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Queen Rania of
Jordan said Thursday evening that
there is nothing Islamic about the
self-proclaimed Islamic State, or
ISIS. She was
speaking with Huffington Post
Editor-In-Chief Arianna Huffington
as a part of The WorldPost Future of
Work Conference. “I would love to
drop the first ‘I’ in ISIS because
there’s nothing Islamic about them,"
Queen Rania said, prompting applause
from the audience.
"They have nothing to do with faith
and everything to do with
fanaticism,” she said. “I think as
an international community, we would
do well to not focus on the
religious character of that group
because when we do, we give them
undeserved legitimacy.”
“ISIS wants to be called Islamic …
because any action against them will
automatically be called a war
against Islam, which is exactly what
they want it to be,” she said. “They
want it to be the West coming
against Islam because it will help
them with their recruiting.”
Instead, Queen Rania said, the war
against ISIS must be led by Muslims
and Arabs, with the international
community in a supporting role. And
part of that war is countering
ISIS’s messaging online and on
social media with content by the
Muslim and Arab community,
especially the youth, she said. “We
can’t let [ISIS] hijack our identity
and brand us in the way that they
want. We have to write our own
narrative.” “What
the extremists want is to divide our
world along fault lines of religion
and culture, and so a lot of people
in the West may have stereotypes
against Arabs and Muslims,” she
said. “But really this fight is a
fight between the civilized world
and a bunch of crazy people who want
to take us back to medieval times.
Once we see it that way, we realize
that this is about all of us coming
together to defend our way of life.”
Queen Rania said she thought there
are different reasons people join
ISIS, including desire for a sense
of belonging, for adventure, for a
job and/or for the religious
rhetoric. She said she sees it as a
pyramid: At the top
of the pyramid are those who
actually generate that ideology, and
I think they’re the worst.
Fanaticism and extremism exists in
every religion but it always remains
on the fringes. And I think what
makes it drift to the mainstream is
the fact that they were supported.
Some did support them with money,
and they provided them with the
infrastructure, which allowed them
to then spread that ideology a lot
more. At the middle
of the pyramid are those who ...
[believe] that there's a political
injustice. That they don’t have a
stake in their own societies. That
there’s no justice. And I think at
the bottom of the pyramid are those
who are probably uneducated and
suffer from poverty and
unemployment, and they are the most
vulnerable. Apart from those on the
top, it’s vulnerability that makes
people fall prey to their kind of
rhetoric. Because there are
different reasons why people join,
she said, the fight against ISIS
needs to be undertaken at different
levels -- including militarily. “But
this can’t just be won on the
battlefield,” she said. “At the
heart of this war is ideology, and
you cannot kill an ideology with a
bullet. You can only kill it with a
better idea.” |
