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Exposing the role that Islamic jihad theology and ideology play in the modern global conflicts

Juan Cole: The Islamic State is not Islamic

Feb 25, 2015 12:44 pm By Robert Spencer

juancoleThe Western intelligentsia is very, very anxious that you have a positive view of Islam. Thus we see a steady stream of articles in the mainstream (and in this case, the far-Left, but the distinction between those two is increasingly fine) media assuring you that the Qur’an is benign, the U.S. Constitution is Sharia-compliant, and the Islamic State is not Islamic. These articles come in a steady stream, and they have to, because they are asking non-Muslims to disregard what they see every day — Muslims committing violence against non-Muslims and justifying it by referring to Islamic texts — and instead embrace a fictional construct: Islam the religion of peace and tolerance. This takes a relentless barrage of propaganda, because with every new jihad atrocity, reality threatens to break through. It wasn’t accidental that Hitler’s Reich had an entire Ministry of Propaganda: lying to the public is a full-time job, as the cleverest of propaganda constructs is always threatened by the simple facts.

Here is another exoneration of Islam for the crimes of the Islamic State, courtesy none other than establishment academic Juan Cole. It is not irrelevant to note also that Juan Cole is on the Board of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), which has been established in court as a front group lobbying for the Islamic regime in Iran. Said Michael Rubin: “Jamal Abdi, NIAC’s policy director, now appears to push aside any pretense that NIAC is something other than Iran’s lobby. Speaking at the forthcoming ‘Expose AIPAC’ conference, Abdi is featured on the ‘Training: Constituent Lobbying for Iran’ panel. Oops.” According to the Daily Caller: “Iranian state-run media have referred to the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) since at least 2006 as ‘Iran’s lobby’ in the U.S.” Iranian freedom activist Hassan Daioleslam “documented over a two-year period that NIAC is a front group lobbying on behalf of the Iranian regime.” NIAC had to pay him nearly $200,000 in legal fees after they sued him for defamation over his accusation that they were a front group for the mullahs, and lost. Yet Juan Cole remains on their Board.

“How ‘Islamic’ Is the Islamic State?,” by Juan Cole, The Nation, February 24, 2015:

Last week a debate erupted over how “Islamic” the so-called “Islamic State” group (ISIS or ISIL) in Syria and Iraq is, and whether it is legitimate to speak of “Islamic” terrorism. It was provoked in part by a Graeme Wood article in The Atlantic and President Obama’s speech to a conference on Combating Violent Extremism. Obama was slammed by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani as allegedly not loving America, in part because he declined to speak of “Islamic” terrorism. On Sunday, former defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, interviewed on CNN’s State of the Union show, called Obama’s refusal to use the phrase “Islamic terrorism” “silly,” saying, “I think people understand that Islam has something to do with what we’re fighting, and when you deny it, you lose a lot of support.” This debate is actually about what philosophers call “essentialism,” and, as Giuliani’s and Wolfowitz’s own interventions make clear, it is about absolving the United States for its own role in producing the violent so-called “Caliphate” of Ibrahim al-Baghdadi.

Oh, really? Yet I readily agree with Cole that Bush’s removal of Saddam Hussein and naive trust that a stable Western-style republic would take its place was ill-considered, as I argued back in March 2003. And the Islamic State filled the vacuum thus created. But this is an entirely separate question from that of whether the Islamic State has anything to do with Islam or not. Whatever Paul Wolfowitz or Rudy Giuliani said or did on CNN is simply irrelevant to the question Cole claims to be investigating: if Giuliani and Wolfowitz are right that Islamic jihadis have something to do with Islam, that does nothing whatsoever to absolve the U.S. “for its own role in producing the violent so-called ‘Caliphate’ of Ibrahim al-Baghdadi.”

The question of phraseology is easily dealt with. The word “Islamic” in Arabic, and in English as well, has to do with the ideals of the Muslim religion. It is thus analogous to the word “Judaic.” We speak of “Islamic ethics” as a field of study, just as we do “Judaic ethics.” Not all Muslims or Jews conform to the ethics preached in their religious traditions. Some are even criminals. But then they are Muslim criminals and Jewish criminals. They are not Islamic criminals and Judaic criminals. Likewise in Catholicism, one speaks of Patristic theology, referring to the religious ideas of the Church fathers, but wouldn’t talk of bad priests steeped in that theology as Patristic criminals. It is because both in Arabic and in other languages “Islamic” refers to the ideals of the Muslim religion that both Muslims and people with good English diction object strenuously to a phrase such as “Islamic terrorism” or “Islamic fascism” (fascism was an invention of Christian Europe, in any case).

Those, like Giuliani, who insist on speaking of “Islamic terrorism” want to shape our language so as to imply that the Islamic tradition authorizes the deployment of terrorism, which the US federal code defines as using violence or criminal activities to intimidate civilians or government for political purposes, with the implication that the perpetrators are themselves nonstate actors. But the Islamic legal tradition forbids terrorism defined in that way. Moreover, Muslim academics contend that the Koran, the Muslim scripture, sanctions only defensive war. Giuliani does not know more about the Koran than they do.

No, Giuliani doesn’t, but he isn’t the sole authority involved here. Muhammad’s earliest biographer, the eighth-century Muslim Ibn Ishaq, explains that defensive war was not Allah’s last word on the circumstances in which Muslims should fight. Ibn Ishaq explains offensive jihad by invoking a Qur’anic verse: “Then God sent down to him: ‘Fight them so that there be no more seduction,’ i.e. until no believer is seduced from his religion. ‘And the religion is God’s’, i.e. Until God alone is worshipped.” The medieval scholar Ibn Qayyim (1292-1350) also outlines the stages of the Muhammad’s prophetic career: “For thirteen years after the beginning of his Messengership, he called people to God through preaching, without fighting or Jizyah, and was commanded to restrain himself and to practice patience and forbearance. Then he was commanded to migrate, and later permission was given to fight. Then he was commanded to fight those who fought him, and to restrain himself from those who did not make war with him. Later he was commanded to fight the polytheists until God’s religion was fully established.” In other words, he initially could fight only defensively — only “those who fought him” — but later he could fight the polytheists until Islam was “fully established.” He could fight them even if they didn’t fight him first, and solely because they were not Muslim.

Nor do all contemporary Islamic thinkers believe that that command is a relic of history. According to a 20th century Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh ‘Abdullah bin Muhammad bin Humaid, “at first ‘the fighting’ was forbidden, then it was permitted and after that it was made obligatory.” He also distinguishes two groups Muslims must fight: “(1) against them who start ‘the fighting’ against you (Muslims) . . . (2) and against all those who worship others along with Allah . . . as mentioned in Surat Al-Baqarah (II), Al-Imran (III) and At-Taubah (IX) . . . and other Surahs (Chapters of the Qur’an).” (The Roman numerals after the names of the chapters of the Qur’an are the numbers of the suras: Sheikh ‘Abdullah is referring to Qur’anic verses such as 2:216, 3:157-158, 9:5, and 9:29.)

Warfare and terrorism pursued by Muslims according to such commands would indeed be “Islamic terrorism,” as it would be commanded and sanctioned by Islamic texts and Muslims authorities. It would not be simply terrorism that happened to be committed by Muslims, as Cole is trying to establish.

The attempt by the American right wing to mainstream the phrase “Islamic terrorism” takes advantage of general American ignorance of the Muslim tradition; it is a linguistic trap intended to make us all Islamophobes. If a politician insisted that we call Israel’s reckless disregard for noncombatant life in last summer’s attack on Gaza “Judaic terrorism” and implied that Israelis acted that way because they are all commanded to do so in the Bible, it would be easy to see this way of speaking as anti-Semitic. President Obama is right to avoid that trap, and he knows enough about Muslims and Islam to recognize it for what it is.

Wolfowitz is arguing that Islam has an “essence” that “has something to do with what we’re fighting.” Essentialism when applied to human groups is always an error and always a form of bigotry. Zionists bombed the King David Hotel in British Mandate Palestine in 1948, killing dozens of civilians and some British intelligence officials. If a British official had responded then by arguing that “everyone knows that Judaism has something to do with what we’re fighting,” it would be fairly clear what that official thought about Jews in general. As for Iraq and Islam, there was no Al Qaeda or ISIL in Iraq in 2002, when Wolfowitz conspired to fight an illegal war on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands, maimed millions, created millions of widows and orphans, and displaced at least 4 million of Iraq’s then 25 million people, making them homeless. As late as 2012, in a poll conducted by my colleague Mark Tessler at the University of Michigan and several collaborators, 75 percent of Sunni Iraqis said that religion and state should be separate (personal communication). The social maelstrom visited on Iraqis by Wolfowitz’s sociopathy produced radical movements like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and ISIL, to which even secular Sunni Iraqis have turned out of desperation. Wolfowitz had no business in Iraq. His actions were illegal. Now this war criminal is blaming “Islam” for “what we’re fighting.”

“Essentialism when applied to human groups” may be “always an error and always a form of bigotry,” but when applied to belief systems it is not. Cole is, perhaps deliberately, conflating Islam and Muslims, and claiming that to speak of what Islam is and is not, which is established by reference to Islamic texts and teachings, is to make a bigoted judgment against all Muslims. Islam in all its forms teaches certain things. Its teachings are knowable. To speak about Muslims acting upon them, when they themselves explain and justify their actions by referring to those actions, is not bigotry, despite the endless charges to the contrary from Leftists and Islamic supremacists. It is simply to notice reality.

As for the character of ISIL, the answer to the question being pitched in Washington lies in the field of the sociology of religion. Religious traditions always encompass lots of different kinds of organization. There are religious establishments, what the sociologists call “churches.” In Protestant-majority America, Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians are “churches” in this sense—typically, their congregations are full of white middle- and upper-class families and they have strong institutions, formal seminaries and ways of licensing and controlling clergy. The equivalent in the Middle East is the Sunni establishments. Each country typically has an appointed chief Muslim legal adviser, or mufti, and mainstream seminaries to train clerics in the complex traditions of legal reasoning that typify Sunni Islam.

Then there is the sect. Many (not all) Pentecostals, or a group such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, would be less institutionalized and more spontaneous, and draw adherents more from the working and lower middle classes, and so would fall into the category of “sect,” as sociologists use the term. The Salafi movement in Sunni Islam, which especially attracts people in poorer neighborhoods in cities like Tunis or the small towns of the Delta in Egypt, is the Muslim equivalent of working-class evangelicals and Pentecostals. Salafis often reject mainstream Muslim authorities and appeal to what they see as the practice of the first generation (the Salaf) of Muslim disciples of the Prophet Muhammad….

They reject those authorities because they contend that they have strayed from the true teaching of the Qur’an and Sunnah — just as Pentecostals and Jehovah’s Witnesses contend that the older mainline Protestant churches have strayed from the true teachings of the Gospel. So Cole’s own analogy here confirms that the Islamic State is indeed Islamic.

Cole then embarks upon a labored argument to establish that the Salafi jihadis are a “sect” and a “destructive cult,” charging anyone who disagrees with him with the cardinal sin of “Orientalism”

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.

Cole here ignores, of course, the fact that the KKK, the People’s Temple and the Branch Davidians represented obvious deviations from Protestant Christianity, and were condemned as such. The Islamic State and jihadists have likewise been condemned by Muslim authorities, but these condemnations have all too often rung hollow: Tahir ul-Qadri’s vaunted 300-page fatwa against terrorism doesn’t even mention the passages of the Qur’an that exhort believers to violence against unbelievers; and the recent “Letter to Baghdadi” from Muslim scholars to the self-styled caliph of the Islamic State endorsed central concepts of jihad doctrine that Western analysts usually think are limited only to “extremists.” Cole likewise ignores the fact that all the traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence (madhahib) teach that the umma has the responsibility to wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. It is not “othering the Middle East” to point this out — it is simply noting the severe limitations of Cole’s analogy.

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.”

Al-Azhar rejects the Islamic State. Yet al-Azhar has certified a manual of Islamic law as “conforming to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community” that stipulates about jihad that the caliph “makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax” (‘Umdat al-Salik, o9.8). So while al-Azhar disagrees with the Islamic State in practice, it agrees with it in principle. Can Cole say that about the Episcopalians regarding the Branch Davidians? Not if he is honest.

Wood controversially asserted in his article for The Atlantic, “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” This assertion is theological, not sociological. No social scientist would say, “The reality is that the Ku Klux Klan is Christian. Very Christian.” If what Wood meant to say was that ISIL is a Muslim cult rather than a Buddhist one, that assertion is uncontroversial. If he means that Islam has an essence, of which ISIL partakes or indeed that ISIL is a natural outcome of the alleged Islamic essence, then he is speaking as a medieval Platonist, not as a contemporary social scientist.

Yes, yes, contemporary social scientists reject “essentialism” — that is, the idea that anything really is anything, as opposed to anything else. That this is nonsense, and that Cole knows it’s nonsense, is shown by this very article: Cole assumes that he and his readers both know what the KKK is, and what Pentecostalism and Jehovah’s Witness is, but Islam? — a mystery, and you’re a bigoted Orientalist Islamophobe if you think otherwise. In any case, even if one grants that Islam has no essence, nonetheless the Islamic State jihadis claim to be acting in accord with Islam, and make their case based upon an interpretation of the Qur’an and Sunnah that is well established in Islamic history and theology. The fact that other Muslims have a different understanding of Islam doesn’t negate this.

Nationalism is probably also a conceptual veil here. Since the nineteenth century, religious movements have typically been inflected with nationalism, but in Europe and North America the national marker of identity has tended to be foregrounded, even where religion formed a key part of a movement. Thus, the Croatian Ustashe during World War II is typically seen as a form of nationalism, whereas Catholic identity and institutions were deeply implicated in it, and the fascist Ustashe demanded that Serbs convert to Catholicism. In its viciousness, destructiveness and ambition, the Ustashe was not very different from ISIL today. ISIL is put under the sign of religion, but it is in fact a form of nationalism appealing to medieval religious symbols. Nor is its ruthlessness unprecedented in modern history. It is not clear that Muslim ISIL adherents have as yet managed to kill a fraction of the number of people (over 500,000) that the Ustashe polished off in death camps in the 1940s.

The Christianity/Islam moral equivalence aside, to claim that the Islamic State is a form of nationalism leads inevitably to the question: which nation? And that’s where Cole’s analysis is most absurd: the Islamic State is not nationalistic in any sense. It is neither Iraqi nor Syrian, for it has erased the border between the two. It is, in fact, the most internationalist of movements, with over 20,000 Muslims from all over the world traveling to Iraq and Syria to join it. The only nation that the Islamic State could conceivably be said to be fighting for is the international Muslim nation, the worldwide umma — but Cole can’t acknowledge that, as it would be granting the point he is trying clumsily to rule out. He then goes on to explain that the Islamic State is “so much more powerful and widespread than the Branch Davidians” not because “their ideas are more attractive to people in Syria and Iraq than Branch Davidian ideas were in Texas,” but because it “operates in areas where the state has collapsed”; “has gained enormous coercive power”; and feeds Sunni-Shia antagonism. None of these come even close to attempting to explain the extraordinary appeal the Islamic State has for Muslims outside Iraq and Syria, despite condemnations of the Islamic State from Muslim leaders.

And so yet another attempt to establish the Islamic State as un-Islamic drowns in its own illogic and poor reasoning — not that Cole or the academic or media elites will take any notice, of course, except to call me a racist, bigoted Islamophobe. But the lingering question is, why is it so important to the elites to convince us that jihad terror has nothing to do with Islam? Why are they so desperate to make sure that non-Muslims in the West remain ignorant and complacent in the face of the manifest threat of jihad terror? Why are they so intent on pursuing policies that are absolutely certain to condemn the West to a future of civil war and chaos? I’d like to see Juan Cole answer those questions. But he won’t.

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Filed Under: academia, Featured, Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, Daesh), Jihad doctrine, Useful idiots, willful ignorance Tagged With: Juan Cole


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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 12:52 pm

    Juan Cole’s argument (‘Nothing to do with Islam’) has been completely debunked by Graeme Wood.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/

    Juan Cole destroys his own credibility by trying to recycle this disproved idea.

    • Beagle says

      Feb 25, 2015 at 1:07 pm

      Indeed. Cole is merely beclowning himself.
      http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/02/jordanian-columnist-the-islamic-state-did-not-invent-a-new-islam

      • john spielman says

        Feb 25, 2015 at 2:54 pm

        Cole is nothing more than another academic whore( like John Esposito) who has prostituted himself to the moon god allah for money

  2. moses says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 1:07 pm

    Juan cole should wake up to the real world and smell the coffee. ISIS=ISLAM

  3. mortimer says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 1:24 pm

    Cole’s evocation of the KKK is very interesting and worth exploring, but not from the reasons he thinks. The KKK with its face masks and hoods (similar to those of ISIS) and its supremacism had many similarities to ISIS at least superficially.

    The deep structure of ISIS, however, aims to imitate punctilliously Mohammed and his companions, but the KKK was not an imitation of Jesus and his disciples by a long stretch. The KKK was an imitation of Masonry if anything.

    The KKK nostalgically looked back to the idyllic times of Southern slavery and wanted to reconstruct it! ISIS looks back to the 7th century and wishes to reconstruct it in every detail. Then the new millennium will come!

    Both ISIS and the KKK are supremacist, but so are Saudi Arabia, Iran and all Islamic countries.

    There are no Western countries where supremacism is a measure to disqualify women or ‘others’ from full participation in political life. That is normative Islam and based in discriminatory Sharia.

    Cole is deceiving us to think that Sharia isn’t inherently discriminatory. Cole is conducting ‘academic jihad’ or ‘academic taqiyya’.

  4. bob says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 1:26 pm

    Juan Cole (the “genius”) swallowed hook line and sinker the false report of Israel “opening up dams” to flood Gaza.

  5. Champ says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 1:34 pm

    And Juan Cole is NOT Juan Cole …

    o_0

    • Mirren10 says

      Feb 25, 2015 at 2:37 pm

      Champ, I * love * you !

      That was hilarious !

      Would that all these morons and fools were forced to swallow a big, huge dollop of self awareness !

      • Champ says

        Feb 25, 2015 at 3:04 pm

        Thank you, Mirren10! …glad I could give you a chuckly among the madness put forth by these enablers of evil: islam.

        🙂 I love U 2, my friend! xo

        • Champ says

          Feb 25, 2015 at 3:06 pm

          (I meant chuckle, but chuckly works, too)

      • Mo says

        Feb 25, 2015 at 4:51 pm

        @Mirren10 says

        “Champ, I * love * you !
        That was hilarious !”

        Mwahahaha! That was indeed brilliant by Champ!

        “Would that all these morons and fools were forced to swallow a big, huge dollop of self awareness !”

        And a hearty AMEN to that, as well!

        • Champ says

          Feb 25, 2015 at 6:06 pm

          Hi, Mo!! …thank you, my friend! 🙂

    • Wellington says

      Feb 25, 2015 at 6:29 pm

      Echoing Mirren and Mo, a good one, Champ. Very clever. Hope you and yours are well.

      • Champ says

        Feb 26, 2015 at 5:56 pm

        Thank you, dear Wellington!

  6. Peter says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 1:35 pm

    Clearly, Western intelligentsia like him are not “intelligent.”

  7. mortimer says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 1:35 pm

    Robert Spencer wrote: “Warfare and terrorism pursued by Muslims according to such commands would indeed be “Islamic terrorism”.

    Spencer provided quotes both from the Koran and their interpretations by leading Islamic scholars that approved of Islamic terrorism as canonical.

    Cole’s denialism is no doubt related to his being a paid apologist for an Islamo-fascist government that practices a form of barbarity that is practically identical to that of ISIS.

  8. josepxicot says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 1:56 pm

    Of course the islamic state is not within the islam nooooooooooooooooot,they are a christian gang in
    permanent mistake,and the main activity is killing or murder their brothers in the name of Our Lord,Mr.
    Cole is not so right,may be needs some medical psiquiatric care.

  9. Jovial Joe says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 1:58 pm

    A brilliant and scholarly take-down of a bare-faced charlatan Robert; priceless.

    • mortimer says

      Feb 25, 2015 at 2:41 pm

      The question is: What is this man’s game? Former Bahai’i? Works for Iran? Criticized Khomeini? Approves Israel, disproves Israel’s elected governments? All for isolationism? I doubt he’s got a solid idea of what’s in Islam. He looks at it with the benign eye of Bahai’ism.

      Take off the blinkers, Cole. Foundational Islam is not what people think. The caliphs invented Islam as a support for their dynasties.

  10. JeffS says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 2:00 pm

    “Why is it so important to the elites to convince us that jihad terror has nothing to do with Islam?” Using Hugh Fitzgerald’s Esdrujula Explanation—timidity, stupidity, cupidity, I would say that Juan Cole exemplifies cupidity.

  11. Jeff says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 2:04 pm

    Juan Cole is clearly a puppet of the Islamists.

  12. Jay Boo says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 2:09 pm

    It is not easy to find words to adequately debate members of the far Left Western intelligentsia.

    I must humbly admit that I am more than just a little bit intimidated at the thought.
    This man is obviously brilliant beyond belief.
    Just look at how he wears a dark stripped shirt with a dark jacket to challenge the conventionality of the unenlightened bourgeoisie. His impressive smirk of self-assurance is backed up by the confident way he wears his hair in perfectly styled waves that are permed and sprayed into an absolute faux carefree perfection with just a subtle hint of semi-Albert Einstein relativity. Ben Franklin would be jealous of the impeccable image of supreme wisdom that this man conveys as he pears over those peek-a-boo I am smarter than you PHD series designer glasses.

    • Mo says

      Feb 25, 2015 at 4:55 pm

      @ Jay Boo

      “This man is obviously brilliant beyond belief.”

      I am glad I put the coffee down. I wouldn’t want to slobber all over my keyboard! This whole thing needs to be printed, framed and sent to him.

      Though I’m sure he’s so clueless that he’d take it as a compliment. BWAH!

  13. Angemon says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 2:24 pm

    “How ‘Islamic’ Is the Islamic State?,” by Juan Cole

    It’s islamic enough to call itself islamic and attract muslims from different backgrounds on a worldwide scale.

    If claiming that the islamic state is islamic is “just a form of Orientalism” then muslims worldwide are the first Orientalists when it comes to the IS.

  14. Gary Fouse says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 2:40 pm

    And a red car is not red.

  15. ECAW says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 2:46 pm

    A particularly brilliant dissection by Robert Spencer of Cole’s slipperiness but the paragraph beginning:

    “The attempt by the American right wing to mainstream the phrase “Islamic terrorism”

    is presented as RS speaking when it is actually part of Cole’s article.

    • Jovial Joe says

      Feb 25, 2015 at 2:52 pm

      I’d noticed that but fairly obvious that Robert had been reverted all of a sudden 🙂

      • Jovial Joe says

        Feb 25, 2015 at 2:53 pm

        I meant HAD NOT been reverted!

  16. ECAW says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 3:10 pm

    Confused about non-essentialism? You’re intended to be. Some more examples here:

    ‘There is a strain of thought among academics called non-essentialism. Its adherents would have us believe that Islam, like everything else, has no essence therefore Islam can be whatever you like. This is because non-essentialism means that “for any given kind of entity, there are no specific traits which entities of that kind must possess”. It has been said that non-essentialism is itself an essentialist position but I’ll leave that one to you – it hurt my head. I’ll just suggest that it is one of those ideas which are so ridiculous that only intellectuals could entertain them.

    That is not to say that the usual deceptive apologists do not recognise a useful button when they see one. Mehdi Hasan says “Where is the book of Sharia law? It doesn’t exist. People argue over what Sharia law is.” This is merely the usual Mehdi sleight of hand. There is such a thing as Sharia law and although there are differing interpretations there is in fact a great degree of uniformity between the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence. The major variations we see around the world come largely from the differing amount of sharia adopted by different countries.

    His transatlantic counterpart Reza Aslan tells us that “All religions are infinitely malleable”. They certainly are finitely malleable around the edges but if there is ever an Islam in which Allah is regarded as part of a trinity then surely it is Islam no more. Reza should try dropping into his local mosque and suggesting it.

    Closely related is the view of one CofE participant in the interfaith dialogue charade :

    “I start from the principle that Islam is what Muslims say it is”

    This prompts the obvious question “Which Muslims?” Are we to give more credence to the Muslims of IS or Al-Azhar or Quilliam or to Ibn Kathir or Caliph Ali or the wild-eyed dawah man on the High Street every Saturday? If you are not willing to distinguish between authentic or inauthentic versions then the logical conclusion must be that there are 1.6 billion Islams and therefore none.’

  17. Kenny says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 3:49 pm

    So, there we have it and now we know!

    Islamic State is not Islamic, and a pig’s bum isn’t bacon.

    And 2+2= whatever the party says it does.

    • Champ says

      Feb 25, 2015 at 3:54 pm

      http://captainras.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/dunce-cap.jpg

      • Kenny says

        Feb 25, 2015 at 4:45 pm

        Nice cartoon, but my point was actually a quote from Orwell’ s 1984.

  18. Michael Johnson says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 5:13 pm

    Where did they find this guy he looks like he doesn’t know anything about Islam since he thinks Islam is so great sharia law is better than the constitution he should go take his butt over there and live then we will se if Islam is so tolerant and peaceful to him

  19. eib says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 5:27 pm

    I am familiar with the non essentialist idea, it is a post modern lie.
    Graeme Wood has encountered the IS personally. I doubt that Cole has the courage to go to IS territory and see for himself whether or not the IS is Islamic.

  20. Peggy says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 6:40 pm

    If Islam is being tarnished by IS why don’t we hear about Muftis declaring them enemy of Islam and issuing a fatwa or two against the leaders? They were quick to issue one against Salman Rushdie for being insulting to Islam but misrepresentation of Islam and tarnishing it’s good name by murdering on such a scale is not?
    If the Musftis don’t call this unislamic why are we?

  21. Kasey says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 10:44 pm

    Juan Cole needs to read from the sire below, then he might understand a bit more about Islam.

    https://thuppahi.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/the-real-consequences-of-islamic-indoctrination-mind-set-and-logic-with-24-items-for-discussion-and-debate/#more-15867

  22. ApolloSpeaks says

    Feb 25, 2015 at 11:38 pm

    ROBERT DID A SUPERB JOB

    in raking leftist Juan over the burning Coles of truth. The Sunni Islamic State isn’t Islamic. But the Islamic Republic of Shiite Iran is the genuine article. So says Juan Cole. So says Barack Obama who has referred to Iran as the “Islamic Republic” on many occasions.

    http://www.apollospeaks.com

  23. Salah says

    Feb 26, 2015 at 1:50 am

    “The Western intelligentsia is very, very anxious that you have a positive view of Islam.”

    Translation: Islam is on the defensive. Islam is falling apart. Islam is DYING.

    Islam is on the defensive everywhere, even in Muslim countries.

    http://crossmuslims.blogspot.ca/2014/08/cannibalism-in-islam-taught-at-al-azhar.html

  24. DRDIAS says

    Feb 26, 2015 at 1:36 pm

    It seems that history does resort to some strange reflections of itself:

    “Before 1929, Churchill had been a successful, well-known and greatly respected politician. From 1929 until WWII started, he was no longer popular with political leaders. He was labeled a “scaremonger,” and in 1934 in the German press, Churchill was dismissed as “an incorrigible Germanophobe.”

    What a quote. Makes you wonder just who are the actual political and governmental leaders whom are really actually informed, hence educated on the matters at hand or are they just Stupid moronic cowardly “APPEASERS” who do not have a clue or comprehension of the true moral ethical intend amongst the coming events that are about to unfold within their hands at that very moment in time!

  25. Ian_A_S says

    Feb 26, 2015 at 4:31 pm

    Robert, I applaud your tireless patience in tackling the shibboleths of leftist intelligentsia. It is a subtle game, and I believe you are getting on top of them here. But clearly with all the worldwide killing and mayhem brought on by Islamic jihad, we are not winning the global war of ideas. When on earth will the professors in the liberal arts departments in western universities wake up out of their denial and defend the victims of murderous Islam rather than the perpetrators of Islamic violence? Why is it so hard for them to see the terrible consequences of their Islamic sympathism?

  26. Lyndon Weggery says

    Feb 26, 2015 at 11:33 pm

    What Cole fails to see from history is that this is the third attempt by Islam to dominate the world and their IS aspirations to achieve this are deadly serious.The West can only send assistance to Iraq to hardly contain this menace but that’s what we must do until the true Messiah comes back to save us all.

  27. M S case says

    Feb 27, 2015 at 7:57 pm

    If some people have a distaste for calling iislamic terrorist,, islamist terrorist, then just call them Islamist murderers. uh oh the word “Islamist” is still there. Got a problem then, it’s either one or the other..

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