On Monday, I put up a post linking to Graeme Wood's Atlantic piece and called it a must read.
Today, I read Frank Weathers' related words and would be wrong not to send my readers his way for a countering perspective:
As it turns out, it played pretty well among a lot of us, though now it is getting some push back from Muslims, and scholars, who know more than Mr. Wood does about their religion. They know more than
most Americans do too.
That said, most normal folks have noticed that the majority of Muslims do not go on rampages, killing everyone who gets in their way in a bid to bring about the eschaton. You noticed this too, right? So when Qasim Rashid wrote a post over on the Patheos Muslim Channel, for the blog Islam Ahmaddiya, I took a gander at it, and I think you should as well.
Titled, ISIS Really Wants Power—Not Islam, the author takes a scalpel to several of Mr. Wood’s claims about ISIS, and a number of his general claims about Islam. You really should go read it, because there is always more than one side to a story, and tidy little narratives are all the rage when we want to try and understand something that everyone can agree is a horror, especially when we already think we know the answers to our questions.
That is what ISIS is. It’s a horror show that is conducting a terror campaign in a bid to gain power the old fashioned way. By making war on the innocent, and taking away their lives, while taking away the rightful citizens, and territory, of the legitimate governments in the countries that ISIS operates in.
A friend of mine calls ISIS the “Califake,” and I agree with that characterization. I would hope Mr. Wood and Mr. Rashid would too. From the beginning of their rise to prominence, I have said that they are illegitimate usurpers with more in common with the Barbary Pirates than with the voice of true Islam. There is no magisterium in Islam, though, even if Mr. Rashid might argue that the millions who have pledged their allegiance to His Holiness Mirza Masroor Ahmad is the closest thing to a pope-like figure that any group of Muslim followers has.
What perplexes me isn’t what ISIS really wants, which is power and prestige, nor what ISIS really is, which is a group of terrorists with rich backers and shared enemies, who use religion as a prop in their bid for power.
No. What perplexes me is that many of my fellows seem to think that the best thing for us to do is to go back to Iraq with US ground forces, air forces, etc., and deck ISIS with the knock out punch that they have coming to them. In other words, act like the crusading army that ISIS says we are, and which they are willing to die fighting against, while also killing anyone, and everyone who they don’t see eye to eye with.
Read the rest prayerfully and with an open mind. I'm trying hard to do so.
Frank continues to believe firmly that ISIS needs to be destroyed and goes on to tell us how that ought to take place.
I can see some wisdom in this if I look at things with an eye looking well on down the road.
It may very well be the eye God wants us all to be using.
God, grant those in opposition to the evil that is ISIS supernatural wisdom. And soon.
Amen.
