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Will The New Caliphate Unite The Middle East Against It?
There is no longer an Jihadist ISIS or ISIL in Syria and Iraq. The people leading that entity declared (pdf) today, at the highly symbolic beginning of Ramadan, themselves to be a new caliphate:
Therefore, the shūrā (consultation) council of the Islamic State studied this matter after the Islamic State – by Allah’s grace – gained the essentials necessary for khilāfah, which the Muslims are sinful for if they do not try to establish. In light of the fact that the Islamic State has no shar’ī(legal) constraint or excuse that can justify delaying or neglecting the establishment of the khilāfah such that it would not be sinful, the Islamic State – represented by ahlul-halli-al-‘aqd (its people of authority), consisting of its senior figures, leaders, and the shūrā council – resolved to announce the establishment of the Islamic khilāfah, the appointment of a khalīfah for the Muslims, and the pledge of allegiance to the shaykh (sheikh), the mujāhid, the scholar who practices what he preaches, the worshipper, the leader, the warrior, the reviver, descendent from the family of the Prophet, the slave of Allah, Ibrāhīm Ibn ‘Awwād Ibn Ibrāhīm Ibn ‘Alī Ibn Muhammad al-Badrīal-Hāshimī al-Husaynī al-Qurashī by lineage, as-Sāmurrā’ī by birth and upbringing, al-Baghdādī by residence and scholarship. And he has accepted the bay’ah (pledge of allegiance). Thus, he is the imam and khalīfah for the Muslims everywhere. Accordingly, the “Iraq and Shām” in the name of the Islamic State is henceforth removed from all official deliberations and communications, and the official name is the Islamic State from the date of this declaration.
A caliphate, in its self-conception, is the only legal entity to rule above all Muslims.
With this declaration al-Baghdadi also declared war on all monarchs and other rulers in the Middle East. He will soon likely call for offensive jihad against them. This might now unite all the notoriously discordant Gulf countries against this new Islamic State.
There are already signs of this. The Saudis are said to have now, in sight of the danger, even agreed to let the Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki go for a new term. This might set them in opposition to Washington which, as the one trick pony it is, had called again for regime change in Iraq.
It will be interesting to see the reaction from Turkey, the rearward logistic base for ISIS, now IS. Erdogan surely would not mind a new caliphate but he will have objections against one in which he isn't the Caliph ruling it. So will we now see, now confronted with a new common enemy, a real united response of all Middle East countries against this new danger?
‘Arab countries will never unite until they get rid of of their Western puppet ruling elites…”
The social foundations of those elites, in Jordan, the Gulf, and the three peninsula states (Saudi, Yemen and Oman) is very insubstantial. Not only are the regimes notoriously corrupt and oriented to looting public resources but there are large populations of migrant labour, with all the classic attributes of a population ready to explode.
On the other hand there has been no indication that the forces making up ISIS are capable of evoking any enthusiasm from the masses, either. In fact, as Syria has demonstrated, their mode of rule is so thuggish and bigoted that it is almost calculated to drive people into rallying around regimes which are, otherwise, despised.
Curiously enough, ISIS seems to conform fairly closely to the model of the fascist “movements” of the 1920s. Though it poses as a mass movement, it is nothing of the sort; an agglomeration of mercenaries, declasse foreigners, lumpen and criminal elements and outcast victims of European racism. Their language is force, their hope is to impose their rule through terror, and their strength lies entirely in the corruption and ineffectiveness of the states in which they operate.
In Syria they rely heavily on the support, if only passive, of the imperialists and their puppets (Erdogan, King Playstation, the Emirs and the Saud family), in Iraq they seem to exist on the sufferance of local Sunni clans and the ex-Baathists. It is an indication of the weakness of their position that they strike no fear into their allies, just as, I suspect, they do not frighten the imperialists either.
And perhaps that is the subtle calculation underlying the US’s constant repetition of the (apparently foolish) tactic of forming armies of Sunni fanatics, subsidised by the Gulf kleptocracy, despite their propensity to run out of control: Washington and Bandar understand that none of these “jihads” can exist without their support.
It doesn’t matter when the likes of bin Laden, for example “go rogue” because their politics makes them impotent. They have no appeal to the masses, least of all to youth.
We have had much talk of “blowback” but to what has it amounted? Even supposing that 9/11, and the various bombings were actually (and many here would doubt it) carried out by out-of-control mujahideen, what do they amount to compared with the orgies of blood and radioactive explosives that they have enabled the “west” to organise.
Orgies which themselves are mainly useful as means of imposing authoritarian regimes in the de-industrialising west, from whose populations nary a peep in resistance has been detected despite the rapid, radical and reactionary re-ordering of their societies.
And that, in the US and EU, is where the action is.
It is all about their domestic politics at a time of deep, though systematically denied, crisis. The sad truth is that the imperial periphery is still just that-peripheral and that the metropolis has no fear of what happens there. Whether Mubarak, Morsi, Sisi or the Pharaoh rules Egypt is of no interest to Washington.
The only thing that the imperialists do fear is the entrance of the masses onto the political stage, for the masses are the only power that can overturn their system. And ISIS do not represent any large populations, nor will significant numbers ever rally to their banners or fight with them. And that is why, despite their fragility, none of the hereditary houses of cards in the Gulf is panicking as the Caliph Baghdadi and his forces approach their lands.
They could be wrong. If they are taking US advice the odds are that will be wrong, on the other hand their bags are always packed and their plunder is safely stowed away in London.
Posted by: bevin | Jun 29 2014 20:12 utc | 16
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