Why does the Islamic State have a black flag?

The jihadi movement in northern Iraq and Syria which is now in the news is wont to put up a black flag. This is a common feature of jihadi movements since at least the year 2000. It’s a phenomenon which has me wondering, because the black flag was the banner of the Abbasids, the second dynasty of caliphs, while most of the jihadi movements take as their inspiration an earlier epoch of pre-dynastic rulers. On the surface this seems a curiosity, but if you read Hugh Kennedy’s When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World you also know that the rise of the Abbasids was driven in part by a deep rage against the earlier Ummayads by the Shia. Some of the Abbasid rulers were in fact relatively sympathetic to the Shia cause, though ultimately the Abbasid period was when what we now think of as Sunni Islam began to crystallize in a coherent positive fashion as something distinct from the sectarian minorities within Islam. All this matters because short term raison d’etre of the Islamic State, and what distinguishes it from Al Qaeda, is that it has put the Shia-Sunni conflict front and center, and the black flag has been associated with Shia movements for over a thousand years now.

To some extent this is trivial. But, it shows the sorts of patterns and connections you can draw upon if you have at your disposal a few seemingly disparate facts. Which brings me the point of this post, a friend asked me via email yesterday what books he should read to understand Islam, and Muslims, a bit more. After 9/11 many Americans went and read the Koran to understand Islam. It’s a relatively short book compared to the Bible, so that’s doable. But it also makes as much sense as reading the New Testament to understand Christianity. If that does make sense to you, and some evangelical Protestants would say that it does, then by all means. But many would argue that you don’t really understand how Christianity as a phenomena manifests itself in the world by just reading the New Testament. But a more appropriate analogy would be reading the Hebrew Bible to understand Judaism. That is because like Judaism, Islam is a religion where much of the intellectual work has gone into defining and extending the body of religious law which regulates life. Judaism as it exists today makes no sense without the Talmud,* which is a far greater body of work in volume than the Bible, and pertains much more precisely to behavior in a day to day sense. Similarly, Islam is much more defined by the Hadith than the Koran in relation to how Muslims live and practice.

Obviously I’m not going to recommend that every non-Muslim read the Hadiths. For practical introductions to Islam John L. Esposito’s oeuvre is probably at the top of the list. Anti-Islamic critics have charged Esposito with being too respectful of his subject of study, but I don’t think that’s a problem as long as you know that going in. After reading Esposito, I would suggest Hugh Kennedy’s two works which introduce Islam’s first two ruling houses, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In and When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty. Like Esposito, Kennedy tends to not directly challenge the standard Islamic narrative, despite not being a Muslim himself. But, one of the central planks of the narrative which has been percolating into the public discourse in the West, and which Kennedy’s works tend to undermine, is the conception that the Sunni-Shia conflict as we understand it today is primal and goes back to the days after the death of Muhammad in the 7th century. Though it may have roots in that period it is quite clear from what I have read that a more precise picture must integrate the centuries of dialogue, debate, and conflict, up until the 10th century, when the Sunni faction as we’d recognize it had emerged. To cap off a survey of traditionalist scholars with a counterpoint, Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World,** is probably a must. Much of this work is likely wrong, but it is wrong in a very provocative way which makes you reconsider your assumptions. I do think one reality you can take away from this though is that the first century of Islam is an area where we have far less clarity than you might think before exploring the topic. I suspect much of this is due to the fact that our understanding of antiquity is tied to three particular instances of literary reproduction between 800 and 1000, one in the Abbasid House of Wisdom, another during the Carolingian Renaissance, and finally the efforts sponsored by the Byzantine ruler Constantine VII. These translation and copying efforts did have particular agendas, and just the Carolingian scholars would give you a biased picture of post-Roman barbarian states and rulers which preceded the Pippinids, so the Abbasids were not going to commission a view of Islamic history not to their liking.

Finally, to understand mainstream Islamic scholarship which nevertheless attempts to be relevant to Western non-Muslims, you probably need to read Tariq Ramadan. He has the virtues of being an orthodox Sunni who operates with the standard currency of Islam, but still exhibits fluency in the Western conceptual architecture which we take for granted. Additionally he will make up any deficit in metaphysics that one might perceive in the above list of works. Personally I don’t think that religious metaphysics really explain much of interest to those outside a given religious tradition (e.g., Muslims get nothing from understanding Trinitarian theology, and an atheist gains nothing from two hundred ways of defining tawhid), but others disagree.