A bit more on the tweets by Peter Lee aka Chinahand I had quoted:
Westerners mock pretensns of IS Caliphate bt it seems 2 strike chord among quite a few Muslims: effort to reestablish theocratic rule in 1/3
heartland of Umayyad/Abbasid caliphates, turn page on disastrus century of colonial/postcolonial rule, replace fragmented/corrupt states 2/3
w/ united Islamic power. West passivty validates the caliphate & its transnational strategy. May be PRC/Rus that try 2 draw the line. 3/3
(BTW – Denigrating those ideas because of shortened spelling in a Tweet(!) is petty.)
After further thinking about that I believe that Peter is right. ISIS, the group now claiming a Caliphate, might have had roots in some sectarian scheme the CIA and the U.S. Special Forces were running in Iraq. But it has by now far exceed that realm. The Caliphate is based on original Wahhabi ideas which were in their essence also anti-colonial and at first directed against the Ottoman rulers.
See Alastair Crooke‘s essays, You Can’t Understand ISIS If You Don’t Know the History of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and Middle East Time Bomb: The Real Aim of ISIS Is to Replace the Saud Family as the New Emirs of Arabia, on the origin and history of these thoughts.
After 1741 the minor Ibn Saud Bedouin tribe collaborated with the radical cleric Abd al-Wahhab to justify its expansion. Several decades later they became too successful and the Ottoman rulers, with the help of their Egyptian army, exterminated the movement and the first Saudi proto-state. When a hundred years later the Ottoman empire fell apart the Wahhabi ideas and the Saudi movement sprang back to life. But the Saudi rulers were now under British imperial influence and that required to put their Puritans down:
Abd-al Aziz, however, began to feel his wider interests to be threatened by the revolutionary “Jacobinism” exhibited by the Ikhwan. The Ikhwan revolted — leading to a civil war that lasted until the 1930s, when the King had them put down: he machine-gunned them.
Wahhabism survived after that but in a crippled form subordinated to the ruling Saud family.
The new Caliphate followers are copies of the original Wahhabis who do not recognize nation states as those were dictated by the colonial “western” overlords after the end of the Ottoman empire. They do not recognize rulers that deviate, like the Saudi kings do, from the original ideas and subordinate themselves to “western” empires. It is their aim to replace them. As there are many people in Saudi Arabia educated in Wahhabi theology and not particular pleased with their current rulers the possibility of a Caliphate rush to conquer Saudi Arabia and to overthrow the Ibn Saud family is real.
In that aspect the Caliphate is anti-colonial and anti-imperial. That is part of what attracts its followers. At the same time the Caliphate project is also imperial in that it wants to conquer more land and wants to convert more people to its flavor of faith.
Both of these aspects make it a competitor and a danger to imperial U.S. rule-by-proxy in the Middle East. That is, I believe, why the U.S. finally decided to fight it. To lose Saudi Arabia to the Caliphate, which seems to be a real possibility, would be a devastating defeat.
Espousing a (reactionary) anti-imperial, anti-colonial ideology while at the same time furthering an imperial project is not as strange as it appears. The U.S. itself is of anti-colonial heritage and is now trying to establish a global empire. This dualism requires some serious doublethink. Billmon wrote a short Twitter essay yesterday on how the originally anti-colonial U.S. and its officials now have to lie to themselves to justify their imperialism. See also Guest77‘s comment on the unconscious doublethink of U.S. officials. They lie to a New York Times reporter one day then read their lies the next morning, believe them and feel confirmed in their false views.
There is not that much difference between the unaltered Wahhabi ideology ISIS espouses and the puritanical believes of the first white conquerors in North America. The anti-imperial/imperial duality is only one commonality. Indeed I believe that there are quite a lot parallels between both movements.
