Does It Really Matter What People Call the SoCalled Islamic State?

Language is part of the armory of human resistance, says Wole Soyinka.

Siphiwe Sibeko / Reuters

URI FRIEDMAN
JUN 1, 2016

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Is there a right and wrong way to describe depravity? When a terrorist

organization has seized control over millions of people and chunks of countries,
when it has killed thousands and drawn world powers into war, is what we call
the group really all that important? When that organization calls itself the
Islamic State, and it takes inspiration from actual Islamic theology and

administers actual territory, why not refer to it as such? Whats the use of opting
instead, as many government ocials have, for derogatory acronyms like the
Arabic Daesh, or taunts like the Un-Islamic Non-State?
We have a pretty straightforward policy here, Michael Slackman, the
international managing editor for The New York Times, told The Washington Post,
in explaining why his paper goes with the term Islamic State. We use the name
that individuals and organizations select for themselves, and then try to
contextualize it. (Some English-language news outlets add context with
qualiers such as the self-styled Islamic State or the Islamic State group; others
stick to relatively anodyne acronyms like ISIS or IS. The Atlantic typically uses
Islamic State or ISIS interchangeably.)
This logic applies not just to the media, but to academia, according to Will
McCants, the author of The ISIS Apocalypse. I understand why political leaders
would want to choose [which name to use], he told the Post. I dont understand
the pressure for academics to follow suit. Its one thing for politicians to shape
perception. Im looking for a more neutral way to describe an organization. The
term Islamic State, he added, is the one consistent part of their name, which
has changed over the years. I chose not to confuse people.
Last week, in a talk at the Human Rights Foundations Oslo Freedom Forum in
Norway, the Nigerian playwright and poet Wole Soyinka condemned this logic.
And his reasoning is worth considering: After all, the 81-year-old Nobel laureate
intimately understands the potency of language. He has spent his career
deploying words against kleptocrats and dictators, a practice that earned him 22
months in solitary connement in Nigeria and later a death sentence in absentia.
Art should expose, reect, indeed magnify the decadent, rotten underbelly of a
society that has lost its direction, he wrote in 1977. In 2016, he sees that rotten
underbelly stretching roughly from Raqqa in Syria, which ISIS claims as its
capital, to the Sambisa Forest in Nigeria, where the groups aliate Boko Haram
is active.
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In Oslo, Soyinkas message was to not underestimate the force of semantics.

Language is part of the armory of human resistance, he said. Rejection of the
self-ascribed goals of an enemy is a critical part of the defense mechanism of the
assaulted. Whenever an unconscionable claim is denied, rejected, openly
derided, it erodes the very base of the aggressors self-esteem.
Todays preeminent aggressor is not Islamic. Its more like an Anti-Islamic
Murder Incorporated whose existence and activities have not been endorsed by
a single internationally recognized Islamic nation, argued Soyinka, who grew up
in a Christian household but later embraced elements of traditional Yoruba
spirituality.
Nor is the enemy a state. Its more like a sadistic, morbidity-obsessed,
irredentist group [that] indulges itself in destabilizing statesgenuine states,
that isand extinguishing peoples, the Yazidis [in Iraq] most notoriously. And
yet, he continued, we insist on respectfully referring to them as a state. Such
proponents of spurious egalitarianism fail a crucial test of responsibility to truth
and language. Yes, theres freedom of expression, but theres also freedom of
choice of expression. And that does not cost much.
Soyinka criticized publications for their promiscuous use of the name Islamic
State. Those who live directly under the sword [of the group in Syria and Iraq]
have no choice: They must call them by the name they choose for themselves.
But what of the rest of us? he asked. The medias normalization of the term, he
charged, is an act of insidious cooperation with the agenda of unlimited
violence.
Journalists are deluding themselves if they think theyre being impartial in
calling the organization by its self-proclaimed name, Soyinka told me after his
speech. Language is hardly ever neutral. [Journalists] have no choice but to
make a choice.
And theyre deluding themselves if they believe theyre merely documenting the

conict between the organization and its opponents, rather than being engaged
in it. Their stake in that conict goes beyond the beheadings of journalists like
James Foley and Steven Sotlo. Far and above any other enemy I have ever
recognized, [groups like ISIS and Boko Haram represent] something totally
deleterious to humanity, said Soyinka. How do you ght such enemies except
with everything you have, including language?

Proponents of spurious egalitarianism fail a crucial

test of responsibility to truth and language.
For Soyinka, the ght is urgent and existential. He believes twin threatsthe
depredations of Boko Haram and the corruption that corroded the Nigerian state
under former President Goodluck Jonathanhave placed his country in a
precarious situation. They are imperiling a nation that, as a result of British
colonialism, is a frayed quiltwork of various nationalities, interests, loyalties.
Many Nigerians do not know and are not interested in what is known as
Nigeria, he said.
Its not as if Soyinka is an ardent Nigerian nationalist. I hate the word
patriotic, he told me. I just believe in solidarity with the human beings with
whom I live. Hes said in the past that he considers himself a Yoruba before hes
a Nigerian. But in recent years, hes become preoccupied with borders and the
integrity of states. In a BBC lecture in 2004 on the changing nature of collective
fear, he noted that during the Cold War, people tended to worry about nuclear
war between superpowers. These days, he said, the fear is one of furtive,
invisible power, the power of the quasi-state, that entity that lays no claim to any
physical boundaries, ies no national ag, is unlisted in any international
associations, and acts every bit as mad as the M.A.D. gospel of annihilation that
was so calmly annunciated by the superpowers during the Cold War.
This appears to be why Soyinka is so oended by descriptions of ISIS as a state.
States are imperfect entities, as Soyinka is aware from personal experience, but
they are how humanity has chosen to organize itself in modern times. For the
sake of human progress, in his view, nihilistic policies of crucixion, mass rape,

public beheadings, and the like by enemies of the world order must not be
characterized as acts of state.
Soyinka is essentially calling for a new, more aggressive language for a new age
of fear. We must take on the duty of telling the enemy openly: It is not spiritual
fulllment that you seek, but power. Control. Power in its crudest form, he said
in a 2014 speech. At this moment in the lives of communities across the globe,
taking note of the havoc wreaked daily by the doctrine of religious impunity,
there is far too much appeasement and toleration in the language we bring to
each confrontation. There comes a time when our humanity accepts that there
must be an end to an attitude that is best captured in that Yoruba expression:
Fitiju karun. Literally that means, contracting a disease through politeness.
Soyinka isnt just contributing an argument to the cluttered debate over what to
call ISIS. Hes making a case for the primacy of words, the only weapon most
people have against the group. To work with language, he contends, is to make
choices. And referring to an organization by its preferred name is a choice, not
some passive, neutral alternative.
Its a choice, moreover, that journalists dont always make, despite their claims
to calling things as they are. In the U.S. press, for example, North Korea is not
known as the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, perhaps in part because it
is the antithesis of a democratic republic. Nigerias terrorist menace is referred
to as Boko Haram, a local name often translated as Western education is
forbidden, rather than the extravagant titles it has bestowed on itself, including
the People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophets Teachings and
Jihad and the West Africa Province [of the Islamic State].
If journalists feel delity to language and truth, Soyinka suggests, they should
recognize that while use of the term Islamic State brings clarity to the entity
being discussed, it breeds confusion about the meaning of the terms constituent
parts: Islamic and state. They should recognize that while the groups
ocial name is one truth, its distortion of mainstream interpretations of Islam
and its subversion of states are truths as well. They should recognize that
politicians arent the only ones in the business of shaping public perception.

This reporting was made possible in part with the support of the Human Rights Foundation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

URI FRIEDMAN is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers global affairs.
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