Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 8412 Plough Quarterly • Spring 2016 What happened? ISIS was not born just yesterday, nor did it start with the civil wars inIraq and Syria. Much as its methods might meet with disapproval, its ideology, Wahhab­ ism, is a movement whose influence extends to the furthest corners of the Islamic world today and which, in the form of Salafism, has become especially attractive to young people in Europe. The fact that the schoolbooks and curricula used by ISIS are 95 percent identical to those used in Saudi Arabia indicate that it’s not only in Iraq and in Syria that the world is starkly divided into “forbidden” and “permitted,” or where humanity is divided into believers and unbelievers. For decades, thanks to billions of dollars of sponsorship from the oil industry, a worldview has been promoted in mosques, in books, and on television that declares all who hold different beliefs to be heretics – reviling, terrorizing, slandering, and insulting them. Once it’s become a habit to systematically denigrate others day after day, it’s only con- sistent – how well we know this from our own German history! – to end up declaring their lives worthless too. That this religious fascism has even become conceivable, that ISIS finds so many fighters and even more sympathizers, that this organization has been able to overrun entire countries and capture cities of millions with minimal resistance – all this represents not the beginning, but rather the tentative endpoint of a long deterioration, especially a deterioration of the religious imagination. I became a student of Middle Eastern Studies in 1988; my topics were the Quran and poetry. Any who study this subject in its classi- cal form soon reach a point where they can no longer reconcile the past with the present. And they become hopelessly sentimental. Of course, the past was not only a peaceful and motley rainbow. As a philologist, however, I focused on the writings of mystics, philosophers, rheto- ricians, and theologians. Like other students of Bookcase in the Umayyad Mosque, Damascus Photograph by twiga_swala, Dan