British author Karen Armstrong's recent essay on the assumed religion-and-violence correlation, though long, is well worth a read. She reminds the reader of the violent history of the secular state, and the new religion of nationalism that has both inspired and justified centuries of bloodshed.
Armstrong offers a quick summary of the emergence of modern Europe, with an emphasis on the process of secularization during the shift from church power to state power. After Europe's reconfiguration, it channeled its newly found global position into worldwide imperial acquisition.
In the case of the Middle East, the region's exposure to Western secularism came from two sources, foreign and domestic. The foreign source was in the form of European colonialism, a brutal experience given the intentions and policies—policies that curiously betrayed the liberal values upheld in Europe. Domestically, nationalist leaders in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Turkey, and Iran pursued Westernization, but not always in the spirit of liberalism. In addition to reform and state building, their oftentimes autocratic, at times savage, style of leadership also fostered profound resentment among segments of those populations.
Moreover, with a gathering list of ills in the Middle East by the 1960s and 1970s—political, economic, social—as well as US replacement of Britain and France as the region's new foreign master, views of the secular/nationalist leaders worsened.
Though never of broad, popular interest, a political strain of Islam took root in the Middle East in the early twentieth century, and has since manifested itself in a variety of ways, from political theory to terrorism. The current ISIS phenomenon is merely an ultra-extreme variant of Islamism.
Important to bear in mind is that most Muslims in the Arab Middle East (and beyond) are not averse to liberalism. As revealed in poll after poll, the majority of Arab Muslims support democratic principles and desire greater political liberty, freedom of speech, and self-determination. Though they want their own version of these things, with the inclusion of Islamic elements, this does not mean the Arab world seeks to be ruled in Taliban style. Far from it.
Extremist groups like ISIS are not the product of religious thinking; they're the byproduct of destabilized, manipulated systems. Roughly ninety years of European-American management of the Middle East has resulted in the news stories presently unfolding: civil war in Syria, a scarcely functional Iraq, increased jihadist militancy, and so on. The encouragement—now a reflex—is to see religion in these stories. By doing so, the region's problems become internal and cultural in nature. US involvement and responsibility (for sixty of the ninety years) therefore gets erased or deemphasized.
From 1991 to 2011, the United States can claim responsibility for approximately 1 million Iraqi deaths. Iraq is now a country mostly in name (likewise with Afghanistan). To discuss ISIS without the inclusion of such historical realities is to engage in thinking characterized by dogma, precepts, and faith.
