What ISIS Really Wants: The Response

I suggested that religious ideology was underrated as an explanatory lens—indeed, barely understood as one—but didn’t specify the relative importance of it versus other factors, specifically “the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil.” If I could specify that relative importance, I would; I find the confidence of others in this regard fascinating. But as I wrote in the original essay: “Without acknowledgment of these factors, no explanation of the rise of the Islamic State could be complete.” I set out to write an essay about this group’s ideology, which heretofore has gone underacknowledged, so I don’t apologize for doing just that, though I take to heart Hamid’s counsel to see these elements as less separable than they appear.