User:Sara/proposal

Familiarity

Around June 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) released the very first video online claiming a Muslim Caliphate. They had decided to drop the words Iraq and Sham (the Levant) from their official name and transform into an all embracing Islamic State. The general sentiments accompanying this first declaration (at least for us living within the frontiers of the so-called Middle-East) were disbelief, then horror, then a surprising and brutal sense of familiarity.

As ISIS started to publish their videos online after the break of the Syrian revolution in 2011, it seemed impossible to miss the endless references to western popular aesthetics and the use of networks of social media strategies and user-generated platforms to emphasize their role in the global political imaginary.

Objects

In his 2003 book In the Break, Fred moten starts his introduction by stating that objects can and do resist. But what is an object in the age of digital reproduction? "It may seem obvious”, Mitchel Resnick and Brian Silverman write in their 1996 essay Exploring Emergence while an object composed of four white squares moves on the black canvas of the side screen:

“ … in fact, what appears to be an object is not really an object at all. All that is happenning is that little squares on the screen are turning “on” and “off”, following a set of simple rules. And those rules say nothing at all about objects …"

Acts of Language

The history of digital images reminds us that objects are nothing but an act of language; nothing but a set of controls and commands that flow in endless loops between the functions of writing, the spoken, and the seen.

Capture

On one of the early days of January 2015, Jordanian Air Force pilot Muath Safi Yousef Al-Kasasbeh was executed by the militants of the Islamic State.

The execution scene appears in the last few seconds of a 22min slick video entitled “The Healing of Believers’ Chests”.

In this text, I will refrain from recounting the shocking and brutal details of Al-Kasasbeh’s death.

I will, however, try to read the video of his execution through a different set of violent encounters with their different guises and reproductions. And I will start from the moment Al-Kasasebeh’s body is digitally captured and distributed online.

Entertainment

Only a few months after the declaration of the formation of the Islamic State, parents and community leaders in Dublin, Ohio met with Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to voice out their concerns about the seductive techniques IS is performing to lur their youths into religious extremism.

As they requested an estimate of $4 billion of funds from the Federal Goverenment to build a gym and other entertainment facilities at the Noor Islamic Cultural Center, they appeared to understood very well that extremist thought thrives in boredom.

They understood that fundamentalism is the language of repetition.

Interface

In an english translation of Pakistani Islamic scholar Abou A’la Al Maudoudi

The Letter

After the crash of Youssef Al-Kasasbeh’s plane in late December 2014 near Rakka, the Islamic State’s de facto capital, IS used twitter to ask its supporters to suggest a way to kill the captured pilot. As people responded to the twitter hashtag, the decision fell on the first part of the verse:

“And if you punish [an enemy, O believers], punish with an equivalent of that with which you were harmed. But it you are patient - it is better for those who are patient.” __ The Quran, 16:126 (Surat An-Nahl)

Al-Kasasbeh was subsequently killed by fire.

Essence

Tens of thousands of Muslims around the world condemned the Islamic State’s savagery. Their message was clear: this is not the true Islam.

The true Islam seemed more of an inner continuaiton of religious tradition; a sense of authenticity that assumes a true understanding of faith in opposition to a blind adherence to the letter. Such understanding seemed to transgress the ambiguity of ritual and its diverse reproductions. The truth seemed to thrive in a presupposed theological essence.

Repetition

One tweet published by an anonymous man claiming allegiance to ISIS stated shortly after Muath’s execution that every concealer must be punished even if it were one’s own mother or father, claiming that past generations of Muslims have diverged away from the Islam of the Quran and closer to tradition.

Seen from this man’s eyes, the Islamic State is mainly a project of rupture with tradition. It favors the adherance to the letter, to the machinic reproductions of a set of rituals, and to the sacredness of the external form of religious gestures.

The twitter account was later deleted, and its tweets, lost.

Capital

Abstraction

Acts of Language