Hill School speaker says ISIS does not represent Islam

Dr. A.R.M. Imtiyaz, a professor of political science at Temple University, talks with Hill School students after a presentation on ISIS. Evan Brandt — DIGITAL FIRST MEDIA

By Evan Brandt, The Mercury-02/12/2016

POTTSTOWN >> As with so many things in the Middle East, questions about who the Islamic State group ISIS represents and where it came from have complicated answers.

Speaking Wednesday night in the library Memorial Room at The Hill School, A.R.M. Imtiyaz, a political science professor at Temple University specializing in Asian studies, tried to unravel some of the confusion.

He was there at the invitation of The Hill’s Middle East and North Africa Club and Imtiyaz was welcomed and thanked for his comments by the group’s leader, Soaad Elbahwati, a former Pottstown student with an Egyptian background.

“It’s so important to me that The Hill community learns more about ISIS and that it does not represent Islam,” she said.

Imtiyaz took the audience of about 25 through a quick history of Islamic conflicts in the Middle East and repeatedly made the point that not only is the Islamic State group “a child of modern politics,” but that its mission is in the Middle East — not the United States.

The primary conflict with which the Islamic State is concerned, Imtiyaz said, is an ancient one — the rivalry between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam.

He reminded the audience that Iraq and Syria were nations created by Britain in the 1920s and that Islamic State “considers these to be artificial states.”

Autocrats installed first by the British and later by the Americans protected western interests in those countries and suppressed Islamic movements, Imtiyaz said.

He noted, for example, that Sadam Hussein and his Ba’ath party were primarily Sunni in a nation where the majority of Muslims were Shiite.

“When Saddam Hussein was in power, he crushed al-Qaida. He did not tolerate any kind of insurgency,” Imtiyaz said.

The same was true of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, he said.

“After Hussein, Iraq became uncontrollable,” said Imityaz. “The Shia began to exact their revenge on the Sunni and the U.S. did nothing.”

When Hussein was overthrown in the 2003 United States invasion, and his army with primarily Sunni officers was dissolved, those professional soldiers found themselves with no job in a country now run by unsympathetic Shiites, Imtiyaz said.

They began to fight — first for al-Qaida, and later for ISIS.

Similarly, when the “Arab Spring” blossomed in 2011, the instability it caused in Libya, Syria and Egypt allowed groups like ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood to fill the “power vacuum,” Imtiyaz said.

One way groups like that have secured power is by providing “social services” to the general population, said Imtiyaz.

“The Middle East is a region with millions of people and 71 percent of them live on less than $3 a day,” he said. “So when someone says they can take care of you, they can take care of your family, it means something.”

But even with that kind of support, it is a political organization, not a religious one, he stressed.

“Last month, the Pew Forum released a survey that shows that more than 90 percent of Muslims hate and disapprove of ISIS,” Imtiyaz said.

“ISIS does not represent Islam and it is actually hurting Muslims,” he said.

Like many other political groups, ISIS is “using violence, and using it very effectively, to achieve a political gain.”

That gain, said Imtiyaz, is unlikely to result in an Islamic caliphate in territory now part of Syria and Iraq, as ISIS proclaims.

Rather its primary purpose “is to kill Shia,” Imtiyaz said.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, “suddenly, overnight” Iraq’s Sunnis “lost their power.”

So people like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi pledged their allegiance to Osama Bin Laden.

They used the unintended affects of the U.S. invasion to recruit displaced Sunnis to fight for them.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, was a U.S. detainee and was tortured in prison, said Imtiyaz.

While there, he “made a good network” with other detainees and, after escaping, was carrying out attacks in Iraq by 2013.

ISIS has become successful at recruiting from other countries by using sophisticated social media appeals to disaffected Muslims who have had difficulty assimilating into western countries.

“But they mostly convince them to come back. They find people who don’t have a job and say ‘why not come home to die and help your people?’ People who have jobs don’t want to go to Iraq to die,” Imtiyaz said.

“Their main focus is at home. Their main enemy is the Shia,” said Imtiyaz.

“We don’t have solid evidence that ISIS poses a serious threat to the U.S.,” said Imtiyaz, adding “bombing them will not solve the problem. That will just lead to a new era of terrorism, and create further hatred.”

“People in the Middle East do not like the policies of Washington, D.C., but they love the United States, they want to come here,” he said.

“By contrast, China is not bombing them, but building bridges and providing food,” Imtiyaz explained. “They like the policies of China, but they don’t want to go there.”