fbpx

The Rage for Order exchange, part 3: Why ordinary people join ISIS

[additional-authors]
June 29, 2016

Robert F. Worth spent fourteen years as a correspondent for The New York Times, and was the paper’s Beirut bureau chief from 2007 until 2011. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books. He has twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award. Born and raised in Manhattan, he now lives in Washington D.C.

The following exchange focuses on his critically acclaimed book A Rage for Order (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here.

***

Dear Mr. Worth,

In your book you tell a number of sad personal stories of people whose lives have been completely and tragically changed by the turmoil taking over the Middle East.

One of them is the story of a man named Abu Ali, a melancholic sounding 38-year-old who joins ISIS for three months in the hope of getting a “desk job” and leading a new, purer lifestyle in the caliphate. The descriptions of the crazy things he sees, which lead to his fleeing to Turkey after three months, are quite harrowing. Curiously, while he is eventually disillusioned with ISIS, in the end of the story he still “loves the idea of an Islamic State.”

I would like to ask you what, besides very vivid descriptions of a very disturbing reality, you think your readers can take away from stories like this – what do you feel we need to understand about this organization, and how do personal accounts help get the message accross? Are there any specific misperceptions about ISIS that you would like your narrative to clarify?

Yours,

Shmuel

***

Dear Shmuel,

I met several people who had joined the Islamic State and others who lived under it and supported it (as residents of Raqqa and other towns under its control). I was particularly drawn to Abu Ali, the character I wrote about at length in my book, because he seemed more flawed and more appealing than the others. To some extent, this is merely about the mechanics of a good story: Abu Ali had a richly detailed narrative, and there was a kind of humor in the gap between his lazy opportunism and the fanatical rigor of ISIS. I also suspect that he was more open and willing to share his story fully because he didn’t seem to have the burden of guilt that other former ISIS members have. The other people I met were wary, and part of this, I suspect, is because they had done or participated in some awful things. Abu Ali was different. Of course, one cannot be sure. But I am inclined to believe his claims that he never killed anyone, and that he recognized pretty quickly the appalling evil of the group.  

For me, Abu Ali’s relative innocence, and his ability to tell such a detailed story, were important in a larger thematic way. I wanted readers to understand why so many people – including a great many who are not criminal or vicious – end up joining such a sick and depraved organization. This has been one of the great mysteries of ISIS for people in the West. Abu Ali came to ISIS after years of misery and a terrible sense of helplessness. For him, the dominant reality was not the appalling savagery of ISIS, but the greater (though less publicized) cruelty of the Assad regime.  He had been part of a thoroughly corrupt government structure, and his parasitic role as an aide in his father’s “expediting” business left him feeling sickened and empty. Even his family had collapsed, after an argument with his wife and her brother. He was left with nothing: no meaningful work, no family, and a country that was shattering into warring militias. In that context, the prospect of a group that seemed capable of restoring order, as ISIS claimed to do, was appealing. This is something we don’t often see in the West: ISIS put a quick end to crime and official corruption in the places it ruled, and for people who’d been raised on the idea of a glorious Islamic past, it touched a nerve.

Abu Ali’s attraction to ISIS was abetted by his distrust of anything in the Western media. This is a legacy of the Assad regime’s propaganda, which led many Syrians to believe that anyone in power (especially in the West) was part of a scheme of imperial manipulation, and was necessarily lying.

In the broadest sense, I think what Americans need to understand about ISIS is that it is not some inevitable outgrowth of Islam, but rather the product of several interlocking and toxic trends in the Middle East. Disempowered majorities all over the world tend to strike out in anger, and in Syria and Iraq today the Sunni Arabs feel both disempowered and surrounded on all sides. They feel an existential challenge from Shiite Iran (whose sway extends to the current Iraqi government), and from the secular but Alawite-dominated regime of Assad in Syria. They feel a similar challenge from the Kurds, in north-eastern Syria. This sounds abstract. But on the personal level, Abu Ali’s story illustrates how easy it is for people in these conditions to be drawn in by fanaticism. Even a soft, middle-aged man with no history of violence or hatred became so sickened by his circumstances that he was willing to join the one group that seemed to offer him something – and that group was the Islamic State. 

Did you enjoy this article?
You'll love our roundtable.

Editor's Picks

Latest Articles

More news and opinions than at a
Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.