This Weekend's Must Reads

Want to catch up on the week that was? These are the week’s best writings on international affairs. 

Battle Lines: Want to Understand the Jihadis? Read Their Poetry – New Yorker

“ISIS, Al Qaeda, and other Islamist movements produce a huge amount of verse. The vast majority of it circulates online, in a clandestine network of social-media accounts, mirror sites, and proxies, which appear and disappear with bewildering speed, thanks to surveillance and hacking… Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But this is a mistake. It is impossible to understand jihadism—its objectives, its appeal for new recruits, and its durability—without examining its culture. This culture finds expression in a number of forms, including anthems and documentary videos, but poetry is its heart. And, unlike the videos of beheadings and burnings, which are made primarily for foreign consumption, poetry provides a window onto the movement talking to itself. It is in verse that militants most clearly articulate the fantasy life of jihad…Yet behind the swagger there are powerful anxieties: all jihadis have elected to set themselves apart from the wider society, including their families and their religious communities. This is often a difficult choice, with lasting consequences. By casting themselves as poets, as cultural actors with deep roots in the Arab Islamic tradition, the militants are attempting to assuage their fears of not really belonging.”

*Art is the truest reflection of a society, what it dreams of, what it fears, and what it aspires to become. Analysts study the ideology, the politics, and the economics of jihad, but we ignore the poetry as if it’s a diversion rather than a valuable map of an inner landscape that remains unexplored. This New Yorker article by Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel takes a closer look. It’s literary analysis as social profiling, and it’s fascinating. My pick of the week.

China’s Green Revolution – Foreign Policy

“A new study released Monday by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics concludes that both China’s economic rebalancing away from dirty, heavy industries and its newfound concern for the environment are real and producing tangible results sooner than had been expected. That translates into an economy that is burning less coal and spitting out fewer emissions than even a few months ago…Obama has spent years working to reduce American greenhouse gas emissions and hopes to cut U.S. emissions by about 28 percent over 2005 levels by 2025. However, fierce opposition from congressional Republicans has derailed some of his most ambitious efforts. Many lawmakers say they are loath to curb emissions and risk harming the economy for fear of giving China — the world’s biggest polluter — a competitive advantage over American firms…And, while welcome for the earth’s atmosphere, China’s apparent shift is not uniformly good news in the short term. Big resource exporters, such as Australia, have for years depended on seemingly endless Chinese demand for iron ore, coal, and other minerals to fuel their own economic growth; those nations could have their fiscal health seriously threatened by a leaner and greener Chinese economy. U.S. coal companies that for years have eyed the Asian market, and especially China, as a last-ditch lifeline as coal use declines at home will also find little solace in China’s new direction.”

The Controversy Over Muhammad Cartoons is Not About the Prophet Muhammad – The New Republic

“If true blasphemy requires faith on some level, then secular blasphemy is a contradiction in terms. To try and blaspheme someone else’s God or Prophet, figures who exist as no more real to you than Zeus or Thor, is a strangely shallow activity. You can offend others but you are not staking a personal gamble in damnation, the sort of defiance that gives energy to the work of, say, James Joyce or André Gide…The believing Muslims who took offense at the cartoons were often motivated by their conviction that Muhammad isn’t a logo but a real person, as much an actuality as any member of their family. But even on the Islamic side of the controversy, there was certainly a tendency to treat Muhammad as an abstraction. Given how calculated and strategic the violence directed against Charlie Hebdo was, with its clever intent to polarize European opinion, Al Qaeda was treating Muhammad as a flag who has been captured by the enemy and needs to be regained. But to use the Prophet as a tribal avatar is really no different than making him into a cartoon. On both sides of the cultural divide, Muhammad exists more as a marker to quarrel over than a person or messenger. The battles over cartoons of Muhammad is really a struggle between competing abstractions. Unfortunately, the blood that is shed is real.”

What Should We Do if the Islamic State Wins? Live With It – Foreign Policy

 “So what do we do if the Islamic State succeeds in holding on to its territory and becoming a real state? Posen says that the United States (as well as others) should deal with the Islamic State the same way it has dealt with other revolutionary state-building movements: with a policy of containment. I agree. Despite its bloodthirsty and gruesome tactics, the Islamic State is not, in fact, a powerful global actor. Its message attracts recruits among marginalized youth in other countries, but attracting perhaps 25,000 ill-trained followers from a global population of more than 7 billion is not that significant. It may even be a net gain if these people leave their countries of origin and then get to experience the harsh realities of jihadi rule. Some of them will realize that the Islamic State is brutal and unjust and a recipe for disaster; the rest will be isolated and contained in one spot instead of stirring up trouble at home.”

 Original Image: Brett Jordan