One of those movements was led by a scholar from central Arabia named Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Many local leaders rejected his approach, but he found a patron in a powerful local tribal leader, Muhammad Ibn Saud. In the local wars rising among the largely nomadic desert tribes for goods and land, Saud used Wahhabism to justify its opposite: his military campaigns were clearly fought for political and economic power. As Armstrong describes it, ‘two forms of Wahhabism were emerging: where Ibn Saud was happy to enforce Wahhabi Islam with the sword to enhance his political position, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab insisted that education, study, and debate were the only legitimate means of spreading the one true faith.’
When Wahhab died, Saud and later his sons continued to claim that Wahhabism was the only legitimate version of Islam and that it could be ‘enforced with the sword’. Enforcing the Wahhabi version of Islam along with the practice of takfir, meaning identifying other Muslims as unbelievers and therefore deserving of death, became common ways of justifying mass killings that actually were committed for political or economic goals. Armstrong describes how, after Wahhab’s death, ‘Wahhabism became more violent, an instrument of state terror… Saud’s son and successor used takfir to justify the wholesale slaughter of resistant populations. In 1801, his army sacked the holy Shia city of Karbala in what is now Iraq, plundered the tomb of Imam Husain, and slaughtered thousands of Shias, including women and children; in 1803, in fear and panic, the holy city of Mecca surrendered to the Saudi leader.’
That was the origin of what would later – following World War I and British and French colonial machinations – become the state of Saudi Arabia. During the decades that followed, competing violent strands of Wahhabism vied for power and influence, including a rebel movement known as the Ikhwan, or brotherhood. With the quashing of the Ikhwan rebellion in 1930, the replacement of its rejection of modernity, and its extreme violence against civilians who disagreed with it, the official Saudi state presented a changed version of Wahhabism. Saudi Arabia abandoned the majority of the most violent practices, including the territorial expansion efforts that lay at the heart of early Wahhabism.
Unsurprisingly, not everyone agreed with that shift. There were struggles over the definitions, goals and traditions of Wahhabi Islam, and in many ways ISIS now shows its roots in some of those earlier practices. As Karen Armstrong describes the trajectory, ‘the Ikhwan spirit and its dream of territorial expansion did not die, but gained new ground in the 1970s, when the kingdom became central to Western foreign policy in the region. Washington welcomed the Saudis’ opposition to Nasserism (the pan-Arab socialist ideology of Egypt’s second president, Gamal Abdel Nasser) and to Soviet influence. After the Iranian Revolution, it [Washington] gave tacit support to the Saudis’ project of countering Shia radicalism by Wahhabizing the entire Muslim world… Like the Ikhwan, IS represents a rebellion against the official Wahhabism of modern Saudi Arabia. Its swords, covered faces and cut-throat executions all recall the original Brotherhood.’
Of course the immediate political trajectory of ISIS as an organization lies in the much more recent past, specifically the years of US occupation of Iraq and the rise of al-Qaeda. But its religious and ideological touchstones have much older roots, in Saudi Arabia, not Iraq.
The organization known as ISIS, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (or for some, the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham), traces its origins to the earlier ISI, or Islamic State in Iraq, which was itself an outgrowth of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), sometimes known as al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Beginning in June 2014, ISIS changed its name again and began to refer to itself as the Islamic State, or IS. The organization has also been known as ISIL, or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. In much of the Arab world, it is known as Daesh, the Arabic acronym for al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil-Iraq wash-Sham (more or less the same as ISIS).
The original name, al-Qaeda in Iraq, reflected the origins of the group, claiming the Iraqi franchise of the al-Qaeda brand. The name change from al-Qaeda in Iraq, or AQI, to Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI, took place during the US troop surge in 2006-07, when many Sunni militias were abandoning their opposition to the US occupation and instead joining the US-initiated Awakening movement, which paid them to fight with the US occupation forces instead of against them. The newly renamed ISI, which rejected the Awakening movement and continued its anti-occupation military attacks, was thus distinguishing itself from its former allies among other Sunni militias.
The next change, to ISIS or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, came when the organization, after the 2009-10 period of not-quite-defeat but certainly significant setbacks in Iraq, re-emerged in Syria as a rising player on the anti-Assad side of the Syrian civil war. This change also heralded the more ambitious self-definition of the group’s intentions – beyond the geographic expansion from Iraq to Syria, it was also now looking toward the elimination of the Syrian-Iraqi border as part of its goal. ISIS, whether one defines the final ‘S’ as Syria or al-Sham, refers to an older, pre-colonial definition of the territory: what was long known as ‘Greater Syria’.
Al-Sham, Arabic for Greater Syria, referred to a wide and diverse territory that had been under control of the Ottoman Empire for 400 or so years. It included more or less today’s Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and historic Palestine, including what is now Israel. So ‘ISIS’ generally refers both to the location of the group’s fighters and supporters – contemporary Iraq and Syria – and the aspirations of the organization. ISIS has been public about its goal of erasing colonial borders, starting with the border between Iraq and Syria, but it is easy to see its goals extending to reversing the colonially imposed divide between Syria and Lebanon and beyond. ISIS has said little about the issue of Palestine, but it’s difficult to imagine any discussion of colonial borders in the Middle East that did not quickly turn to Israel-Palestine.
The alternative contemporary version of the name, ISIL, or Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, may have emerged as a consequence of translation, rather than as the organization’s own choice. The group itself uses ‘al-Sham’ in its names, thus ISIS in translation. But al-Sham, historically, was the same thing as the Levant, a European term both colonialist and orientalist in its origins and usage. So the Obama administration’s conscious choice to use ‘ISIL’ rather than ‘ISIS’ reflects a deliberate intention to be insulting.
As Public Radio International’s ‘The World’ programme explains it, ‘The term Levant first appeared in medieval French. It literally means “the rising”, referring to the land where the sun rises. If you’re in France, in the western Mediterranean, that would make sense as a way to describe the eastern Mediterranean.’ Thus the colonialist legacy. PRI goes on, ‘Levant was also used in English from at least 1497. It’s kind of archaic, but still used by scholars in English, though more widely in French. The Germans have a similar term for the same region: Morgenland, or “the land of the morning”, It’s even more archaic in German and kind of implies an imaginary, romantic, never-never land.’ Thus the orientalist part.
Even the New York Times identified ‘Levant’ as ‘a once-common term that now has something of an antique whiff about it, like “the Orient”, Because of the term’s French colonial associations, many Arab nationalists and Islamist radicals disdain it, and it is unlikely that the militant group would choose “Levant” to render its name.’ But for the White House, apparently colonialist language does not seem to present a problem. At least through the spring of 2015, ISIL remained the Obama administration’s