

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

Narciss posted:

Hindus and Buddhists never overran a third of the known world in violent conquest after founding their religion.

And Muslims only did it once, nearly 1500 years ago.

Meanwhile, Christianity did it once (converting Rome to Christendom), then again (Justinian the Great), then again (The Age of Discovery), then again (The Scramble for Africa), and so forth.

computer parts fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Jul 4, 2015

Rigged Death Trap
Feb 13, 2012

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

Well that falls under another neat piece of poo poo about religions. If a muslim X does not own slaves, rape and conquer do unthinkable acts in today Y and Z are they a true muslim X?


[E]Oh and youd be a fool to even suggest that the indian subcontinent and east Asia werent mired in the same kinds and amount of warfare as everwhere west of it.

Rigged Death Trap fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Jul 5, 2015

Narciss
Nov 29, 2004

by Cowcaster

Kim Jong Il posted:

There's a difference between arguing about abstract notions of religious first principles (where it's correct to state that Islam is inhumane and barbaric in the way that the overwhelming majority of religions are), and the reality of what the majority of its believers think and practice. Clearly, what's currently seen as Islamic-motivated political violence owes a lot to the war, political repression, and poverty in the Middle East. I think that explains the majority of it, but it's not really helpful for the Glenn Greenwalds of the world to reflexively criticize people like Dawkins who are coming more from the "all religions are barbaric" side than the "let's use this as convenient excuse to bomb and and use drones" side, and this sort of mischaracterization does quite a bit to damage their credibility.

I'm arguing the other side of this because no one else is, but yours is more the direction I lean. Most people are reasonable & kind, and will ignore the repugnant parts of the religion they claim to follow. That said, I do think that it's easier for leaders (of countries, political movements, terrorist groups) to build support if the religion they're building an organization upon endorses their less savory actions.

----------------
This thread brought to you by a tremendous dickhead!

khwarezm
Oct 26, 2010

Deal with it.

computer parts posted:

And Muslims only did it once, nearly 1500 years ago.

Meanwhile, Christianity did it once (converting Rome to Christendom), then again (Justinian the Great), then again (The Age of Discovery), then again (The Scramble for Africa), and so forth.


What do you mean by that precisely? There were tons of further conquests by Islamic states in the future after the initial wars. India, Asia Minor and Southeastern Europe to name a few. This sometimes did involve lots of supposedly religious motivation, and sometimes it didn't, how is distinguishable from Justinian or the Scramble for Africa?

Nessus posted:

I don't think Islam has anything much to do with terrorism, though I suppose some aspects of the religion's teachings might hinder or support certain forms of actions.

The IRA was doing most of this poo poo well before ISIS did, and if you had more occupied/colonized Christian nations you'd probably have more groups of this sort with a Christian flavoring.

We can say a lot of bad things about the IRA but I don't really think they compare to ISIS, in terms of pure numbers killed its not even in the same ballpark.

Personally I find myself seeing more parallels with groups like the Carlists in Spain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlism

khwarezm fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jul 5, 2015

Pantsuit
Oct 28, 2013

Are white people inherently violent?

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


Why is religion being considered separate from the society as a whole? Who gives a poo poo if a premodern enpire was motivated by religion or not? Why are the Umayyads worse than Alexander or Ghengis Khan? If you get stoned for adultery why is it worse if that is prescribed in a holy book vs being a secular law?

Religion is simply one component of a society or culture and IMO it's very hard to separate it from those other components

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Jul 5, 2015

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



khwarezm posted:

We can say a lot of bad things about the IRA but I don't really think they compare to ISIS, in terms of pure numbers killed its not even in the same ballpark.

Personally I find myself seeing more parallels with groups like the Carlists in Spain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlism
Sure, though you could probably make some pointed comparisons to the Protestant Ascendancy and Cromwell. :v: But the IRA is certainly a terrorist group (or was at various points) and was serving political ends. I'm willing to bet the IRA was described in terms rather like the ones used to describe various 'terrorist' groups nowadays, and I further imagine that if there was ongoing nastiness as we saw in the modern Mideast, in a highly Catholic area, we'd have the possibility of an ultra-Catholic group comparable to ISIS.

Now an ultra-Catholic group would not behave exactly like ISIS, and you could perhaps make a case that there are elements in Islam that ISIS cites as inspiration for its particularly horrid actions.

fspades
Jun 3, 2013

by R. Guyovich

icantfindaname posted:

Why is religion being considered separate from the society as a whole? Who gives a poo poo if a premodern enpire was motivated by religion or not? Why are the Umayyads worse than Alexander or Ghengis Khan? If you get stoned for adultery why is it worse if that is prescribed in a holy book vs being a secular law?

Religion is simply one component of a society or culture and IMO it's very hard to separate it from those other components

You see, Christian empires conquer like this,

Abner Cadaver II
Apr 21, 2009

TONIGHT!

khwarezm posted:

We can say a lot of bad things about the IRA but I don't really think they compare to ISIS, in terms of pure numbers killed its not even in the same ballpark.

I don't think pure numbers killed is a good measure for this discussion, since that correlates more often with success in violent endeavors than exceptional inhumanity in that violence. The Arab Conquests killed a lot more people than the Mexican-American War but that doesn't decide whether one was morally worse or not.

Wanderer
Nov 5, 2006

our every move is the new tradition
Looking up the sociopolitical context of the modern Middle East and how it feeds into its current tendency to produce zealot-infested holy warriors has been on my "one of these days" list for a while, so I'm interested in this thread.

I guess I've been roundly assuming that it probably had a lot to do with Western powers jockeying behind the scenes due to oil access and Israel's presence, but I've never been quite sure where to start. Is there a Why This Place Matters And/Or Kind of Sucks for Dummies book someone could recommend?

Rigged Death Trap
Feb 13, 2012

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

I dont think any metric is satisfactory when playing the historical equivalency game.
Its a dead end.

^
Well arguably the most deleterious act western powers may have done to the middle east is not the support of Israel or a lust for oil, but the scramble to gain allies to proxy harder against Communist Russia/foe du jour, who cares who gets the support as long as they do what we say.

Think Pinochet but in multiple countries and managing to stick around for longer due to not going super kill squad. (Not to say no mass killings happened)

Rigged Death Trap fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Jul 5, 2015

Xandu
Feb 19, 2006


It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am.

Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:

I don't know how long this thread will last or whether it will turn into a cesspool but while it is here I figure I will post a question I've wanted to ask for awhile in the Middle East thread but did not want to start a derail.

Is there a book or a series of articles or even a well-regarded webpage which collects the various theologic arguments made by suicide bombers, salafist groups, etc. and examines them in light of Islamic jurisprudence, textual support, etc.? One of the thing which might help frame this discussion is if someone has already objectively looked at the various published motivations and examined how they fit with what is found in the Qur'an, the hadith, or the more commonly accepted schools. For instance, if a verse is taken out of context it might look like it supports an action but if all of the schools interpret it differently it might help put the passage in a more nuanced light.

There might be (probably not as much in English since most English analysis of Jihadi material is written by non-Muslims), but while this is interesting in some ways, I also think you have to take a step back and ask if it even matters. Religion evolves and changes and can't simply be defined by what's in a book, even though that's what most adherents will tell you. There's plenty of violent, awful stuff in the Qur'an, just as there is in other religious texts. More important is how it's interpreted, and most "manistream" Muslims will downplay the violence, etc because it's not important to their understanding of Islam.

I think this is an interesting article. He's responding to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who's terrible, but he makes some important points.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-06-16/islamic-scripture-not-problem?campaign=mccants&CID=EMC-FARelease-mccants-061615

quote:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is correct that darker passages of Islamic Scripture endorse violence and prescribe harsh punishments for moral or theological infractions. And she is right that in many Muslim countries, too many citizens still think it is a good idea to kill people for apostasy, stone them for adultery, and beat women for disobedience just because Scripture says so. But Hirsi Ali is profoundly wrong when she argues that Islamic Scripture causes Muslim terrorism and thus that the U.S. government should fund Muslim dissidents to reform Islam.

Islamic Scripture is a constant. Over 1,000 years old, it is composed of the Koran and hadith, words and deeds attributed to the Prophet Muhammad by his followers. Muslims who want to justify violence can find plenty of passages to cite—collections of hadith run into the hundreds of volumes. Nevertheless, Muslim political behavior has varied greatly throughout history. Some Muslims have cited Scripture to justify violence, and some have cited it to justify peace. If Scripture is a constant but the behavior of its followers is not, then one should look elsewhere to explain why some Muslims engage in terrorism. And if Islamic Scripture doesn’t automatically lead to terrorism, then one should not expect the reform of Islam to end terrorism. Indeed, even the ultratextualist followers of the self-proclaimed Islamic State ignore Scripture that is inconvenient for their brutal brand of insurgency.

Consider the Gospels, Scriptures that advocate far less violence than the Koran or the Hebrew Bible. Jesus taught his followers to turn the other cheek. Yet the crusaders murdered thousands in their rampage across the Middle East, and U.S. President George W. Bush, a devout Christian, invaded Iraq without military provocation. Readers may object to these examples, arguing that other factors were at play—but that is exactly the point: Christian Scripture doesn’t always determine the behavior of its followers, and the same goes for Islamic Scripture.

khwarezm
Oct 26, 2010

Deal with it.

Abner Cadaver II posted:

I don't think pure numbers killed is a good measure for this discussion, since that correlates more often with success in violent endeavors than exceptional inhumanity in that violence. The Arab Conquests killed a lot more people than the Mexican-American War but that doesn't decide whether one was morally worse or not.

I don't agree that pure numbers killed is a bad measure, certainly it's crude and ignores context but what metric doesn't? Success in violent endeavors often entails exceptional inhumanity, if the likes of Genghis Khan or the Conquistadors are examples. I don't know much about the Arab Conquests ultimately but we don't really know how many people died there. Besides, it was a much longer process than the Mexican-American war and occurred within the context of near constant warfare in the medieval middle east, coming off the back of stuff like this.

No matter how we measure it its difficult to come to the conclusion that the IRA or ISIS are particularly comparable entities. The IRA did not engage in large scale ethnic cleansing, it seemed to try and specifically avoid handing its enemies the propaganda victory that killing lots of civilians deliberately would offer them (not they always held themselves to that) to a degree (more about this can be read in this article that several people have linked in the middle east thread), they fought their war on a pretty small scale, they didn't hold sex slaves as booty of war and they pursued regular parliamentary politics alongside the violent campaign, in fact they still do as we can see from Sinn Fein's success. Perhaps most importantly the environment they grew out of differed radically, twentieth century Northern Ireland was not a kind place at all, certainly not to Catholics, but it never approached the level of violent breakdown that we see in Syria and Iraq now. I also don't really think that the IRA tied themselves much to particularly Catholic ideology despite what a lot of people might assume, which is one of the reasons that I'm weary about the fact that they're often the go to example for christian terrorists for a lot of people, they tended to be more a straight forward nationalist grouping with a sprinkling of socialism than a religious one. Its like if we boiled down the Cypriot conflict to Muslims vs Christians, its sort of true and I'm sure sectarianism plays a part, but it ignores the more important nationalistic issues.

That's why I booked the example of the Carlists up there, I think that they share more traits with ISIS than the IRA ever would, for one it was much more violent, regularly pursued a course of open warfare out on the field in multiple bloody wars (the last one being the Spanish Civil War), was able to shift to guerrilla warfare based on the situation, had some populist elements mixed with a lot of extremely conservative ones and succeeded in severely undermining the state that they opposed and later helping it to outright collapse (I'm talking about the second Republic here). It gained a lot of support from Clerical elements in favor of traditionalist Catholic view of Spanish society against Liberals taking after the enlightenment.

khwarezm fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Jul 5, 2015

TheOtherContraGuy
Jul 4, 2007

brave skeleton sacrifice

Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:

I don't know how long this thread will last or whether it will turn into a cesspool but while it is here I figure I will post a question I've wanted to ask for awhile in the Middle East thread but did not want to start a derail.

Is there a book or a series of articles or even a well-regarded webpage which collects the various theologic arguments made by suicide bombers, salafist groups, etc. and examines them in light of Islamic jurisprudence, textual support, etc.? One of the thing which might help frame this discussion is if someone has already objectively looked at the various published motivations and examined how they fit with what is found in the Qur'an, the hadith, or the more commonly accepted schools. For instance, if a verse is taken out of context it might look like it supports an action but if all of the schools interpret it differently it might help put the passage in a more nuanced light.

I haven't read it myself, but Sayyid Qutb's Milestones is considered to be one of the seminal works of Islamic extremism.

Xandu
Feb 19, 2006


It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am.
From the perspective of one :)

TheOtherContraGuy
Jul 4, 2007

brave skeleton sacrifice

Wanderer posted:

Looking up the sociopolitical context of the modern Middle East and how it feeds into its current tendency to produce zealot-infested holy warriors has been on my "one of these days" list for a while, so I'm interested in this thread.

I guess I've been roundly assuming that it probably had a lot to do with Western powers jockeying behind the scenes due to oil access and Israel's presence, but I've never been quite sure where to start. Is there a Why This Place Matters And/Or Kind of Sucks for Dummies book someone could recommend?

If you want a textbook overview, I really liked A Concise History of the Middle East by Arthur Goldschmidt & Lawrence Davidson. If you want a history of modern Islamic extremism I can't recommend The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright highly enough. This is the guy wrote Going Clear and he won a Pulitzer for The Looming Tower.

Main Paineframe
Oct 27, 2010

Narciss posted:

Hindus and Buddhists never overran a third of the known world in violent conquest after founding their religion. They may form violent sects and butcher Muslims in their own country, but I'm having trouble thinking of holy wars that took place on anywhere near the same scale as the Islamic conquests. The closest I can think of are the crusaders in the pagan slavic/baltic states.

That's because the Christians were too busy having religious wars against each other. Some eight million Europeans, mostly in the devastated German states, perished during the Thirty Years War. And since everyone is bringing up the Crusades, my favorite by far was the Fourth Crusade. The primary difference is that the Christian nations never really united; while the Islamic conquests were basically one big united empire early on owing to their origin as a conquering state, Christendom was divided pretty much constantly after the fall of the Roman Empire, and was simply too weak to accomplish any real religious conquest (at least, until they crossed the Atlantic and violently conquered territories that eventually dwarfed the Muslim empires at their greatest points). Of course, that's all long-distant history, as Islam has seen its share of fragmentation over the centuries too.

Wanderer posted:

Looking up the sociopolitical context of the modern Middle East and how it feeds into its current tendency to produce zealot-infested holy warriors has been on my "one of these days" list for a while, so I'm interested in this thread.

I guess I've been roundly assuming that it probably had a lot to do with Western powers jockeying behind the scenes due to oil access and Israel's presence, but I've never been quite sure where to start. Is there a Why This Place Matters And/Or Kind of Sucks for Dummies book someone could recommend?

I don't know if there's a single book that covers it, but you can get a good idea just by looking at the history of any Middle Eastern country. However, you want to look further back than the Cold War and Israel - most of the real issues date back to the late 19th/early 20th centuries, when the Ottoman Empire was starting to collapse and Western powers still considered it their God-given right to decide the fate of every square inch of land that wasn't populated by white people or defended by somebody capable of standing up to a Great Power. Pretty much the entire Middle East was under British or French control by the early 1920s, although some had fallen to Western ambitions much earlier - Iran, for instance, was essentially divided between Britain and Russia by 1907. The foundation of Israel was a thing, but all of Israel's neighbors at the time had only been independent nations for a couple years themselves, having been under the yoke of European empires for the past thirty-plus years.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe
ISIS certainly has their religious justifications down pat, but they kill a ridiculous number of Muslims on the flimsiest of pretexts. For this reason, I think most Muslims find them about as Islamic as a Quaker would find Reagan Christian.

Liberal_L33t
Apr 9, 2005

by WE B Boo-ourgeois

SedanChair posted:

ISIS certainly has their religious justifications down pat, but they kill a ridiculous number of Muslims on the flimsiest of pretexts. For this reason, I think most Muslims find them about as Islamic as a Quaker would find Reagan Christian.

More than 42 MILLION Muslims 'support ISIS'

The Sunday Express posted:

The study, based on four recent polls, reveals the shocking level of support for the caliphate around the world.
...More than 8.5million people view ISIS positively, and around 42million view them somewhat positively, according to the data.

Also that Pew poll again, in case anybody forgot

Huge majorities of most Muslim nations have loathsome, pre-modern views and social practices. Obfuscating that fact because it somehow proves ISIS right is every bit as "unhelpful" as drawing Mohammad cartoons supposedly is. How the gently caress do you extend the benefit of the doubt to someone who supports ISIS? There's precious little room to misunderstand what it's about. I understand that it isn't practical to kill everyone who holds such beliefs, but the least that can be done is to stop them and those with similar goals (Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Boko Haram, etc.) from being able to hold power anywhere.

Despite all of the historical debate and back-and-forth over the nature of religious authenticity, I think the real bone of contention in the debates this thread was created to contain is about systems of law and government. To the extent that 'the west' is waging war against a genericized Islamic civilization, it isn't actually about changing the specifics of their scripture or doctrine. It is about changing the enforceability of that scripture, whether de jure or by community action. But on that specific issue, a modern post-Enlightenment society absolutely cannot and should not compromise. No meaningful social advancement is possible in the 21st century so long as any religious body has censorial power over the public square. Period. This issue was actually quite hard fought in the early years of the United States, and if secularism had lost out to the congregationalists, we would all (Americans and non-Americans) be extremely sorry.

Edit:

Rigged Death Trap posted:

I dont think any metric is satisfactory when playing the historical equivalency game.
Its a dead end.

^
Well arguably the most deleterious act western powers may have done to the middle east is not the support of Israel or a lust for oil, but the scramble to gain allies to proxy harder against Communist Russia/foe du jour, who cares who gets the support as long as they do what we say.

Think Pinochet but in multiple countries and managing to stick around for longer due to not going super kill squad. (Not to say no mass killings happened)

The most deleterious act the western powers did was breaking up the Ottoman empire. That was the worst thing they possibly could have done - like the hubris of Rumsfeld's U.S. occupation authority disbanding Iraq's army writ large. By the time the U.S. started directly interfering in middle eastern politics, much of the worst damage (I.E. the ethnic cleansing of the 1920s and 30s) had already been done.

Liberal_L33t fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Jul 5, 2015

Homura and Sickle
Apr 21, 2013

Liberal_L33t posted:

More than 42 MILLION Muslims 'support ISIS'


Also that Pew poll again, in case anybody forgot

Huge majorities of most Muslim nations have loathsome, pre-modern views and social practices. Obfuscating that fact because it somehow proves ISIS right is every bit as "unhelpful" as drawing Mohammad cartoons supposedly is. How the gently caress do you extend the benefit of the doubt to someone who supports ISIS? There's precious little room to misunderstand what it's about. I understand that it isn't practical to kill everyone who holds such beliefs, but the least that can be done is to stop them and those with similar goals (Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Boko Haram, etc.) from being able to hold power anywhere.

Despite all of the historical debate and back-and-forth over the nature of religious authenticity, I think the real bone of contention in the debates this thread was created to contain is about systems of law and government. To the extent that 'the west' is waging war against a genericized Islamic civilization, it isn't actually about changing the specifics of their scripture or doctrine. It is about changing the enforceability of that scripture, whether de jure or by community action. But on that specific issue, a modern post-Enlightenment society absolutely cannot and should not compromise. No meaningful social advancement is possible in the 21st century so long as any religious body has censorial power over the public square. Period. This issue was actually quite hard fought in the early years of the United States, and if secularism had lost out to the congregationalists, we would all (Americans and non-Americans) be extremely sorry.

bwaahahahahahahaha you unironically cited the people who made this:



ahahahaaha oh man. A good post

edit: You probably weren't alive in 2008, so that was a propaganda DVD the Clarion Project (the wisened pollsters that published this data through one of the UK's white supremacist tabloids) mailed to voters in the United States in an attempt to secure the presidency for John McCain.

edit 2: Now that this thread exists please only post here l33t and never post in m/e again tia

Homura and Sickle fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Jul 5, 2015

Liberal_L33t
Apr 9, 2005

by WE B Boo-ourgeois

Jagchosis posted:

bwaahahahahahahaha you unironically cited the people who made this:



ahahahaaha oh man. A good post

edit: You probably weren't alive in 2008, so that was a propaganda DVD the Clarion Project (the wisened pollsters that published this data through on of the UK's white supremacist tabloids) mailed to voters in the United States in an attempt to secure the presidency for John McCain.

Alright, fair enough - I wasn't aware they were the original source. But other polls and events should have made it pretty clear by now that the level of support for ISIS is not negligibile (such as the reports of ~14% of muslims in France, of all places, indicating sympathy for ISIS).

Goatse James Bond
Mar 28, 2010

If you see me posting please remind me that I have Charlie Work in the reports forum to do instead

"Hooray, 3% of Muslims support us at least lukewarmly, truly we will drive out the unbelievers and the Shia and those who open the wrong end of a banana :toot: "

Liberal_L33t
Apr 9, 2005

by WE B Boo-ourgeois

GreyjoyBastard posted:

"Hooray, 3% of Muslims support us at least lukewarmly, truly we will drive out the unbelievers and the Shia and those who open the wrong end of a banana :toot: "

Considering it's the equivalent of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army polling at 3% of support among the global christian population, it is quite impressive ISIS has managed to garner so much favorability despite being adherents of the Pol Pot school of human rights.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

1) You just cited the Express

2) There are 1.62 billion Muslims on Earth.

exmarx
Feb 18, 2012


The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

MonsieurChoc
Oct 12, 2013

Every species can smell its own extinction.

SedanChair posted:

1) You just cited the Express

2) There are 1.62 billion Muslims on Earth.

Quick math tells me that that's around 2,6% of muslims. So, you know, tiny portion.

Edit: Also I probably did it wrong again cause I suck at math.

Goatse James Bond
Mar 28, 2010

If you see me posting please remind me that I have Charlie Work in the reports forum to do instead

Liberal_L33t posted:

Considering it's the equivalent of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army polling at 3% of support among the global christian population, it is quite impressive ISIS has managed to garner so much favorability despite being adherents of the Pol Pot school of human rights.

Jokes aside, one of their big selling points is that they bill themselves as the only current credible resistance against A) the Iraqi government's Shia death squads, B) Assad, and C) assorted Middle Eastern corrupt despots in general and the Saudis sort-of in particular. Oh, and Western Neocolonialism etc.

It's definitely a pretty neat trick for an organization that was largely established by former Baathist bureaucrats. Not like there're any other solid anti-despot movements to rally around at the moment, though - the Muslim Brotherhood (itself a really neat, decidedly non-monolithic topic) is in the process of having its most successful franchise in decades burned to the ground and the ashes salted, and a big issue with Islamism <-> Middle Eastern politics is that a lot of the secular elites tend to be pretty willing to play nice with the despots (and the West :ohdear: ).

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

Liberal_L33t posted:

Considering it's the equivalent of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army polling at 3% of support among the global christian population, it is quite impressive ISIS has managed to garner so much favorability despite being adherents of the Pol Pot school of human rights.

The BNP polled similarly in 2010 UK.

  • Locked thread