Is ISIS, the fanatical Islamist militia currently advancing across the ruins of Iraq and Syria beheading and crucifying “infidels” a throwback to the Dark Ages? Or is it instead an aspect of the very Western “modernity” the US and its allies sought to bring to the region by armed force? Is that “modernity”, indeed, quite what its advocates think it is?

Those are the challenging questions raised by John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics in his essay broadcast in July on the BBC radio programme A Point of View, the text of which is available here:

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28246732

Professor Gray is a leading critic of what he terms “the Enlightenment project”, the idea, famously encapsulated by Francis Fukuyama in his 1992 work The End of History and the Last Man, of the inevitable global triumph of free-market globalist liberal democracy.

 

In this essay the good Professor argues compellingly that ISIS – or the Islamic State, IS, as it has now rebranded itself, perhaps conscious of the irony of the self-proclaimed vanguard of radical Islam advancing under the name of an ancient Egyptian pagan goddess – beneath its 7th Century trappings, is “in many respects thoroughly modern”.

 

Prof. Gray notes how efficiently IS uses the methods and technology of a 21st Century corporation. As he notes:

“Like al-Qaeda before them, these jihadists have organised themselves as a highly efficient company. Initially funded by donations from wealthy supporters, they’ve rapidly expanded into a self-financing business. Through kidnapping and extortion, looting and selling antiquities, siphoning off oil in territories they conquer, seizing gold bullion and other assets from banks and acquiring large quantities of American military hardware in the course of their advance, Isis has become the wealthiest jihadist organisation in the world. According to some estimates, it’s worth well over $2bn.“

 

As others as well as he have noted, IS uses social media with an adroitness a corporate advertising department can only envy. Bloody threats and glorious victories are tweeted frequently and posted on Facebook (no doubt getting lots of “likes” in Islamabad and Luton) and beheadings, crucifixions and massacres of prisoners put up promptly on YouTube. The Islamist terror group also diligently and publicly documents mergers and acquisitions with and of other Islamist groups and tribal militias, and keeps firm and well-documented control of its balance sheet. Slick regular corporate reports are posted on the Internet, detailing each month’s beheadings and suicide bombings, thus keeping the shareholders – the wealthy Saudi and Gulf sheiks who originally bankrolled the organisation – abreast of headcount and how many bangs they are getting for their buck.

 

As Professor Gray perspicaciously observes, “There’s nothing mediaeval about this mix of ruthless business enterprise, well-publicised savagery and transnational organised crime.”

 

But, he goes on to argue, IS’s modernity goes deeper than that. “Though (IS leader) al-Baghdadi constantly invokes the early history of Islam, the society he envisions has no precedent in history. It’s much more like the impossible state of utopian harmony that western revolutionaries have projected into the future. Some of the thinkers who developed radical Islamist ideas are known to have been influenced by European anarchism and communism, especially by the idea that society can be reshaped by a merciless revolutionary vanguard using systematic violence. The French Jacobins and Lenin’s Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge and the Red Guards all used terror as a way of cleansing humanity of what they regarded as moral corruption. ISIS shares more with this modern revolutionary tradition than any ancient form of Islamic rule”


Professor Gray might indeed have gone on to point out that this revolutionary tradition itself sprang ultimately from one aspect of what he himself dubbed “the Enlightenment project”. In this case the hubristic humanist idea that, if human nature is determined by human society, when the Perfect Society can be created it willipso facto achieve the Perfection of Man. Indeed, said Perfect Society is the natural human condition, if only mankind was liberated from wicked oppressors holding them back.

 

As history has shown, what the revolutionaries actually ended up doing, when their achievement of power failed in itself to achieve the expected dawning of Utopia, was wading in human blood trying to impose by force the widely varying ideas of Social Perfection each fanatic revolutionary sect had come to espouse, always ending in failure and some very unpleasant demonstrations of the innate moral weaknesses of humanity when left to its own devices.

 

But the good Professor does go on to drop a douche of icy water on the complacency of those smug Westerners who no doubt would have been happily nodding along to his argument thus far. For he points out that the Islamic state owes its rise, as well as its strategy and ideology, to another offshoot of the very same Enlightenment Project: “Western military intervention gave Isis its chance of power. While Saddam was in charge, there were no jihadist movements operating in Iraq – none at all. With all the crimes Saddam’s dictatorship committed, it was a regime that applied secular law and had made some steps towards emancipating women.” It also respected the country’s ancient Christian communities, protecting them from persecution – indeed Saddam’s deputy, Tariq Aziz, was a Christian. Professor Gray continues: “In my view, toppling Saddam was bound to unravel this secular state and the Iraqi state itself.”  As we now observe it has unravelled, very thoroughly…

 

Why was this toppling done? The Professor is sceptical about cynicism here – he believes that it was not all about Iraq’s oil. Western leaders, unfortunately, also had nobler motives: “The politicians and opinion-formers who clamoured for the invasion believed that all modern societies are evolving towards a single form of government – the type that exists in western countries. If only tyranny was swept away in Iraq, the country would move towards democracy and the rest of the Middle East would follow. Until just a few months ago, some were convinced that a similar process could take place in Syria.”

 

As events have demonstrated, this isn’t exactly what actually happened, nor was it remotely likely to happen. As the Professor was saying long before Operation Iraqi Freedom, whose fruits the people of that unhappy country are now enjoying, was launched: “this has never been more than an ideological fantasy. The modern world isn’t evolving in any single direction. Liberal democracy is only one of several possible destinations.”

 

Indeed. Professor Gray could have gone on to make the point explicitly that Messrs Bush and Blair shared with Herr Marx and Gospodin Lenin the same delusion that if only “the people” could be “set free”, if the tyrants could be toppled or the expropriators expropriated, mankind would at once rush rejoicing into an Earthly Paradise, be that one of perfect communism or perfect free market liberal democracy, a delusion that is rooted in the same 18th Century soi-disant Enlightenment from which both Marxism and Liberalism sprang. Perhaps this is why many of the arch-cheerleaders of imposing “freedom” at the point of a cruise missile and a drone strike, the neo-cons, found their own personal metamorphosis from one to the other so unproblematic.

 

Professor Gray has put his finger on the deep implication of that Enlightenment delusion as it unravels in the disaster now unfolding across the Middle East. Two decades after it was published, Mr Fukuyama’s thesis of the inevitable triumph of global free-market liberal democracy, “The End of History and the Last Man”, lies in ruins. It has inspired a train of events unleashing massacres, murders and sectarian slaughters that have indeed made some local progress towards achieving the Last Man. But people remain people, obstinately clinging each to their own beliefs and cultures, and History stubbornly refuses to End.