Robert Manne, La Trobe University
Robert Manne’s new book, The Mind of the Islamic State, traces the evolution of the jihadist group’s world view. By poring over Islamic State’s texts, online magazines, and prison accounts by key figures, Manne offers insight into an ideology that most have heard of but few understand. In this extract, Manne unpacks the split between Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian Islamist who led the Sunni insurgency in Iraq following the US-led invasion, was a man of action not of words. There exists, however, one fascinating lengthy letter from him to the leaders of Al Qaeda, dated January 2004, whose purpose was in part to begin what turned out to be a protracted negotiation for his movement’s entry into Al Qaeda.
Zarqawi begins within an apocalyptic frame. In Sham (the ancient name for Iraq and Syria) “the decisive battle between the infidels and Islam is taking place”. As Al Qaeda no doubt already grasps, he continues, the Zionist-led American administration of George W. Bush entered Iraq under “a contract to create the State of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates”. Their purpose was “to hasten the arrival of the Messiah”.
What is the political situation following the invasion? Zarqawi regards not the Americans but the Shi’as as the overwhelming problem for the Sunnis. They are “the most vile people in the human race”, “the insurmountable obstacle, the prowling serpent, the crafty evil scorpion, the enemy lying in wait”. Throughout history, the Shi’a have stabbed the Muslims in the back. Their religion “has nothing in common with Islam”. Perhaps worst of all, throughout history they have served the interests of the Jews.
What then is to be done? The key, according to Zarqawi, is to provoke a Sunni-Shi’a civil war:
We will trigger their rage against the Sunnis… [forcing them] to bare their fangs… If we manage to draw them onto the terrain of partisan war… soon the [Sunni] sleepers will awaken from their leaden slumber.
Prospects in this struggle are bright. Zarqawi concludes his letter by asking the leaders of Al Qaeda whether they accept his plan. If they do, he promises, they will have his allegiance.
The leaders of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri must have faced a difficult decision in pondering future relations with Zarqawi. On the one hand, the ferocious battle Zarqawi was leading in Iraq was the most promising ever mounted by the Salafi jihadist movement. On the other, the war against the Shi’a Zarqawi was intent to fight represented a radical break in the history of the mujahidin. Clearly however admiration for Zarqawi and a judgment of the political advantages of alignment with him, overcame concern. In December 2004, Al Qaeda accepted the formal allegiance Zarqawi offered.
In July 2005, a long letter was sent by Al Qaeda Central to Al Qaeda in Iraq. All scholars say that this letter was sent directly to Zarqawi from Zawahiri. This cannot be right. Towards its conclusion it reads:
By God, if by chance you’re going to Fallujah, send greetings to Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi.
Most likely, although its contents were intended for Zarqawi, it was sent via another Al Qaeda member.
The letter documents Al Qaeda’s ambivalence about their new supporter. Zawahiri mounts a series of harsh and fundamental criticisms of Zarqawi’s leadership. The battle for the Islamic State cannot succeed without the support of the Muslim masses. They will never understand the disrespect that has been shown for the Sunni religious leaders. Zarqawi and his followers must not think of ruling on the basis of the mujahidin alone.
Even more sternly, Zawahiri chides Zarqawi for his anti-Shi’a sectarianism. No doubt many Shi’a have behaved treacherously during the American occupation. No doubt their understanding of Islam is deeply mistaken. But the Muslim masses will never understand a program based on the destruction of holy sites or systematic killing, especially of ordinary Shi’a. They will ask: “Can the mujahidin kill all the Shi’a in Iraq?” Zawahiri urges Zarqawi not to be seduced by those who praise him as the “sheikh of the slaughterers.”
Zawahiri’s letter was obviously ignored. Some three months later, a senior Al Qaeda leader, Atiyatullah al-Libi, sent another, far blunter warning. If Zawahiri’s letter concerned Zarqawi’s political mistakes, al-Libi’s concerned the defects of his character. Although this letter is almost unknown in the scholarly literature, it is even more revealing than Zawahiri’s.
Al-Libi’s letter contains a devastating catalogue of the dangers of Zarqawi’s style of leadership. Zarqawi must strive to win the love of the Muslim people. “Do not be harsh with them or degrade them or frighten them.” He must learn to accept disagreement. It does “not require hatred, clashing, hostility or enmity”. He must not become “arrogant” because of praise. His inner circle must avoid “injustice, conceit, haughtiness, superciliousness, excessive harshness and violence.”
Al-Libi reminds Zarqawi that Islam is a religion of “mercy, justice and good deeds”. A balance must be found “between severity and softness, between violence and gentleness”. “Let us not merely be people of killing, slaughter, blood, cunning, insult and harshness”. Zarqawi is warned:
You need to look deeply within yourself and your character.
If he fails to heed these warnings he will be replaced.
It was clear by now that not only through his unrestrained brutality and the expanding circle of what he regarded as permissible under Islamic law but also in his attitude to the Shi’a that Zarqawi had transformed and radicalised the Salafi jihadist tradition.
Zarqawi was killed by the Americans on June 7, 2006. Shortly after his death, his successors fulfilled his wishes by announcing the existence of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). For a time, the warnings al-Libi had issued about the dire political consequences of Zarqawi’s brutal behaviour seemed accurate. The Americans found eager partners among the Sunni tribes in the anti-insurgency movement called the Sahwah, the Awakening.
As a consequence, the Islamic State of Iraq was forced during 2008 to retreat to the arid lands of al-Anbar in the west. One of the wives of a leader, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, inquired:
Where is the Islamic State you’re talking about? We’re living in the desert.
The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), by now under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, emerged from the desert in 2011 at a propitious moment – the military and political withdrawal of the Americans from Iraq, the increasing persecution of the Sunni by the Shia-dominated government of Nuri al-Maliki, and the descent of Syria into civil war.
ISI began taking territory in the Sunni Triangle and despatched a small force to Syria led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, in what became known as the Nusra Front. In April 2013, ISI and the Nusra Front fell out speedily, spectacularly and bloodily after Baghdadi’s unilateral announcement of his leadership of a new political entity called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), covering the lands of both Iraq and Syria.
By this time, Osama bin Laden had been killed by the Americans. Al Qaeda’s new leader, Zawahiri, attempted unsuccessfully to arbitrate the differences, requiring Jolani to limit his authority to Syria and Baghdadi to Iraq. His negotiating team was murdered near Aleppo by members of the Islamic State.
In September 2013, Zawahiri published what he called General Guidelines for Jihad, an apparent and belated attempt to re-assert Al Qaeda’s ideological authority over the global Salafi jihadist movement. Zawahiri reminded the mujahidin that their main struggle must be conducted against the Americans, whose weakening grip on power has been revealed by the Arab Spring. Fighting against “deviant sects”, like the Shi’a, ought also to be avoided except in the case of self-defence and even then only in proportion to the danger posed.
Zawahiri warned the mujahidin to:
refrain from killing non-combatant women and children… from harming Muslims by explosions, killing [or] kidnapping… [and] from targeting enemies in mosques, markets and gatherings where they mix with Muslims or those who do not fight us.
Zawahiri’s guidelines were an attempt to rescue the Salafi jihadist movement from what he regarded as the grievous strategic, jurisprudential and sectarian errors introduced into it in Iraq by Zarqawi and his successors. Its publication formalised an ideological division in Salafi jihadism, between ISIS and Al Qaeda, as fundamental as the split that tore the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks apart in the years before the Russian Revolution.
The Mind of the Islamic State is published by Black Inc. Robert Manne is Emeritus Professor of Politics and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University.
Robert Manne, Personal Chair in Politics, La Trobe University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Matthew Sharpe, Deakin University
When Michel de Montaigne retired to his family estate in 1572, aged 38, he tells us that he wanted to write his famous Essays as a distraction for his idle mind. He neither wanted nor expected people beyond his circle of friends to be too interested.
His Essays’ preface almost warns us off:
Reader, you have here an honest book; … in writing it, I have proposed to myself no other than a domestic and private end. I have had no consideration at all either to your service or to my glory … Thus, reader, I myself am the matter of my book: there’s no reason that you should employ your leisure upon so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.
The ensuing, free-ranging essays, although steeped in classical poetry, history and philosophy, are unquestionably something new in the history of Western thought. They were almost scandalous for their day.
No one before Montaigne in the Western canon had thought to devote pages to subjects as diverse and seemingly insignificant as “Of Smells”, “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes”, “Of Posting” (letters, that is), “Of Thumbs” or “Of Sleep” — let alone reflections on the unruliness of the male appendage, a subject which repeatedly concerned him.
French philosopher Jacques Rancière has recently argued that modernism began with the opening up of the mundane, private and ordinary to artistic treatment. Modern art no longer restricts its subject matters to classical myths, biblical tales, the battles and dealings of Princes and prelates.
If Rancière is right, it could be said that Montaigne’s 107 Essays, each between several hundred words and (in one case) several hundred pages, came close to inventing modernism in the late 16th century.
Montaigne frequently apologises for writing so much about himself. He is only a second rate politician and one-time Mayor of Bourdeaux, after all. With an almost Socratic irony, he tells us most about his own habits of writing in the essays titled “Of Presumption”, “Of Giving the Lie”, “Of Vanity”, and “Of Repentance”.
But the message of this latter essay is, quite simply, that non, je ne regrette rien, as a more recent French icon sang:
Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have lived it; I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future; and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that I am without … I have seen the grass, the blossom, and the fruit, and now see the withering; happily, however, because naturally.
Montaigne’s persistence in assembling his extraordinary dossier of stories, arguments, asides and observations on nearly everything under the sun (from how to parley with an enemy to whether women should be so demure in matters of sex, has been celebrated by admirers in nearly every generation.
Within a decade of his death, his Essays had left their mark on Bacon and Shakespeare. He was a hero to the enlighteners Montesquieu and Diderot. Voltaire celebrated Montaigne – a man educated only by his own reading, his father and his childhood tutors – as “the least methodical of all philosophers, but the wisest and most amiable”. Nietzsche claimed that the very existence of Montaigne’s Essays added to the joy of living in this world.
More recently, Sarah Bakewell’s charming engagement with Montaigne, How to Live or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010) made the best-sellers’ lists. Even today’s initiatives in teaching philosophy in schools can look back to Montaigne (and his “On the Education of Children”) as a patron saint or sage.
So what are these Essays, which Montaigne protested were indistinguishable from their author? (“My book and I go hand in hand together”).
It’s a good question.
Anyone who tries to read the Essays systematically soon finds themselves overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of examples, anecdotes, digressions and curios Montaigne assembles for our delectation, often without more than the hint of a reason why.
To open the book is to venture into a world in which fortune consistently defies expectations; our senses are as uncertain as our understanding is prone to error; opposites turn out very often to be conjoined (“the most universal quality is diversity”); even vice can lead to virtue. Many titles seem to have no direct relation to their contents. Nearly everything our author says in one place is qualified, if not overturned, elsewhere.
Without pretending to untangle all of the knots of this “book with a wild and desultory plan”, let me tug here on a couple of Montaigne’s threads to invite and assist new readers to find their own way.
Some scholars argued that Montaigne began writing his essays as a want-to-be Stoic, hardening himself against the horrors of the French civil and religious wars, and his grief at the loss of his best friend Étienne de La Boétie through dysentery.
Certainly, for Montaigne, as for ancient thinkers led by his favourites, Plutarch and the Roman Stoic Seneca, philosophy was not solely about constructing theoretical systems, writing books and articles. It was what one more recent admirer of Montaigne has called “a way of life”.
Montaigne has little time for forms of pedantry that value learning as a means to insulate scholars from the world, rather than opening out onto it. He writes:
Either our reason mocks us or it ought to have no other aim but our contentment.
Indeed:
We are great fools. ‘He has passed over his life in idleness,’ we say: ‘I have done nothing today.’ What? have you not lived? that is not only the fundamental, but the most illustrious of all your occupations.
One feature of the Essays is, accordingly, Montaigne’s fascination with the daily doings of men like Socrates and Cato the Younger; two of those figures revered amongst the ancients as wise men or “sages”.
Their wisdom, he suggests, was chiefly evident in the lives they led (neither wrote a thing). In particular, it was proven by the nobility each showed in facing their deaths. Socrates consented serenely to taking hemlock, having been sentenced unjustly to death by the Athenians. Cato stabbed himself to death after having meditated upon Socrates’ example, in order not to cede to Julius Caesar’s coup d’état.
To achieve such “philosophic” constancy, Montaigne saw, requires a good deal more than book learning. Indeed, everything about our passions and, above all, our imagination, speaks against achieving that perfect tranquillity the classical thinkers saw as the highest philosophical goal.
We discharge our hopes and fears, very often, on the wrong objects, Montaigne notes, in an observation that anticipates the thinking of Freud and modern psychology. Always, these emotions dwell on things we cannot presently change. Sometimes, they inhibit our ability to see and deal in a supple way with the changing demands of life.
Philosophy, in this classical view, involves a retraining of our ways of thinking, seeing and being in the world. Montaigne’s earlier essay “To philosophise is to learn how to die” is perhaps the clearest exemplar of his indebtedness to this ancient idea of philosophy.
Yet there is a strong sense in which all of the Essays are a form of what one 20th century author has dubbed “self-writing”: an ethical exercise to “strengthen and enlighten” Montaigne’s own judgement, as much as that of we readers:
And though nobody should read me, have I wasted time in entertaining myself so many idle hours in so pleasing and useful thoughts? … I have no more made my book than my book has made me: it is a book consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my life …
As for the seeming disorder of the product, and Montaigne’s frequent claims that he is playing the fool, this is arguably one more feature of the Essays that reflects his Socratic irony. Montaigne wants to leave us with some work to do and scope to find our own paths through the labyrinth of his thoughts, or alternatively, to bobble about on their diverting surfaces.
Yet Montaigne’s Essays, for all of their classicism and their idiosyncracies, are rightly numbered as one of the founding texts of modern thought. Their author keeps his own prerogatives, even as he bows deferentially before the altars of ancient heroes like Socrates, Cato, Alexander the Great or the Theban general Epaminondas.
There is a good deal of the Christian, Augustinian legacy in Montaigne’s makeup. And of all the philosophers, he most frequently echoes ancient sceptics like Pyrrho or Carneades who argued that we can know almost nothing with certainty. This is especially true concerning the “ultimate questions” the Catholics and Huguenots of Montaigne’s day were bloodily contesting.
Writing in a time of cruel sectarian violence, Montaigne is unconvinced by the ageless claim that having a dogmatic faith is necessary or especially effective in assisting people to love their neighbours:
Between ourselves, I have ever observed supercelestial opinions and subterranean manners to be of singular accord …
This scepticism applies as much to the pagan ideal of a perfected philosophical sage as it does to theological speculations.
Socrates’ constancy before death, Montaigne concludes, was simply too demanding for most people, almost superhuman. As for Cato’s proud suicide, Montaigne takes liberty to doubt whether it was as much the product of Stoic tranquility, as of a singular turn of mind that could take pleasure in such extreme virtue.
Indeed when it comes to his essays “Of Moderation” or “Of Virtue”, Montaigne quietly breaks the ancient mold. Instead of celebrating the feats of the world’s Catos or Alexanders, here he lists example after example of people moved by their sense of transcendent self-righteousness to acts of murderous or suicidal excess.
Even virtue can become vicious, these essays imply, unless we know how to moderate our own presumptions.
If there is one form of argument Montaigne uses most often, it is the sceptical argument drawing on the disagreement amongst even the wisest authorities.
If human beings could know if, say, the soul was immortal, with or without the body, or dissolved when we die … then the wisest people would all have come to the same conclusions by now, the argument goes. Yet even the “most knowing” authorities disagree about such things, Montaigne delights in showing us.
The existence of such “an infinite confusion” of opinions and customs ceases to be the problem, for Montaigne. It points the way to a new kind of solution, and could in fact enlighten us.
Documenting such manifold differences between customs and opinions is, for him, an education in humility:
Manners and opinions contrary to mine do not so much displease as instruct me; nor so much make me proud as they humble me.
His essay “Of Cannibals” for instance, presents all of the different aspects of American Indian culture, as known to Montaigne through travellers’ reports then filtering back into Europe. For the most part, he finds these “savages’” society ethically equal, if not far superior, to that of war-torn France’s — a perspective that Voltaire and Rousseau would echo nearly 200 years later.
We are horrified at the prospect of eating our ancestors. Yet Montaigne imagines that from the Indians’ perspective, Western practices of cremating our deceased, or burying their bodies to be devoured by the worms must seem every bit as callous.
And while we are at it, Montaigne adds that consuming people after they are dead seems a good deal less cruel and inhumane than torturing folk we don’t even know are guilty of any crime whilst they are still alive …
“So what is left then?”, the reader might ask, as Montaigne undermines one presumption after another, and piles up exceptions like they had become the only rule.
A very great deal, is the answer. With metaphysics, theology, and the feats of godlike sages all under a “suspension of judgment”, we become witnesses as we read the Essays to a key document in the modern revaluation and valorization of everyday life.
There is, for instance, Montaigne’s scandalously demotic habit of interlacing words, stories and actions from his neighbours, the local peasants (and peasant women) with examples from the greats of Christian and pagan history. As he writes:
I have known in my time a hundred artisans, a hundred labourers, wiser and more happy than the rectors of the university, and whom I had much rather have resembled.
By the end of the Essays, Montaigne has begun openly to suggest that, if tranquillity, constancy, bravery, and honour are the goals the wise hold up for us, they can all be seen in much greater abundance amongst the salt of the earth than amongst the rich and famous:
I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: ‘tis all one … To enter a breach, conduct an embassy, govern a people, are actions of renown; to … laugh, sell, pay, love, hate, and gently and justly converse with our own families and with ourselves … not to give our selves the lie, that is rarer, more difficult and less remarkable …
And so we arrive with these last Essays at a sentiment better known today from another philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, the author of A Gay Science (1882) .
Montaigne’s closing essays repeat the avowal that: “I love a gay and civil wisdom ….” But in contrast to his later Germanic admirer, the music here is less Wagner or Beethoven than it is Mozart (as it were), and Montaigne’s spirit much less agonised than gently serene.
It was Voltaire, again, who said that life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think. Montaigne adopts and admires the comic perspective. As he writes in “Of Experience”:
It is not of much use to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts, we must still walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in the world, we are still perched on our own bums.
Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Deakin University
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Christopher Sheil, UNSW Australia
Amid the astonishing list of accolades collected by Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the book is often also said to be one of the most unread bestsellers. Is this true, and does it matter?
No, it’s not true, or at least the person who made up the story never claimed it was. Rather, the dubious award came with a disclaimer:
This is not remotely scientific and is for entertainment purposes only!
Somewhere along the line the joke was lost, or became a different kind of joke.
The story was created by Jordan Ellenberg in the Wall Street Journal about two years ago. As a lark, Ellenberg, an American mathematician, invented the “Hawking Index” (HI). The index was so-named after Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which has sold more than 10 million copies and is widely referred to as “the most unread book of all time”.
To work out the HI, Ellenberg used the “Popular Highlights” feature in Amazon’s Kindle reader, which lists the five most frequently highlighted passages in a book. He assumed that the highlights of books read to the end would be scattered throughout the text. If people didn’t get past the first chapter, the highlights would be clustered at the beginning. To arrive at the HI, the page numbers of a book’s top five highlights were averaged, and then divided by the number of pages in the book. The higher the number, he assumed, the more that was read.
Ellenberg found that the most read bestseller was Donna Tartts’ The Goldfinch, since all five of the top highlights were from the last 20 pages, giving a completion score of 98.5%. The story about Piketty’s tome was born of the fact that nothing was highlighted beyond page 26, giving a score of 2.6%.
The less than scientific rigour was tipped by the 28.3% score given to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, just pipping the 25.9 given to E. L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey. If most people cannot get through either a 170 page classic novel or 500-odd pages of smut, something is awry with the reading public, or the HI is not what it pretended to be.
Sampling issues aside, the main problem is that the index doesn’t tell of the most read books, but where people mark them up, from which Ellenberg has drawn a questionable inference. A safer assumption is that the index will reveal a book’s most striking or useful passages. As Ellenberg noted, Tartt’s high score arose from mark-ups where the narrative falls away to spell out the book’s themes. In The Great Gatsby, readers tend to highlight a Nick Carraway line about a third of the way into the text that forms “the axis around which the novel spins”. In Fifty Shades, readers (apparently) mark-up the names of the Operas mentioned for followup.
In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the first 26 pages encapsulate the rationale and results of the work. Typical of a scholarly book, it begins with a thesis and the balance contains the supporting argument and evidence. The distillation is bound to be the most marked up, no matter how much is read. Indeed, once you get the gist, you can dip or browse for more profit in any number of reading strategies.
If the HI could be retrospectively applied to E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, it would always fall on the famous preface. The result would be a lower score than Capital in the Twenty-First Century for what is probably the most cited history book of the last century.
The HI was pitched as entertainment, and the most entertained of all is probably Ellenberg. Does it matter? Not to the author, I imagine. With sales now exceeding 2.5 million worldwide, even if the HI was what is purported, a score of 2.4% would give 60,000 completed reads in a trade where publishers can only count on sales of about 300 copies.
The unfortunate consequence would be if people are put off. A 700-page book of economics is never going to be a walk in the park, but Piketty’s style is at the lucid end. As I noted in a full-scale review, one of the book’s charms is the way that the author illustrates the changing social consciousness of inequality with contemporaneous novels and television.
Unlike the US, France and the UK, Piketty’s book hasn’t appeared in Australia’s bestselling lists. As the new report on wealth inequality that Frank Stilwell and I prepared for the Evatt Foundation shows, this is not due to a lack of relevance. If it’s because Australians fall for Ellenberg’s canard, the joke will end up on 99% of us.
Christopher Sheil, Visiting Fellow in History, UNSW Australia
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
At the BookShelf 
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