Stern in Today’s Zaman: The Religion of ISIS
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said that ISIS can be understood as a new religion promoting itself through violence.
Stern made this argument, along with the contention that ISIS must be fought by engaging with youth, in an exclusive interview published Jan. 29 in Today’s Zaman entitled “ISIS is a Modern Phenomenon; It is Really a New Religion.”
From the text of the article:
I certainly think they are using it for recruitment. It is also possible that many of them believe it. Since 9/11 and the allied invasion of Iraq in 2003, Sunnis have taken a far greater interest in the Apocalypse, a subject that has traditionally been of only minor interest to them (as distinct from Shia). In a 2012 Pew poll, in most of the countries surveyed in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, half or more Muslims believe that they will personally witness the appearance of the Mahdi. In Islamic eschatology, the messianic figure known as the Mahdi (the Guided One) will appear before the Day of Judgment. This expectation is most common in Afghanistan (83 percent), followed by Iraq (72), Tunisia (67) and Malaysia (62).
So, yes, I think it is possible that ISIS is deliberately exploiting apocalyptic expectation to enhance recruitment, but it is hard to know how many of the leaders are really thinking that way. But the Apocalypse is all over ISIS’s writings. Its sectarian killing and even its sexual enslavement of “polytheist” women is partly dictated, or so ISIS says, by its preparation for the final apocalyptic battle, which it anticipates will take place in the Syrian town of Dabiq. Thus, ISIS conquered that town, and named its online English-language magazine after it, even though Dabiq was of limited strategic value.
You can read the entire article here.
Stern’s main focus is on perpetrators of violence and the possible connections between trauma and terror. She has written on terrorist groups across religions and ideologies, among them neo-Nazis, Islamists, anarchists, and white supremacists. She has also written about counter-radicalization programs for both neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorists. She has been working with a team at Boston Children’s Hospital on the risk factors for violence among Somali-refugee youth. She is currently working on a study of Radovan Karadzic, indicted for war crimes in Bosnia. Learn more about her here.