Mohammed A. Salih
The dramatic rise and expansion of the#Islamic State# (IS) in Iraq, Syria, parts of Africa and South Asia, has generated much discussion about the group’s atrocities and geopolitical impact, as well as debates about how to respond to it—not just militarily, but in the domains of ideology and propaganda as well. Yet there has been little effort to understand IS as a power. What do IS’s practices, beliefs, and propaganda tell us about it as a form of power? And equally important, how has IS conceived of itself as a power? This article is an attempt to shed light on IS’s exercise of power, looking specifically at its view and treatment of women. For although IS has experienced reversals of fortune on the battlefields of Syria and Iraq, its track record has much to tell us about its particularly radical strand of Salafi jihadi ideology and practices as a power. This is a power that seeks a maximum regulation of the lives of Muslim women, down to the minute details, and exercises extreme brutality by subjecting captured non-Muslim women to an exceptional state of violence and abuse where they are reduced to their bare biological minimum.
To begin with, it is important to note that IS is at once a juxtaposition of the modern and the medieval, combining modern techniques and technologies of rule with medieval discourses and practices of power. Sifting through the pages of Dabiq, an online magazine that IS produced between July 2014 and July 2016 in such languages as English and French and targeted mostly at audiences outside IS territories, the picture that emerges of IS’s treatment and view of women—with respect to their behavior, role, and status in private and public spheres—bears the hallmarks of a biopolitical power. A biopolitical power is a broad designation that for the purposes of this essay combines elements of both Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s definitions and interpretations of the concept involving practices of biopower, disciplinary power, and sovereign power.
As a biopower, IS is an entity that displays an insatiable desire to control and regulate every aspect of women’s outward existence—from their bodies to behaviors and roles at home and beyond—thereby harnessing women’s reproductive capabilities and ultimately confining them to a power relationship in which they are perpetually subjugated to the males around them. In this regard IS can be seen in light of a Foucauldian definition of biopolitical power, one that seeks to take “control of both the body and life” or, indeed, to take “control of life in general—with the body as one pole and the population as the other.”[1]
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