A few months ago, Graeme Wood sparked controversy when the Atlantic published his essay, "
What ISIS Really Wants." Wood's article was controversial because he disputed the claim that ISIS was inauthentic or "un-Islamic" as so many had claimed while the group laid waste to Syria and Iraq.
Writing for ThinkProgress in September of 2014, Igor Volsky and Jack Jenkins pointed to the many Muslims and Islamic groups that had criticized ISIS. They assumed that rape and sexual slavery, for example, were clearly inconsistent with Islam. ISIS was revisionist and ahistorical, the product of pragmatic political demands as opposed to religious belief.
Wood's article provided a strong counterargument, one that Jenkins was unable to fully respond to when he
interviewed one of the experts Wood cited in his piece. Jenkins also
suggested , through alternative experts, that ISIS was misappropriating Islam and that the existence of Muslims condemning ISIS demonstrated that the group was in some way inauthentic. More importantly, it was dangerous, and risked validating the claims of ISIS.
In the case of the criticism of Wood’s article, the counterpoint appears to be that Islam is a diverse religion with many different interpretations. And that is certainly true, but doesn’t that suggest that it is a tradition that can make room for ISIS? And even if the religious motivations are illegitimate, that does not make them inauthentic. ISIS may be the byproduct of a particular time and a particular set of circumstances, but this concession does not suggest ISIS is a nihilistic death cult full of psychopathic murderers.