ISIS and the Challenge of Interpreting Islam

Abstract

The International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) organized an “ISIS and the Challenge of Interpreting Islam: Text, Context, and Islam-in-Modernity” panel at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) Annual Meeting held on November 21, 2016, in San Antonio, TX. After the panel, it held a reception and presented the al Faruqi Memorial lecture. The panel brought together senior scholars of Islam, history, and cultural studies. Moderator Ermin Sinanović (director, Research and Academic Programs, IIIT) divided it into three rounds and allowed questions after each round. Each round addressed an ISIS-related question: (1) “How should we best understand ISIS? Is it a product of Islamic tradition or something inherently modern? What is ISIS an example for?”; (2) “What role does the Islamic tradition play in enabling, justifying, or delegitimizing ISIS?”; and (3) “Is ISIS Islamic?” The first speaker, Ovamir Anjum (Imam Khattab Endowed Chair of Islamic Studies, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Toledo) reminded the audience of the commonality of violence for political ends in history by arguing that this is not a uniquely Islamic phenomenon. According to Islamic tradition, groups like ISIS that employ violence to kill Muslims and non-Muslims are ghulāt (extremists), rebels, or khawārij. One must understand ISIS within the Islamic tradition, because the group is using Islamic symbols. But this does not mean that it is an Islamic phenomenon. In the second round, he contextualized the issue by stating that the number of Syrians killed by Bashar al-Assad is seven times higher than those killed by ISIS. He remarked that “ISIS is horrifying for psychological reasons because they use the pornography of violence, for example, not because they are a uniquely murderous threat. There are a lot of those in the world.” Anjum also found its acts dangerous because its members justify their own biases in the name of Islam. He restated that the group is khawārij, enslaves and kills non-combatants, and rejects the authority of existent Islamic scholarship because the Islamic juristic tradition forbids killing non-combatants. Anjum responded to the final question by refusing to call ISIS “Islamic,” for “Of course ISIS is making Islamic claims, but Islamic tradition is very complex and has been very difficult to agree on things except for a very, very few fundamentals throughout Islamic history.” He also argued that “those who excommunicate Muslims en masse and kill for that reason are khawārij, and they must be fought. This is agreed upon by both Sunni and Shi‘a scholars.” ...