Islamic State Media and the Age of Pyropolitics
Panel 3: Mediating the Sacred
What political future can be glimpsed in the media productions of the “Islamic State.”? A systematic textual and semiotic analysis of IS’s videos, books, pamphlets, and
infographics, particularly Dabiq, Rumiyah, and An-Naba’, reveals that fire is one of the most prevalent symbolic trope in the profusion of IS imagery and literature. In this paper I ask: Why is fire central to IS vision of itself and its enemies? How does IS deploy fire symbolism in its meaning-making practices? What kind of politics does the extensive deployment of fire augur for the Arab world and beyond?
Though fire is a ubiquitous motif in IS speeches, chants, sermons, videos and publications, in this paper I draw on my analysis of six primary texts: four video (Flames of War, What Are You Waiting For?, Healing the Chests of the Believers,)
and three textual sources (the inaugural issue of Dabiq, an article, in the 7th issue of Dabiq titled “The Burning of the Murtadd Pilot,” about the immolation of Kasasbeh, and an article in Rumiyyah, Dabiq’s successor, titled “The Flames of
Justice,” which discusses the merits of using fire to punish unbelievers.
My historical and theoretical exploration points to fire as a potent symbolic trope at the intersection of a mythical-religious realm and a socio-technical realm. Fire figures prominently in the Quran, the hadiths, and Islamic eschatological literature. Fire is also central in Christian and Jewish religious symbolism. But fire is also one of the great engines of civilization: “the great transmuter,” the historian Stephen Pyne called it. A stimulus for the imagination, the flame is “one of the greater operators of images,” wrote Gaston Bachelard. Critics likened the magic of cinema to fire’s capacity to beguile, and equated the rise of the internet to the rediscovery of fire.
I conclude that fire fuses life and death, belief with battlefield, primal stirrings and advanced gadgetry, and thus helps Islamic State forge a dualistic identity: a celebrated self, pitted against a reviled other that must be incinerated. In this, I argue, IS is a harbinger of what the philosopher Michael Marder calls the age of pyropolitics (politics of fire), which constitutes a chaotic and destructive reversal of enlightenment and modern values from the nation-state to notions of progress and justice, auguring a scorched earth politics of extreme identities locked in a life-or-death battle.
Dr. Marwan M. Kraidy is Dean and CEO of Northwestern University in Qatar, the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture at Northwestern, and Contributing Editor at Current History. Previously he was the Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania, where he was also Anthony Shadid Chair and Associate Dean for Administration. His major works are Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Temple, 2005), Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (Cambridge, 2010), and The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Harvard, 2016), which received four major prizes. He has received Guggenheim, NEH and ACLS fellowships. This project was funded by a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. He tweets @MKraidy
