Juan Cole: How ‘Islamic’ Is the Islamic State?

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/199009/how-islamic-islamic-state

Some sects form around charismatic individuals or groups of individuals who demand absolute obedience and a high investment of time and monetary resources from adherents. The leadership of this kind of high-tension sect may try to cut followers off from their family and friends. Often, followers are encouraged to believe that the world will end soon, a belief that makes them less likely to resist appeals to hand over large amounts of wealth and control over their lives to the sect leader. Typically, members who criticize the cult leader are not just excommunicated but shunned, with other sect members completely cutting them off socially, even if they are family.

Sects that merely deviate from conventional societal norms are inoffensive. In the Muslim world, the more sect-like Salafis are often politically quietist and generally harmless. But if a sectarian group begins breaking the law or perpetrating violence (kidnapping, torture, child and spousal abuse, and murder), many observers refer to it as a “destructive cult.” Some sociologists object that “cult” has taken on a pejorative connotation, so they prefer a euphemism like “new religious movement.” But academic criminologists speak of harmful criminal organizations all the time, so why should destructive cults not be so labeled? Where Salafis engage in vigilante violence (some call these “Salafi jihadis” but I prefer “vigilantes”), they become destructive cultists.

It is ironic that Americans, of all people, should have difficulty identifying sects and destructive cults, since our history has been littered with them. Nor have they necessarily been small or inconsequential. It is now typically forgotten that in the early twentieth century the Ku Klux Klan was a Protestant religious organization or that it came to power in the state of Indiana in the 1920s and comprised 30 percent of native-born white men there. It was a large social movement, with elements of the destructive cult, in the heart of North America. More recent groups such as Jim Jones’s People’s Temple and David Koresh’s Branch Davidians may have begun as high-tension sects, but at a certain point they became destructive cults.

The refusal to see ISIL in these terms is just a form of Orientalism, a way of othering the Middle East and marking its culture as inherently threatening. The American obsession with this small militia of some 20,000 fighters, which has managed temporarily to seduce or kidnap what I estimate to be 3–4 million people in Syria and Iraq, colors their perception of the whole Middle East. But the big story in the region in the past year is probably the turn of Egypt (population 83 million) toward secular nationalism, such that those dressed as religious Muslims are often being harassed and discriminated against.

That ISIL falls into the category of the destructive cult explains why the formal establishments (“churches”) of the Muslim world reject it. Scholars at Al-Azhar Seminary, the foremost institution of clerical authority in the Sunni Muslim world, and other Muslim establishments condemn it roundly, just as the Episcopal Church rather frowned on the actions of the Branch Davidians. Mainstream Muslims are outraged at allegations that the gratuitous brutality and grandstanding bloodthirstiness of ISIL can be traced to their “church.”what it is.

[nichomachus]

1. Gary Leupp has a slightly different take

which is well worth reading. It's not quite as simple as Cole (as much as I respect him) or Obama say

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/25/on-obamas-insistence-that-we-are-not-at-war-with-islam/