Islam after the Arab Spring: A Conversation with journalist Graeme Wood

Journalist Graeme Wood, author of a widely-circulated article on the Islamic State that appeared in The Atlantic, participated in a by-invitation-only workshop at the Center on Monday, April 13th.  Over thirty graduate students and faculty members attended, from the Divinity School as well as from the Near Eastern Languages and Cultures program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.   

The workshop focused in particular on the understanding of religion at work in Wood’s controversial and influential argument about the Islamic State and its ideology. Wood proposes in his article that, by tracing ISIS’s attempts at ideological coherence, points of weakness can be identified. 

In a productive back-and-forth, participants looked critically at specific aspects of Wood’s argument, including in particular his highly controversial contention that ISIS is “Islamic. Very Islamic.” Such a statement suggests, students pointed out, that there is a hierarchy of religiosity in which those espousing a rigid scripturalism can legitimately claim to be “more” Islamic. 

Students furthermore proposed that an important difference exists between “Islamic” and “Muslim,” as one is an adjective for the religion (like Judaic, though for which no Christian equivalent exists) and the second an adjective describing the people who claim to follow the religion. 

Participants further debated the question: is Islam simply what a self-described Muslim does? Or is there not a tradition (or various traditions), striving towards coherence and bolstered by authorizing discourses? What is the role of the scholar - does she or he have a responsibility to attempt to represent the tradition as a whole? Or is his or her role to simply reproduce the claims of the self-described Muslim, leaving debates on that claim’s legitimacy up to more qualified individuals versed in the tradition at hand?  In looking closely at Wood’s emphasis on ISIS ideology, participants also clearly identified the potential trap of imagining the other are morebound by ideology, more clearly governed by internal factors - what one of Wood’s critics, Mehdi Hasan, called “the fundamental attribution error.”

Wood offered interesting clarifications on a number of his arguments and thoughtful responses to critics, though he maintained that if he were to re-write the article, he would change very little.  He also added fascinating details about his interactions with informants, and gave thoughtful replies to a number of the responses written to his piece.  In a message to organizers, Wood expressed thanks for the invitation, "which was an honor, and which sparked the most interesting conversation I've had about ISIS since before the article came out."

The workshop with Wood was part of the junior fellow program, “Authority and Meaning: Islam after the Arab Spring.”

—By Laura Thompson