Anyone else wondering why an "Islamist" group would have an acronym like "ISIS"?

[IDemo]

8. But the article states that it isn't even the literal translation

"Al-Sham" is the traditional Arabic reference to the region which includes Syria. It could well be that even an English speaker would not have gone the extra step in excluding all other countries in that region.

Neither way is an exact rendering of the group's Arabic name "al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil-Iraq wa al-Sham". The difficulty is with last word "al-Sham", which is the Arabic term for Damascus and its hinterlands.

Al-Sham is the classical Arabic term for Damascus and its hinterlands, and over time, it came to denote the area between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates, south of the Taurus Mountains and north of the Arabian desert. Similarly, in Egypt, "Masr" may refer either to Cairo or to the whole country. Used in that sense, al-Sham takes in not just Syria but also Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and even a part of southeastern Turkey.