**disclaimer: this isnt a denunciation message** So I just thought Id make clear my position regarding the movement which has emerged in Iraq and Syria over the last decade, that goes by the name the Islamic State. I am not affiliated with them in any way beyond conversations with supporters. I do not consider myself a supporter, nor do I consider myself an Islamist, or a Wahhabi or any of the other various sectarian labels that are attached to them. My primary interest in the group is imagining myself as Ibn Khaldun, climbing down the walls of Damascus to interview Tamerlane in his siege tent. Additionally, the media reporting of the group has implications for the Muslim community more generally. It illustrates the way that anti-Muslim sentiment operates. It shows us many things about the nature of propaganda, about the complexity of this type of conflict and of the murkiness of this age we are in. I am not unaware of the surreality, or the suppressed horror that comes with these discussions. There are echoes of that horror reverberating through all of this. As Mohamad Tabbaa put it grinning executioners. The bleakness of it, the shuddering eeriness of joking with a killer is something that can pass you by very easily. Working in history I am constantly confronted with that eeriness, the books I read, the essays I write, might as well be vellum for all the crimes that they lay upon. There is a saying in Medieval history that states that we write looking over the Inquisitors shoulder, because so much of what we know about medieval Europe comes from records obtained through torture. The historian extracts normality from those accounts, tells stories of village life pulled from men approaching the pyre and their doom. I want to make it utterly clear that I am aware and think about these things constantly. That I try, and often fail, to lend these subjects the gravitas that they deserve. May God forgive me for those points where I fail.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 05:07:41 +0000
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