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Everything the media will cover about Afghanistan is bound up with a rigid form of Islam

Everything the media will cover about Afghanistan is bound up with a rigid form of Islam

Two weeks ago, the Religion Guy looked at the future of world Islam and the media after Afghanistan's Taliban takeover. Herewith a look backward with a bit of historical and cultural perspective for writers covering this turbulent and tormented land.

As University of Washington political scientist Anthony Gill commented in the Wall Street Journal, "Despite the seeming irrelevance of religion in the secular West, policy-makers and military strategists would do well to understand its power elsewhere in the world." In the case of Afghanistan, one good source for that is "Holy Wars: The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism" (Routledge, 1989, reissued 2014) by British journalist Dilip Hiro, a native of Pakistan.

A big theme emerges: Anything and everything that has occurred and will occur is bound up with an especially rigid form of Islam that dominates Afghan culture. In rural villages across the countryside, where most live, mullahs with rudimentary schooling are part of the influential elite establishment.

Time and again over the past century, monarchs tried to tame the clergy and impose a somewhat flexible form of Islam only to be defeated by populist rancor. Among the issues: whether to educate girls, child marriage, modern dress vs. the veil and burqa, whether women can leave their houses without male chaperones or hold down jobs, women voting, alcohol prohibition, polygamy rules and whether to permit banks when the religion bans charging of interest.

Hiro writes that Afghanistan was "a landlocked society which clung to medieval Islam and tenaciously resisted modernization well into the last quarter of the 20th Century." The media have well and amply surveyed the following eruptions since a 1973 military coup abolished the monarchy.

Soviet troops invaded to prop up a Marxist regime and produced the militant Muslim movement (1979). U.S.-aided Mujahideen forces won Soviet withdrawal (1989). The Taliban emerged from the resulting confusion to impose harsh theocracy (1996). Western powers and Afghan allies expelled Taliban rulers for harboring the 9/11 plotters (2001). The Taliban rapidly regain power (August, 2021).


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Trying to spot religion 'ghosts' in the dramatic fall of America's version of Afghanistan (#FAIL)

Trying to spot religion 'ghosts' in the dramatic fall of America's version of Afghanistan (#FAIL)

The whole idea of Axios, as a news publication, is to take massive, complex stories and — using a combination of bullet lists and URLs to additional information — allow readers to quickly scan through the news of the previous day. The Axios team calls this “smart brevity.”

More often than not, this turns out to be a crunched summary of the big ideas in mainstream coverage. Thus, it’s logical to look at this online newsletter’s take — “1 big thing: System failure” — on the horrific scenes that unfolded yesterday in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The big question: What did American diplomats, intellectuals and politicos miss in the big picture?

* The United States was literally run out of town after 20 years, $1 trillion and 2,448 service members' lives lost.

* Mohammad Naeem, the spokesman for the Taliban's political office, told Al Jazeera today: "Thanks to God, the war is over in the country."

Why it matters: A friend who spent more than a decade as a U.S. official in Afghanistan and Iraq texted me that the collapse "shows we missed something fundamental — something systemic in our intel, military and diplomatic service over the decades — deeper than a single (horrible) decision."

* As the BBC's Jon Sopel put it: "America's attempt to export liberal democracy to Afghanistan is well and truly over. …”

What were the key tasks in this “export of liberal democracy”? Here is my two-point summary.

First, the United States and its allies had to build an Afghan military that could protect this project. #FAIL

Second, the Western nation builders had to sell a vision of an Islamic culture that, somehow, embraced American values on a host of different issues — from free elections to freedom for women, from Western-style education to respect for the Sexual Revolution in all its forms. This Georgetown University faculty lounge vision of Islam needed to be more compelling than the one offered by the Taliban. #FAIL

Looking at this from a journalism perspective, I think it is more than symbolic that most of the elite media coverage of the fall of this new, alternative Afghanistan have almost nothing to say about Islam and, in particular, the divisions inside that stunningly complex world religion. Was this, in any way, a “religion story”? Apparently not. #FAIL

There is way too much coverage to look at, of course. However, it does help to look at The New York Times, since that is the straw that stirs the drink in American media. My goal was to find material that contrasted the Taliban’s vision of Islam with the vision offered by the U.S. State Department.


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ISIS executes another Coptic Christian: Once again, this appears to be 'conservative' news

ISIS executes another Coptic Christian: Once again, this appears to be 'conservative' news

Let’s spend a moment examining a basic (you would think) file produced by a Google News search for this name — “Nabil Habashi Salama.”

Who is this man in the news? Simply stated, he is the latest Coptic Orthodox Christian killed by ISIS.

Does his death matter? Alas, this appears to be a political question, one that shapes basic journalism decisions about what stories are worthy of mainstream coverage.

First things first: Here is the overture of a report about his death published at Christianity Today. The headline: “ISIS Executes Christian Businessman Kidnapped in Egypt’s Sinai.”

The Islamic State has claimed another Christian victim. And Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church has won another martyr.

“We are telling our kids that their grandfather is now a saint in the highest places of heaven,” stated Peter Salama of his 62-year-old father, Nabil Habashi Salama, executed by the ISIS affiliate in north Sinai.

“We are so joyful for him.”

The Salamas are known as one of the oldest Coptic families in Bir al-Abd on the Mediterranean coast of the Sinai Peninsula. Nabil was a jeweler, owning also mobile phone and clothing shops in the area. Peter said ISIS targeted his father for his share in building the city’s St. Mary Church.

In a newly released 13-minute propaganda video entitled The Makers of Slaughter (or Epic Battles), a militant quotes the Quran to demand the humiliation of Christians and their willing payment of jizya — a tax to ensure their protection.

Now, what is Christianity Today?


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Define 'radical Islam,' please: Is this a candidate for 'scare quote' status? Really?

If you have read GetReligion.org for any time at all, you are probably familiar with the whole idea of "scare quotes."

Actually, I would assume that this piece of media jargon is now in common in just about any setting in which critics, news consumers and journalists argue about issues linked to news coverage and, especially, media bias.

So what does the term mean and what, on this day, does it have to do with discussions of "radical" forms of Islam? Wait. You see the quote marks that are framing the word "radical"?

Here is one online definition of this term:

scare quotes -- noun
quotation marks used around a word or phrase when they are not required, thereby eliciting attention or doubts.

For example, this online dictionary notes that, "putting the term 'global warming' in scare quotes serves to subtly cast doubt on the reality of such a phenomenon."

Here at GetReligion, many of our discussions of scare quotes have started using them to frame a perfectly normal term in discussions of the First Amendment -- religious liberty. Religious liberty turns into "religious liberty" whenever religious traditionalists, usually in conflicts over the Sexual Revolution, attempt to defend their free speech rights, rights of freedom of association and rights to free exercise of religious beliefs.

A GetReligion reader sent me a recent piece from The Atlantic and asked if another important term in public discourse is about to be shoved into "scare quotes" territory. The double-decker headline on that piece saith:

The Coming War on ‘Radical Islam’
How Trump’s government could change America’s approach to terrorism

You knew Trump had to be involved in this somehow, right? Here is the overture, which shows the context of the question that was raised by our reader:


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Where are the essential facts about religion in news reports about fall of eastern Aleppo?

American news consumers, as a rule, do not pay much attention to foreign news coverage. Here at GetReligion, we know that writing a post about mainstream media coverage of religion news on the other side of the planet is not the way to get lots of clicks and retweets.

That doesn't matter, because news is news and it's genuinely tragic that many Americans are in the dark about what is happening outside our borders. We will keep doing what we do.

This leads me to news coverage of the fall of the eastern half of Aleppo in Syria, a landmark event in that hellish civil war that is receiving -- as it should -- extensive coverage in American newspapers.

As you read the coverage in your own newspapers and favorite websites, please look for a crucial word -- "Alawites." President Bashar al-Assad of Syria is a member of the often persecuted Alawite sect of Islam. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

Let's start with the top of the Washington Post report, since this story is very typical of those found elsewhere, such as The New York Times and also Al Jazeera.

BEIRUT -- Syria’s government declared Thursday that it had regained full control of Aleppo after the last rebel fighters and civilians evacuated the key city as part of an agreement brokered by Russia and Turkey.
The Syrian military announced on state media that “security and stability” had been returned to eastern Aleppo, once the largest rebel stronghold. The “terrorists” -- a term used by the Syrian government to describe nearly all of its opponents -- had exited the city, the military said.
President Bashar al-Assad’s consolidation of Aleppo marks the end of the opposition presence in the city for the first time in more than four years and deals a major blow to the rebellion to unseat him.

Think about this as a matter of history, for a moment. Is there anything bloodier and more ruthless than a civil war, with fighting and acts of violence taking place inside a nation, pitting armies within its population against one another?

If that is the case, then it is crucial how one labels and defines these armies.


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That must-read think piece: The Atlantic listens to the voices of the Islamic State

After reading (finally) Graeme Wood's much-discussed cover story at The Atlantic -- "What ISIS Really Wants" -- it seems to me that he is saying there are two people who are dead wrong when it comes to evaluating the religion component in the campaign to create the Islamic State. These two people, of course, have followers.

First of all, there is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself, who has been declared the leader of the caliphate that is at the heart of the Islamic State's claim that it's approach to Islam is just and true and that all faithful Muslims must embrace it or be declared as apostates. Truth be told, there are a few million Muslims who agree with him, but millions and millions of Muslims who disagree.

The other person who is wrong, when it comes to ISIS, is President Barack Obama, who has famously stated that "ISIL is not Islamic." Like the views of the self-proclaimed caliph, this is a absolute statement that draws support for many people, including some Muslims in the West, but is rejected out of hand by many, many other Muslims -- including the leaders of ISIS.

This brings me to the first of several passages in the Wood piece -- which is a work of analysis, not news reporting -- that I believe should be taken seriously by journalists who are trying to cover this debate. The ISIS leaders insist, he notes:


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Big question in the background: What is terrorism's long-term impact on world Islam?

Big question in the background: What is terrorism's long-term impact on world Islam?

The news media are understandably consumed with Muslim terrorists’ deadly attacks on a satirical weekly’s office and a Jewish grocery in Paris. Europeans are soul-searching over national security, anti-Semitism, and outrage against Muslims, with no evident enthusiasm for restoring any Christian vitality. Tough coverage logistics meant there was scant notice that in the same week Boko Haram destroyed a town in Nigeria and slaughtered hundreds, even as many as 2,000, inhabitants.  

There’s the usual journalistic confusion here over how to characterize the religious aspect. Just before these latest atrocities,  the journal First Things published an article on “Challenging Radical Islam” that’s must reading for reporters. Author John Azumah, a Christian expert on Islam at Columbia Theological Seminary, carefully balances the ideological complexities. Contra the left, he says “key aspects of the ideology of radical violent Muslim groups are indeed rooted in Islamic texts and history.” Yet he criticizes the right, contending that in principle Islam or the Koran or the Prophet Muhammad aren’t the real problem.
            
Azumah notes that “Muslim leaders around the world have repeatedly and publicly denounced” al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and Islamic State (ISIS). The Religion Guy addressed this last September 27 in “Who speaks for Islam in a time of terrorism?”


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Battle over a quote in The New York Times: Did Charlie Hebdo gunmen urge conversion to Islam?

Sorry, but it is time to make a familiar point all over again.

The other day, I noted that -- if you want insights into the mindsets of editors wrestling with the tricky, hot-button religion angles in the Charlie Hebdo massacre -- it is very important to study the early versions of stories in an elite publication (think The New York Times, in this case) and then contrast them with the versions that ran later.

This is hard to do because of the evolving WWW-era practice of actually removing earlier versions of the story from the online record. This raises all kinds of questions (including for media critics), such as: Did the earlier versions count? Is it accurate to say that a publication like the Times published something if the material no longer "exists" on the record? If a digital tree is removed from a digital forest, how do you discuss whether or not it existed in the first place?

Screen shots help, but it's impossible to screen shot everything. I suspect that stories are now changing so fast that those online time-machine search programs cannot catch everything. There are, of course, critics out there making their own copies of the earlier stories. Thus, via Mediaite.com, we have this gripping passage from an early Times report, quoting survivors of the massacre:


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So who speaks for Islam in a time of terrorism?

So who speaks for Islam in a time of terrorism?

THE RELIGION GUY interrupts this blog’s usual answers to posted questions and feels impelled to highlight a development that ought to receive far more attention than it has.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly Sep. 24, President Obama said “it is time for the world -- especially Muslim communities -- to explicitly, forcefully, and consistently reject the ideology of organizations like al-Qaeda and ISIL” (the group also called ISIS or “Islamic State”).

As if in response, that same day 126 Muslim leaders issued a dramatic 15-page “Open Letter” to ISIL’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his followers that denounced them on religious grounds.

Implicitly, the letter targets as well the tactics of al-Qaeda, Nigeria’s Boko Haram, and similar terrorist movements claiming Islamic inspiration. The technical argument relies on dozens of citations from the Quran, Hadith (accounts of the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds), and Sharia (religious law).

The signers of this blunt challenge, all from the faith’s dominant Sunni branch, come from 37 nations including the U.S. 


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