Tom Holland, ISIS and a Search for Answers

A few nights ago, Channel Four screened a documentary made by the historian Tom Holland: “ISIS – The Origins of Violence”. It was a sobering, sombre film which pointed towards answers to the question all sane thinking people ask : why do ISIS/Daesh carry out the hideous atrocities for which they are notorious? The usual explanations are either limited and/or superficial. Either Daesh are dismissed as “Islamofascists” (by people like me), as the product of the invasion of Iraq (by Stop the War Coalition and their ilk), or they carry out their atrocities to terrify all opposition (by ISIS/Daesh prisoners).
Whatever the merits of these arguments, they fail to explain the ideological justification for the evil behaviour of ISIS. Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said: “Men can only commit great acts of evil if they believe they are doing good”. Thus, the driving idea of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen was their belief that they were creating a better world by slaughtering Jews and Communists. The Soviet secret police state apparatchiki saw their brutal regime as a necessary step towards creating a socialist state. Holland takes the courageous step of identifying the tenets of ISIS beliefs which drive their fanatical urges to commit crimes against humanity.
At the start of the film, like a good historian, Holland links the past to the present by visiting Paris and showing harrowing film of the 2015 massacres and the Charlie Hebdo murders. Holland says: “Isis have a thing about Paris". The “thing” is that ISIS regard France in general as the place where the Crusades began and Paris in particular as a city of vice and prostitution. He further explains that ISIS see themselves as re-establishing the caliphate ended by Kemal Attaturk in Istanbul, 1924. He also, interestingly, describes the impact that Napoleon’s impact upon Islam following his invasion and occupation of Egypt in1798, which led to a subtle change in the way Muslims regard Mohammed – as a neo- Napoleonic warrior leader, rather than a mystical force. The concept of Jihad, says Holland, changed from the struggle of the soul on a spiritual journey to an active war against unbelievers, following two failed attempts by Muslim armies to capture Constantinople in the 14th and 15th centuries.
It is to Holland’s credit that he highlights these matters which most commentators tend to pass over. These historical events might not figure large in our world view, but they do for ISIS. Where Holland is at his best, however, is where he locates the central tenets of ISIS thinking in the Koran itself. As Rosamund Urwin says in the Evening Standard:
“He (Holland) argues that Isis “self-consciously draws on Islamic scriptures, texts and episodes from Mohammed’s life to justify what they’re doing”.
Besides this, Holland asserts that ISIS/Daesh regard themselves as returning to the essential scriptures and following the true path of Islam. This gives me an eerie feeling of Deja vu – evangelical Christians said something similar to my younger self when they talked of “getting back to the Bible”. The Muslim equivalent is known as “Salafism”, aka "Wahabism". As Holland says in the “New Statesman”:
“Salafism today is probably the fastest-growing Islamic movement in the world. The interpretation that Isis applies to Muslim scripture may be exceptional for its savagery – but not for its literalism. Islamic State, in its conceit that it has trampled down the weeds and briars of tradition and penetrated to the truth of God’s dictates, is recognisably Salafist”
In short, Holland sees ISIS as having brought about an internal crisis in Islam itself. He acknowledges that most Muslims deplore what ISIS do, but he argues that mainstream Muslims need to take more assertive action. A “firewall”, as he calls it, is needed if ISIS can truly be described as UnIslamic. Holland continues:  
“Such behaviour (ie, ISIS violence) is certainly not synonymous with Islam; but if not Islamic, then it is hard to know what else it is.”
It is not for me to prescribe the next step, but, overall, Holland has raised some interesting questions and provided a penetrating analysisof ISIS thinking (if that’s the right word). I was impressed, also, with his reporting of the plight of the Yazidis under ISIS, and the world’s indifference to their persecution. As he told the ES:
“Holland is angry that the Yazidis have been so overlooked. “The massacres and enslavement was going on while Israel was attacking Gaza. There was talk about ‘Israeli genocide’. Israel was not committing genocide. It was not engaging in a deliberate attempt to kill civilians. All the world’s press was in Gaza, writing this, while at the same time an authentic genocide was going on, and no one paid it any attention. What happened to the Yazidis was authentically Nazi.”
This was no surprise to me, but it helps that a historian of Holland’s stature chooses to highlight the matter. He also reported on another story that never makes the headlines: the persecution of Christians by ISIS. He visited a monastery where the only worshippers are two resident monks and looked out over what were once Christian lands, but are now occupied by Daesh. If anything, Holland understates the persecution of Christians by ISIS. He says that ISIS tolerate Jews and Christians under their rule, as long as they pay a tax called the Jizya. This gives a misleading impression, as “The Spectator” says:
“Isis has stopped pretending. A 2016 issue of Dabiq blew cover, outing Christians repeatedly as ‘pagans’ and encouraging followers to ‘break crosses’ while boasting of having murdered scores of priests since their last publication. All pretence that Christians were afforded special treatment has evaporated. So why does the international community keep trotting out this lie?"
Why indeed?

Two photographs that need no explanation.