ISIS brings new kind of challenge

A panel of Mt. Hood historians and political science instructors held a midday forum on Wednesday to discuss the terrorism threat of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) and what it means to the U.S.

History instructors Pat Casey and Elizabeth Milliken and political science instructors Janet Campbell and Joe Cavali hosted a session of MHCC’s recurring Historian’s Roundtable forum in the Visual Arts Theater. The event drew about 70 students, faculty, and staff members.

Casey opened the forum with some history of Islam and the Middle East region. Centuries of bitterness owing to the damaging crusades and later European and American intervention during World War I are among reasons ISIS leaders list when discussing their motives.

One big goal of ISIS is to restore an Islamic State (as its name suggests), a country solely for Muslims that has historically been referred to as “The Caliphate.”

This desire to create a state is one thing that makes ISIS different from other terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. It’s an effort to reclaim lost territory, the panelists said.

During the early history of Islam, the prophet Muhammad “and his Arab armies pursued a massive conquest which continued during the decades after his death. The eventual result was a massive empire that stretched from modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, all the way to Spain.

ISIS expresses bitterness for four crusades of centuries past, which overturned that emprie. “The crusades were a coalition of the willing in a multinational army… from Christian Europe, to try to retake areas in what is today [known as] Palestine,” said Casey.

Muslim leaders often use the term “crusader” as an insult, Casey said.

ISIS leaders despise the current borders that divide the Middle East, which Campbell called the result of “Europeans over cigars drawing lines on maps.”

After WWI, the U.S., Great Britain, and France divided up the Middle East (known as the Ottoman Empire at the time, which fell on the losing side) into territories, which they then colonized. “The real legacy of all this” are the current official borders of much of southwest Asia and the Middle Eas,” Casey noted.

“These borders – completely drawn by outsiders, not locals, imposed upon the people living there – they [ISIS] say this is a historical injustice and their goal in life is to take this out,” he said.

Campbell explained that the vast majority of Muslims are moderate, and are negatively affected by violent fundamentalist Muslims. Even most fundamentalist Muslims are nonviolent – leaving a small minority of violent Muslims that Campbell said are referred to by political science experts as Non-Government Violent Movements.

Many leaders of violent radical Muslim groups such as ISIS are heavily influenced by the work of Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Egyptian scholar who believed that influence of American hedonism must be eliminated from the moderate Muslim world to bring it back to its respected position of technological, mathematical, and scientific advancement in the days during and after Muhammad’s caliphate. Qutb was hanged in 1966 for attempting to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Leaders of groups like ISIS hate American foreign policy, which tends to secularize all politics. Radical Muslim leaders want to remove the west from Muslim affairs.

All this makes reducing the threat of ISIS, from the U.S. perspective, that much harder.

“ISIS’s takes on religious fundamentalism differs profoundly, because when you’re out to convert the whole world” it is difficult to find a middle ground to settle on politically, Campbell said.