Why there’s no such thing as Islamic State (What's in a name) - Guardian

[flamingdem]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/01/islamic-state-language-isis

“The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods,” says the main character in Iris Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net. His view is that the words we use trap us into seeing the world in a certain way. Orwell believed the same: if there’s no name for it, you can’t really think about it. Conversely, a name can be created for something that doesn’t really exist.

Linguists have argued for decades about the strength of this effect: the consensus is that language guides, rather than determines, thought. It can set up habits, no more. But habits can be tenacious.

Politicians have long known this. Advertisers know it. And so do terrorists. And with the evolution of Islamic State (Isis) we have a neat case study in the power of proper nouns. This faction of Sunni fighters first called itself Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, clearly a name for local consumption. It means The Group for Monotheism (tawhid) and Struggle (the literal meaning of jihad, a word as multivalent in English as it is in Arabic). There haven’t been polytheistic religions in the region for centuries, but in Muhammad’s time Arabs worshipped many gods. So what’s being brought to mind are Islam’s earliest years – a time of pure faith when the effort to displace paganism was at its height.
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Soon the name changed again, to locate the group geographically, first in bilad al-rafidayn (land of the two rivers: Mesopotamia) and later in Iraq and al-Sham (the Levant – the “l” in the British government’s preferred term, Isil). Both these names are romantically archaic. In particular, al-Sham was a province in the earliest Muslim empire, presided over by the “rightly guided caliphs” – the direct successors of Muhammad.

So far, so much fundamentalist dogwhistling. But for an English-speaking audience, the message is lost: until you arrive at Islamic State, a title that recasts the idea of the caliphate – a pre-modern community of believers – for westerners used to a 19th-century model of nationhood. The shift is important because it suggests something substantial, a country with borders, laws and institutions. Look at the map of what it controls, however, and you’ll see anything but a state in the modern sense. Its territory snakes along riverbanks, grabbing towns here and there, extending its fingers into patches of desert.

[ZombieHorde]

1. Hmmm... The author almost had it.

Orwell believed the same: if there’s no name for it, you can’t really think about it. Conversely, a name can be created for something that doesn’t really exist. (bold mine)

On the right track...

Islamic State, a title that recasts the idea of the caliphate – a pre-modern community of believers – for westerners used to a 19th-century model of nationhood. The shift is important because it suggests something substantial, a country with borders, laws and institutions.

...and then way off track. The author seems to believe that there are legitimate states, but there are no states. There is only behavior. People doing shit and believing shit and calling some of that shit homeopathic medicine, er...I mean states. It's just a bunch of woo. IS is no more and no less legitimate than any other state.