What motivates ISIS?: a short interview with a Middle East expert

November 4, 2015 • 10:24 am

Here from PBS Newshour is an interview of historian Will McCants by Margaret Warner. McCants works for the Brookings Institution, a respected think tank in Washington, D.C.; his page there describes him like this:

. . . .a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy and director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and has served in government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East, and terrorism, including as State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. He is the author of “Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam”(Princeton University Press, 2011) and “The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State” (St. Martin’s Press, 2015).

In this short  6½-minute chat, McCants discusses his new book, which is doing well on Amazon, and Warner queries him about the motivations of ISIS. She seems taken aback that their motivation seems to be largely religious, even for the organization’s recruits who, while not religious themselves, appear to be swept up in ISIS’s “apocalyptic vision”—a vision derived directly from Islam. They are, he says, intoxicated by “fighting an End-Times battle and absolving their sins.” Is religion at all culpable here? You be the judge.

h/t: Leon

44 thoughts on “What motivates ISIS?: a short interview with a Middle East expert”

  2. So we can’t ascribe the rise of ISIS to ‘bad governance and lack of economic opportunity’, as Justin Trudeau did? x

    1. No, you can, at least to some extent. Historically speaking, people tend to adopt radical, apocalyptic worldviews in situations of great social transformation and violence. As McCants himself elaborates in his book (and as many other scholars, myself included, concur), a large portion of Muslims in both the Sunni and Shi’ite communities interpreted the 2003 US-led preemptive invasion as a clear confirmation of prophecy. (I could provide plenty of evidence for this, if you’d like.) Without the invasion and subsequent occupation, it’s doubtful that such widespread apocalyptic fervor would have arises in the Muslim world. But once an apocalyptic worldview is adopted, it can play a major causal role in determining the behaviors of those who accept it.

      1. Yes, Phil, my comment was tongue-in-cheek, or as we say nowadays, snark.

        My comment was directed at Trudeau who appears to think that ISIS should arise in the Aborigine outback of Australia and in the Native American reservations in the US. x

        2. There was of course the Ghost Dance in the late 19th century – and that, too, was a millenarian cult that derived from the destruction of Indian societies, particularly that of the Sioux. Snark is too easy.

    1. That’s one depressing website you’ve got there. And the sections on religions are the most depressing because they are so unnecessary.

      1. I assume “they” refers to religions? If so, then yes. It’s a sad fact that humanity evinces a persistent weakness for certain types of delusional thinking. Such delusion will almost certainly become increasingly dangerous as we proceed into the Era of Advanced Technology.

        1. Yeah, religions. Or rather, the religious contribution to possible apocalypse. Meteors, global pandemics, super volcanoes, and the sort are in some sense built-in. Even some social ills,like the threat of nuclear war and climate change, have structural causes connected to the development of technology that make them seem like a problems we’d fairly likely have to deal with no matter how many times you rewound the tape of cultural history. The potential religious sources of dangerous instability, though, feel completely arbitrary. It is like some movie where the plot hinges on some simple miscommunication between person A and B, where the whole plot collapses if person A actually read a post-it note from person B, or some other small thing. I find it exceedingly frustrating to watch such movies because “all they need to do” is learn some “tiny” fact and the problem vanishes. This is how religion feels. All they need to do is learn a “tiny” fact and their issues evaporate. This makes the religious component of instability seem shallow and like something that should be easy to remedy, like the missed communication in the movie plot… someone just tell that person what they don’t know, what everyone in the audience knows, what any person in real life might infer…

          Of course, human nature is every bit as structural as the arc of technology, so it’s an illusion to imagine that the religious delusion is somehow less entrenched, less inevitable than technological threats or perhaps even meteors. But it still *feels* exceedingly arbitrary, and that feeling makes any apocalypse brought on by the religious feel ten times more horrible to me than one brought on by other factors.

          1. Only problem is that religions don’t rely on “a tiny fact”, but a huge presupposition, ie that there is such a thing as god, and that humans can know what it thinks and desires.

          2. Yes. That’s why I put “tiny fact” in quotes.

            I know it is no small matter to change this presupposition. Nonetheless, I also know that their view of the world is an illusion, a bit like a Necker cube. They see the cube facing one way and they are willing to destroy the world over their understanding of which way the cube faces. That feels much worse to me than if they were willing to destroy the world over something that isn’t an illusion, greed say. This is just my emotional reaction, since objectively a destroyed world is a destroyed world, it matters not whether it was greed or illusion that did it in. But the latter bothers me more.

    3. What an interesting website! Can’t wait till I have time to read more of it later today. (Morning here.)

      1. I agree. I hope to have time to read it soon. Stupid work is ruining my ability to read things.

  5. US right wing groups are cut from the same cloth – wanting to bring on some Armageddon scenario. Well if population pressures, pollution, climate change etc carry on as they have, they may get their wish.
    Nutters.

      1. I think climate change and biodiversity loss could definitely exacerbate apocalyptic thinking among both extremists groups at the margins and mainstream believers by ostensibly fulfilling prophecy. The result is that eschatological beliefs could actually be cemented by a steady march towards a secular apocalypse.

        1. eschatological beliefs could actually be cemented by a steady march towards a secular apocalypse.

          I am sure of it.

          That’s how the fundamentalist group of my youth responded to any and all global threats. The cold war? Nuclear weapons? Gas shortages? Pollution? Crime? Revolutions? Bad weather? All of these are resisted with one hand and cheered with the other. Of course things are going to get bad, they say, God said it would be so at the end. See… every bad thing proves we are right!

          These are people starved for any concrete evidence their beliefs are not pure fantasy, so they are very hungry for things that confirm, in their minds, their narrative of history. This is why Israel has become so central for so many Christians. They have come to realize that the existence of the state of Israel confirmed their view of history (God choosing the tribe of Israel, and controlling history to keep them in play) in a way that a scattered diaspora didn’t. More recently, while my fundamentalist friends rail against things like gay marriage, and are legitimately frightened by it, in another way this development simultaneously satisfies them because it plays into their view of the end times.

  6. why is it when Ben Carson or other GOPers claim evolution is ‘only a theory’ or that gays can be set straight, no one has any issues tracing their loony phrases to their Christian beliefs.

    Yet when Muslims do or say equally or more deranged things, all clearly stemming from the Koran and Hadith, its never because of their faith but because of poverty/US foreign policy/general extremism/etc/etc/

    1. I noticed the same thing. My conclusion is that we all sat at the same bench watching the same gaming, rooting or not, for the same team.

      we dare not question and if we do, it has little to no effect. Makes me sick.

      this is why I enjoy coming here.

    2. Actually, everyone I know who’s interested in these matters ascribes their loony beliefs to their Christian views.

  7. The first step in determining what to do about a possible enemy is to understand it and fully define the group. Neither the left or right in this country has done that so any discussion about what to do about it is premature. Once this first step has been accomplished, the result might be to do very little and realize this is an internal problem for the 1.6 billion Muslims to solve. The Islamist and Jihad movement is first and foremost a religious problem.

    1. Just note that sometimes Wood and others mention 2076 as the year when ISIS believes the apocalypse will occur. (Wood doesn’t mention it in the article you link to, but he does in some interviews and other articles.) It turns out that this is wrong. The prophecy comes from an old classical manuscript by al-Suyuti called “Al-Kashf An Mujawazat Hadhihi Al-Ummah Al-Alf.” ISIS is almost certainly aware of it, but they just as likely don’t accept it. Nonetheless, as David Cook and other scholars of Islamic apocalyptic note, 2076 (which corresponds to 1500 in the Islamic calendar) will almost certainly be a year of heightened apocalyptic fervor. Thus: a year to be particularly vigilant, especially given the sort of advanced technologies that will likely be around at the time.

      1. will almost certainly be a year of heightened apocalyptic fervor. Thus: a year to be particularly vigilant

        I’ll put a reminder in my Google calendar so I don’t forget the heads up.

        1. I put in a request to hold off the apocalypse until 2051, so I can get my full 100 years of living in beforehand.

          Oh wait…my kids and grand-kids…I should ask for another millennium just to be safe.

  9. This reminds me that I have to go back and reread Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millenium. I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, I cannot recall if he makes a point of a correlation between socio-economic upheaval and the rise of millenarian movements.

    1. That is a classic book on the subject. And scholars definitely connect socio-economic upheaval with the appearance of millenarian movements. Graeme Wood and Will McCants both would undoubtedly agree with that. In fact, mainstream leaders in both the Christian (e.g., John Hagee) and Muslim (e.g., Yasir Qadhi) communities point to the rapid technological and scientific changes of the past 100 years as unambiguous empirical evidence that the Rapture / appearance of the Mahdi is imminent.

      1. Norman Cohn was stimulated into writing his great book by the success of Communism and Naziism, so I find it curious that almost nobody on this and other threads, if not nobody at all, seems to mention these movements, perhaps because they are not ‘religions’ in the sense that they didn’t depend on a belief in God, and religion in that sense seems to be the target that new atheists are fixated on – but both Naziism and Communism were millenarian movements and both had what success they had in consequence of socio-economic upheaval and the collapse of political order. It is not a simple matter of ‘religion bad’, as Cohn’s book makes clear. Also, it really did not seem to me in that interview (which admittedly I read rather than watched) that the interviewer was ‘taken aback’ by what McCants said – she asked good questions and got good answers.

        1. Tim, you make an excellent point. The reason I don’t mention it specifically is that Marxism and Nazism aren’t the major contemporary concerns. Religious terrorism is. But you are exactly right that they were millenarian movements that borrowed heavily from the eschatology of Christianity. In my book, and on my website (below), I distinguish between “evidential” and “ideological” eschatologies. I explicitly mention Marxism and Nazism — as well as singularitarianism — as ideological eschatologies, just like the eschatologies of Twelvers, the Islamic State, and dispensationalists. In contrast, the eschatological scenario of “doom” discussed by Nick Bostrom in his book Superintelligence isn’t ideological at all, it’s evidential. Same goes for scenarios involving asteroid impacts, supervolcanoes, a global pandemic, a physics disaster, and so on.

          http://www.risksandreligion.org/#!big-questions–faq-/c1yzj

          1. Thank you both for comments. Mr. Harris, you are of course correct in your assessment. Both Nazism and Communism entailed similar thought processes and socioeconomic situations. I recall when reading Marx’s theory of history and Cohn’s work how the teleological nature of the former fit quite well with what the latter had written about.

            And I started my reread yesterday evening.

  10. How ironic that the evangelic sect member GW Bush is responsible for the apocalyptic sect rise of ISIS.

    Mohammedanism – US: 2-0 (Al Qaeda, ISIS).

    You would think that Korea and Viêt Nam had brought _some_ empirical feedback… :-/

    2. The rise of ISIS is a result of Assad’s staying in power, which in turn is a result of Western indifference combined with Russian protection.
      Europeans have had to deal with Islamic fanaticism for ages before the USA even existed, so the idea that everything in the world, particularly the bad things, is a result of US action is strange to me.

  13. I believe it is worthwhile to revisit Mr Hitchens commentary on the Quran and its dubious origins

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