Daesh: Don't Call Them ISIS

John Kerry does it. London Mayor Boris Johnson thinks about it. Queen Rania of Jordan gives impassioned speeches explaining why we should all do it. As she argues, they are neither Islamic nor a state. Don't call them ISIS or ISIL or whatever self-styled aggrandizing title they choose to call themselves. Deny them that prestige, and deny them a recruiting tool. Just call them Daesh.
What is that? It's a sort of acronym in Arabic; "sort of" because acronyms are not used in Arabic, just abbreviations. For instance, Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, known as SCAF in English, was commonly abbreviated in the Egyptian media as "The Supreme." In Arabic, therefore,  Daesh is intentionally a pejorative, delegitimizing label used by their enemies and victims in the Arab world- and it's worth remembering that the victims of Daesh's unspeakable brutality are overwhelmingly fellow Arabs and Muslims.
So what's in a name? Does it matter if we in the West and the Western media call them Daesh rather than Islamic State? Yes, it does.  Deny them that association with the religion they give a bad name to, and deny them a recruiting tool. So come on, Mayor Johnson, just do it.
 

A Time to Kill: Egypt's Tragic Ramadan

Rarely has Ramadan come at a more tragic time for Egyptians, or for that matter for Syrians. The spirit of the season is intended to be a holy month of peace and worship; of turning away from the material world and tuning in to the spiritual; of seeking forgiveness and redemption through fasting and self-abnegation. And yet the new moon that announces the advent of this year’s Ramadan shines a grim light on Egyptians killing Egyptians in the streets.

The elation was short-lived for the millions who marched to oust Morsi and his catastrophic administration on June 30^th. First there was the backlash from the Muslim Brotherhood, echoed by a chorus in the international media accusing 'a coup against Egypt’s first democratically elected president.' The fact is that the Islamists, notably the Brotherhood and the Salafis, cannot lay claim to the Revolution of January 25^th , a revolution they initially boycotted, and whose ideals they neither subscribed to nor sacrificed for. If anyone stole the revolution, they did. Similarly Morsi supporters’ mantra of ‘legitimacy’ rings hollow: he acted illegitimately in office from the day he was elected, grabbing power, riding roughshod over the institutions of government, putting himself above the law, and stuffing his administration with incompetent cronies.    

On the other hand, the liberal/secular camp- for want of a better catch-all designation for the diverse factions forming the opposition to the Islamist parties- the liberal camp exaggerates the role U.S. foreign policy played, or could have played, or should have played, during the past year and in the days leading to the June 30^th uprising. Had American policy openly supported an uprising backed by a military coup against Egypt’s first democratically-elected, Islamist president, how would that American support have played domestically in Egypt and in the Arab/Muslim world? It is hard to imagine that the Muslim Brotherhood camp would have failed to make propaganda of the fact that the Egyptian military is the United States closest interlocutor, and that the ousting of an Islamist regime in Egypt is welcome news in Israel.

There has been much criticism of how the aftermath of the ‘coup’ was handled, with house arrest of leading Muslim Brotherhood leaders, and taking Islamist television channels off the air. But these media were being used to enrage and incite the mass of Morsi supporters, who shouted into the cameras blood-curdling threats of revenge and killing, particularly against the Christian minority. By any measure, in any country, these threats constitute hate speech and incitement to violence, and would have been taken off the air.

Nevertheless, the deaths of fifty-plus Morsi supporters demonstrating before a mosque at dawn on Monday is a sickening and tragic development. It should never have happened. Even if there had been provocation on the part of the Brotherhood supporters, the military should have been ready to control and contain a confrontation, not overreach with lethal force. The same use of deadly military force against protesters resulted in the deaths of more than 25 protesters, mostly Coptic Christians, during the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces' eighteen-month rule in the transition from Mubarak to Morsi. It was such incidents that turned public opinion against the military and brought thousands into the streets chanting ‘Down, down with Military Rule’. How could that lesson have gone to waste?

The path to a positive future for Egypt is anything but straightforward. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties cannot and should not be excluded again from political life, but it is not at all clear that their participation, now or in the near future, can take a constructive turn. Egypt’s Islamist parties have shown that they do not subscribe to the spirit of democracy, as opposed to the ballot box. In fact they do not even claim to subscribe to it. For them, the separation of politics from religion is illegitimate, and a plurality of opinion is heresy. For them, the ballot box is only a means to an end, and once that end is achieved, the box is to be discarded once and for all.

Do Muslims not Understand Free Speech? The Hate Film Furor

There are some events so shocking that you cannot process them coherently in words, even a week later. The horrific news of the killing of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other diplomats in Libya on September 11 is one of them. This article is not about that. As it turns out, the armed attack on the American consulate in Benghazi may have been unrelated to the Islam-reviling video clip that launched coincidental protests first in Cairo and then across the Muslim world.

But the question remains, about the crowds of hundreds or in some cases thousands who mobbed American embassies from Tunisia to Indonesia with protest signs against the so-called ‘Innocence of Muslims’ trailer, do Muslims not understand free speech? Why the violent reaction to such a laughable, beyond-amateurish attempt to insult their Prophet? Why not simply shrug it off as the piece of insignificant Muslim-baiting it is? Are Muslims too unsophisticated to understand the concept of free speech?

It’s not that simple. Muslim societies are sophisticated enough to be aware that the concept of free speech is not an absolute, even in the West. They are aware that in France or Germany, anyone who questions the number of victims of the Holocaust, let alone denies it, is jailed. They are aware that in France, Muslim girls are not allowed to wear a headscarf, a symbol of their faith, to public school.  They may or may not be aware that in the United State, the most recent attempt to adopt an amendment to criminalize flag desecration- which would include use as clothing or napkins- was defeated in the Senate by a single vote in June 2006.

In Egypt, people remember that United States administrations intervened regularly to condemn and ask for suppression of films, songs, or books critical of Israel. As the Mubarak regime complained at the time to the Bush administration, the U.S. criticized the Egyptian regime for cracking down on free speech and then asked it to do just that when it disapproved of the form that speech took.

Free speech is not an absolute value, anywhere in the world. Every society draws its red lines in a different place. In the United States, the First Amendment does not protect you if you cry fire in a crowded room. Hate speech is not protected if it is an incitement to violence.

So it may be simplistic to assume that Muslims just ‘don’t understand’ free speech. Even if it were an absolute value in the West, which it demonstrably is not, that does not mean that the rest of the world accepts that value as absolute. Indeed, as Stanley Fish pointed out in the New York Times today, the majority of the populations of the world, not only Muslims, place respect of religion above respect of free speech.

This California-produced ‘film’ was made, distributed and exploited with the transparent purpose of inciting furor, against Muslims and by them. Still, the question goes begging: why do Muslims rise so easily to the bait, time after time? Why does the blowback spread so predictably across the world? Why do they not respond in more measured, effective ways, or better still, ignore the derisory provocation for what it is?

The answer lies in the context on the ground: a world in which two Muslim countries are invaded and occupied by the West; a third nation currently threatened with pre-emptive bombing; a fourth subjected to drone strikes and their ‘collateral damage;’ and so on. The powerlessness to resist these concrete forms of subjugation and humiliation, and the perception that the gratuitous insults to the Islamic religion are part and parcel of the same supposed ‘war against Islam’, make the region a tinderbox that explodes at the striking of the flimsiest match.   

And once again the tragic dynamics play out. The perpetrators of the provocation claim their right to impunity, and the images of rioting Muslims confirm the opinion of those in the West who see them, at best, as political primitives who do not understand ‘free speech’, or, at worst, as violent followers of a violence- prone religion.