In a long, rambling statement in September, ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani expounded on his group’s inherent advantage: “Being killed … is a victory,” he said. “You fight a people who can never be defeated. They either gain victory or are killed.” In this most basic sense, religion—rather than what one might call ideology—matters. ISIS fighters are not only willing to die in a blaze of religious ecstasy; they welcome it, believing that they will be granted direct entry into heaven. It doesn’t particularly matter if this sounds absurd to most people. It’s what they believe.
Political scientists, including myself, have tended to see religion, ideology, and identity as epiphenomenal—products of a given set of material factors. We are trained to believe in the primacy of “politics.” This isn’t necessarily incorrect, but it can sometimes obscure the independent power of ideas that seem, to much of the Western world, quaint and archaic. As Robert Kagan recently wrote, “For a quarter-century, Americans have been told that at the end of history lies boredom rather than great conflict.” The rise of ISIS is only the most extreme example of the way in which liberal determinism—the notion that history moves with intent toward a more reasonable, secular future—has failed to explain the realities of the Middle East. It should by now go without saying that the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not share ISIS’s view of religion, but that’s not really the most interesting or relevant question. ISIS’s rise to prominence has something to do with Islam, but what is that something?
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