ISIS and Religious Terror: To Report is not to Support

“By publicizing the views of ISIS as Islamic you are helping their cause.” That was more or less the accusation being made at the Council of Foreign Relations lunch at the Parliament of the World Religions. The target of the accusation was Graeme Wood, the journalist whose excellent article in the Atlantic on the Islamic justifications for ISIS raised the ire of many Muslim leaders.

What Mr. Woods article does, and you should read it to the end, is report that ISIS has some very smart people creating sophisticated intellectual rationals for both their cause and the horrific means by which they pursue it. And at the base of these theo-legal works are extensive and well documented appeals to the Qur’an, the Hadith of the Prophet, and body of Islamic tradition popularly called “Shari’a.”

This justifies calling ISIS “Islamic.” They self-identify as Islamic. They practice all the basic pillars of Islam. They believe what all Muslims believe. And they base their conduct on appeals to the traditional sources of Islamic legal reasoning.

Of course there are good political reasons for Muslims who are appalled by ISIS to disavow it and it methods. And they have a responsibility to put forward their reasoning for denying that ISIS is Islamic. Which they have done.

Indeed, the major part of the lunch conversation between Mr Wood and Farah Pandith was an exploration of how Muslim communities could prevent extremists from recruiting young men and women, and what “amplifiers” might be that would keep ISIS and other extremists from being the loudest voice in the room, as well as the most pervasive. In another post I’ll explore those.

But many of the parliamentarians at lunch, like those on the stage at the plenary and in every single session I attended preferred to bash “the media” for not talking about how good good religion is. One young man was so agitated at the lunch he tried to shout down Mr. Wood, accusing him of already having enough of a platform.

That was the loud end of the constant whining in Salt Lake City that “the media don’t tell our story.”

Consider however, and here what I say is as true for Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Taoists, and Neo-Pagans as it is for Muslims, that the media aren’t telling the story because there is no story to tell – certainly not one to compare with that of ISIS.

For a journalist (like a social scientist, which is my training) a religion is what religious people do, not what religious people say about themselves. And a good story, one worthy of a major monthly magazine or international newspaper or a few minutes on cable news, reports on what they have done that has a significant effect on a large number of people.

What one finds again and again at the Parliament is that the religions don’t present a good story. What they have is a thousand, or ten thousand stories of doing good. And because these stories do not get national or international (or really even local) coverage some of those doing good are frustrated.

They need to get over it and quit bashing the media. Journalists are not PR barkers for religious ideals and a better world. They aren’t grant writers for community service programs. And they certainly aren’t preachers advancing the latest in metaphysical speculation. They tell stories of what is happening that makes a difference to their readers, listeners, and viewers. And they have a pretty good eye for that if they survive and thrive like Mr. Graeme.

Here at the Parliament there is no media. The press room is empty. There are no TV trucks outside with their antennae in the air. No roving reporters sticking microphones in people’s faces and asking for their views. Google the Parliament and what you see are the Parliaments own sites. Google “news” and the Parliament and you get literally a handful of insignificant stories in minor outlets. The local Fox station was the only TV to cover it at all. Talk about 15 seconds of fame.

But we at the parliament shouldn’t complain. We should ask if maybe that doesn’t tell us something about ourselves that we would rather not face. Because only if we ask and answer, no efforts at self-justification, can we change the situation. Self-reflection, change. The kind of things religious people claim that they do.