Recently Sam Harris rebuked President Obama’s assertion that the Islamic State is “not Islamic.” And also that “No religion condones the killing of innocents.” To not put too fine a point on it, these statements are either false or meaningless. I applaud Harris as far as it goes, as he is willing to unashamedly rip the veil off the sophistry which dominates much of our public discourse. But in many ways Sam Harris is to atheists what Thomas Frank is to liberals. He is sincere, but his power is in rhetoric rather than analysis.
On the face of it the Islamic State is clearly about Islam. Islam is in its name, and they gesture toward many of the traditions and tropes of that religion. But to reduce the Islamic State to something as vague and expansive as being due to Islam is not particular informative or insightful. This sort of civilizational-culturalist explanation resembles the aether in its formless ability to reshape itself to any phenomena. A key fact which I think is essential in attempting to understand the nature of the Islamic State is that ex-Baathist officers and functionaries have been essential in the operation of the nascent state. This is interesting because Baathism was notionally a secular ideology, co-founded by an Arab of Christian background. But one thing I have read is that even non-Islamist Sunni insurgents in Iraq in the aughts became progressively more religious in their orientation. The eventual absorption of this element into the Islamic State is then an evolutionary process of slow co-option of a marginalized component.
If the function of the Islamic State as a state, as opposed to a diffuse terrorist network, is contingent upon the resurrection of the old Baathist power elite, then one can posit the hypothesis that its emergence was contingent upon the total dispossession of that elite after 2003. Clearly the Sunni Arab hegemony of the Baathist period was not sustainable, but the total dissolution of all the old institutions, and the marginalization of stakeholders, was not inevitable. A falling back to old, atavist, identities by these officers is not entirely surprising. Consider the ethnic nature of most prison gangs. These men on the run, stripped of all material comforts, naturally were drawn to a less concrete, more ‘aspirational,’ ideology.
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