99 - What to call Islamic Sate
Autor: Cássio Marcelo de Melo Tunes | Publicado: 2015-11-16T09:29:00-08:00

&nbsp;WHAT TO CALL ISLAMIC STATE





Nov 15th 2015, 23:53&nbsp;BY THE ECONOMIST



HOURS AFTER France and America pledged to ramp up the war against
Islamic State (IS) in response to attacks in Paris that killed 129 and wounded
more than 350, French warplanes began pounding the group’s stronghold in Raqqa,
in north-eastern Syria. The operation was conducted in co-ordination with
American forces. The French and Americans seemed to be unified over the name
they are using for this terrorist scourge, too. Announcing strikes, the French
defence ministry referred to a target “used by Daish as a command post”. Barack
Obama used the same term when he spoke, at a G20 leaders’ summit in Turkey, of
redoubling efforts&nbsp;“to bring about a peaceful transition in Syria and to
eliminate Daish&nbsp;as a force that can create so much pain and suffering for
people in Paris, in Ankara, and in other parts of the globe.” John Kerry, the
American secretary of state, also called IS Daish&nbsp;during a meeting in
Vienna. The group has variously been dubbed ISIS, ISIL, IS and SIC too. Why the
alphabet soup?

Part of the reason is that the group has evolved over time, changing its
own name. It started as a small but viciously effective part of the Sunni
resistance to America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, calling itself al-Qaeda in Iraq,
or AQI. In 2007, following the death of its founder (and criticism from
al-Qaeda for being too bloodthirsty), AQI rebranded itself the Islamic State in
Iraq, or ISI. It suffered setbacks on its home turf, but as Syria descended
into civil war in 2011 ISI spotted an opportunity. By 2013 it had inserted
itself into eastern Syria and adopted a new name to match: the Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Increasing the confusion, ISIS changed its name yet
again in June 2014, declaring itself the State of the Islamic Caliphate (SIC),
a title that reflects its ambitions to rule over Muslims everywhere.

Translation presents another opportunity for acronyms to flourish. In
its earlier incarnation as ISIS, the group had sought to challenge
"colonialist" borders by using an old Arab geographical
term—al-Sham—that applies either to the Syrian capital, Damascus, or to the
wider region of the Levant; hence the official American preference for calling
it Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, rather than ISIS. The Arabic
for this, al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil ’Iraq wal-Sham, can be abbreviated to Daish,
just as the Palestinian group Hamas (which means "zeal") is an
acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or Islamic Resistance Movement.
Daish&nbsp;is the name that has widely stuck among Arabs, although the group’s
own members call it simply the State, al-Dawla, for short, and threaten with
lashes those who use Daish. (Daish and Daesh are one and the same acronym in
Arabic, merely transliterated differently for the Roman script.)

There is a long history of pinning unpleasant-sounding names on
unpleasant people. Rather as the term Nazi caught on in English partly because
of its resonance with words such as "nasty", Daish&nbsp;rolls
pleasurably off Arab tongues as a close cousin of words meaning to stomp,
crush, smash into, or scrub. Picking up on this, France has officially adopted
the term for government use; its foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, has
explained that Daish&nbsp;has the added advantage of not granting the group the
dignity of being called a state. Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, has
cast similar aspersions, denouncing the group as a “Non-Islamic Non-State”.
Rather than obediently adopting the acronym NINS, this newspaper has chosen for
the time being to continue calling the group simply Islamic State (IS).