”we must become more reflective, more willing to interrogate our shared history”

Why ISIS Isn’t Medieval
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It is actually viciously modern.

By John Terry

via mozu

かいつまむと、ISは中世を反映しているのではなく、現代的で、欧州の影響を看過できない、と。

引用している記事によると、


Isis jihadis aren’t medieval – they are shaped by modern western philosophy

Kevin McDonald for the Conversation, part of the Guardian Comment Network
Tuesday 9 September 2014 12.59 BST

Maududi’s Islamic state is profoundly shaped by western ideas and concepts. He takes a belief shared between Islam and other religious traditions, namely that God alone is the ultimate judge of a person, and transforms this – reframing God’s possession of judgment into possession of, and ultimately monopoly of, “sovereignty”. Maududi also draws upon understandings of the natural world governed by laws that are expressions of the power of God – ideas at the heart of the 17th-century scientific revolution. He combines these in a vision of the sovereignty of God, then goes on to define this sovereignty in political terms, affirming that “God alone is the sovereign” (The Islamic Way of Life). The state and the divine thus fuse together, so that as God becomes political, and politics becomes sacred.



Such sovereignty is completely absent in medieval culture, with its fragmented world and multiple sources of power. Its origins lie instead in the Westphalian system of states and the modern scientific revolution.



In revolutionary France, it is the state that creates its citizens and nothing should be allowed to stand between the citizen and the state. That is why today French government agencies are still prevented by law from collecting data about ethnicity, considered a potential intermediary community between state and citizen.

This universal citizen, separated from community, nation or history, lies at the heart of Maududi’s vision of “citizenship in Islam”. Just as the revolutionary French state created its citizens, with the citizen unthinkable outside the state, so too the Islamic state creates its citizens.


Such manipulations aim at destroying the body as a singularity. The body becomes a manifestation of a collectivity to be obliterated, its manipulation rendering what was once a human person into an “abominable stranger”. Such practices are increasingly evident in war today.

ISの思想の基礎になっている国家の主権の概念や国家から生み出される市民の概念などはフランの影響だし、身体を残虐に愚弄して殺害して、人間を忌まわしい物体のようにしてしまうのは、現代的戦争で顕著になってきているものである、と。


さらに、

Isil's barbarism is modern, not medieval
It suits us to imagine history is going our way, and tell ourselves our enemies are relics. But the Islamic State's brutal beheadings and burnings were born of the digital era

It is no surprise that the Isis manifesto insists that women remain “hidden and veiled”. But it would be wrong to assume that this idea is treated with horror worldwide. The popularity of the veil is a relatively recent trend; photographs of Palestinian and Afghan women in the Sixties show confident, unveiled Muslims looking and dressing much like their Western counterparts. Things then started to change in Egypt with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and their promoting the veil as a sign of Islamic defiance against decadent Western culture. What started as a symbol of political Islam steadily grew into a fashion, and with it the new notion that covering one’s face was a sign of religious piety.
In 1983, an American academic named Arlene Elowe Macleod started a study of 85 working women in Egypt – of whom 29 were veiled when she began. When she finished her study, five years later, 69 were veiled. They had been persuaded that, as one woman told her: “We Muslim women dress in a modest way, not like Western women.” The distinction was a new one. Other women told her they didn’t have a reason to cover up, but they did because everyone else did. The quiet revolution of the veil has been gathering pace ever since.

女性は覆面をつけて、身を隠していろとISはいうが、６０年代には、パレスチナやアフガンの女性、顔を出して西洋の女性さながらであったが、その後、西洋文明への対抗として、エジプトで顔を隠すようになったのであって、覆面をつけることはむしろ現代的現象でもある、と。

実際には現代の潮流を反映しているのに、中世風に語るのは、、

This matters because ISIS’s most powerful allure is a collective sense of nostalgia for a specific version of the past. Medieval historians like Hoyland are among the best at unearthing the ways in which humans reform their own history for contemporary ideological purposes. Nostalgia has been and continues to be, as Virginia Tech historian Matt Gabriele has shown, a powerful unifier. In this case, ISIS draws its ideological strength from an acute sense of what an invented past can accomplish for the present and how nostalgia can motivate immediate, violent action.



We revise our history when we lack the nuance to consider that George Washington was both a great general and a merciless hunter of slaves. We revise history when we label the horrific massacre of hundreds of black Americans in Phillips County, Arkansas, in 1919 with the pathetically inadequate term race riots. We revise history when we refuse to see the ethical problems with Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill reminiscing about singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” aboard the HMS Prince of Wales in 1941, only to incinerate entire urban, civilian centers in Germany with fire from on high a few years later. We revise history when we hear about the murder by drone of a 13-year-old boy in Yemen and promptly shrug our shoulders. War is hell. Oh well.

In the meantime, we must become more reflective, more willing to interrogate our shared history. If we do not—if we refuse to confront our own nostalgia—we run the risk of harboring dangerous thinking about our policies toward groups like this and turning every struggle into one between Good (us) and Evil (them).





　現代の自分たちに都合のいい過去を”掘り起こして”、その過去について郷愁の念を抱くことによって仲間との結束を固めるのである、と。

　もっとも、過去を美化して過去に思いを寄せ、一致団結しようというのは、ISだけでなく、われわれもやっていることであり、そのことを自覚しないで、悪人の奴ら、ｖｓ　善人の俺たち　という単純な図式にのせた政策というのは非常に危険である、と。

　英米の記者たちの歴史観というのは、まさに、善人　ｖｓ　悪人　で、他国については歴史を洗浄・美化しているように言い立てるくせに、美化される前の自分たちの歴史にかなり無自覚であり、自分たちの洗浄された歴史については、無批判のことがおおいですね。

　その根本には、かれら　対　われわれ　という大きな溝があるんでしょうね。