Jan. 12, 2018
Azadeh Moaveni wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about the decline of the Islamic state and the impact it has had on the idea of an Islamic homeland:
The world has declared the defeat of the self-proclaimed caliphate, which has been reduced from controlling large, populous swathes of Iraq and Syria to a small enclave in the desert. The collapse has been accompanied by abundant discussion about what comes next: What to do with fleeing fighters? Who will prevail in intra-jihadi squabbles?Almost none of this discussion has considered the impact of the Islamic State on the dream of some form of Islamic homeland, which predated the militants’ caliphate. If anything, it has been revitalized by this failed experiment in Islamic governance, among everyone from young, disenfranchised professionals and activists in the Arab world to at least two generations of European Muslims, middle-class and marginalized alike, who feel increasingly alienated by societies in which they were born.The word “caliphate” burst into mainstream Western discussions in 2014, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a territory of God, calling out to Muslims everywhere, “Rush, O Muslims, to your state,” reminding them that the idea of the nation was irrelevant to Islam, that “Syria was not for the Syrians” and that the earth belonged to Allah. In the West, the dusty antique sound of that word, “caliphate,” together with the Islamic State’s phantasmagorical violence, made the pronouncement seem delusional, a reflection of Mr. Baghdadi’s apocalyptic vision.