Hi,
Earlier this week, I covered some general ideas about Samer's Raqqa Diaries. Today, I want to investigate a couple of details I thought were important from the book.
First, the most important point this book made was how the regime oppressed people by taking away their religion during a time when people needed it most. As Samer describes it, Daesh has no connection to Islam. The way Daesh represents itself as some kind of ‘Islamic’ ideal is a falsehood.
This relates to a larger idea I ended my prior post with – by associating itself with the same religion observed by the people they are trying to oppress, Daesh makes it more difficult for an outside observer to separate the oppressor from the refugee. This is a common tactic of any war-making regime because if the outside world looks at a war zone and can’t tell the difference between who is causing the damage and who is being damaged, it becomes so much more difficult for the international community to bring together the support needed to bring these conflicts to an end.
I thought The Raqqa Diaries did well to separate refugee and oppressor despite the ‘shared’ religious connection an outsider might notice. Samer’s observation that Daesh has no connection to Islam is vital. It points the way to how someone in the international community can help make the world a better place by simply understanding the difference between those devoted to a religion and those who use religion as a means to obtain power through violence and oppression.
Samer’s thought echoes an idea I’ve been thinking about for a few months – why do we in the USA call it ‘ISIS’ or ‘The Islamic State’? The expression sounds like something straight out of Fox’s torture-glorifying 24 (and therefore something not worth emulating) and yet here we are in the English-speaking world going on about ‘ISIS this’ and ‘ISIS that’. A lot of people around the world refer to what we call ISIS as Daesh. It brings to mind a basic question anytime something has multiple names – what is there to gain by having two names for the same thing?
An obvious explanation is that it makes sense to translate Daesh into a more easily pronounced phrase or expression because Daesh isn’t quite an English language word. That’s cute but the explanation really falls flat when you consider all the foreign words we’ve adopted instead of translating (if you disagree, reader, we can discuss over sushi).
I think the explanation is far simpler – somebody wanted to link this crazy regime that represents nothing about any religion to Islam. I don’t know if this was a sinister thing or just seemed ‘obvious’ to whoever carelessly said ‘ISIS’ first – it doesn’t really matter. The end result is a world where a lot of people who don’t know better will now associate Islam with the terror, chaos, and destruction anytime they see the mainstream media ‘cover’ what is going on in Syria.
The way we label things plays a much larger role than acknowledged in how we come to understand and interpret the world around us. The distinction of ISIS and Daesh is a simple yet important example. As long as we casually accept the careless assumptions imbedded in words or phrases like ‘ISIS’, the longer we’ll all waste living with the consequences of stereotypes, prejudices, and assumed differences.
