Isis: The Origins of Violence – a brave documentary that will start many a fight. By Mark Lawson
One of the peculiarities of this week’s Bafta TV awards was the BBC receiving
more prizes than Channel 4 by a ratio of 19 to 1. This may have been
because of voters punishing the network for poaching The Great British Bake
Off. But the results were unrepresentative of the state of television, because
there is a sort of programme that only Channel 4, among British broadcasters,
would and could make – and Isis: The Origins of Violence is a stark example.
Presenting foreign
documentaries is often thought of as a glamorous profession – free air travel
and hotel accommodation in hot places in exchange for a few pensive
walking-talking shots – but this invitation to historian Tom Holland promised
an explosion on his Twitter feed, and possibly one under his feet. While
visiting sites of Isis atrocities that have not yet been made safe, he was
required to address the philosophical question of whether Islamic doctrine
contains a strain of thought that can be used to justify extreme violence and
even genocide.
Although Holland
rightly emphasised that the “vast majority of Muslims” find the deeds and
reasoning of Isis abhorrent – and acknowledged that the west has its own
history of bloodily targeting foreign lands in the name of God – this remained
a courageous film exploring questions left unspoken in large parts of the media
through a combination of liberalism and fear. Many articles have explained the
origins of jihad and the Islamic
State dream of a global caliphate, as Holland does, but he heads from
there into rare depths.
As an essay of ideas,
the film most resembles the work of Adam Curtis, although, rather than
delivering his monologue of quizzical authority out of shot as Curtis does,
Holland is constantly on screen, looking brooding on the tube or metro, or
walking through ruins. There is one direct
overlap between Isis: The Origins of Violence and Curtis’s trilogy The Power
of Nightmares (2004). Both deal with the founder of the
Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian official executed in 1966 for
attempting to assassinate President Nasser. Qutb’s rhetoric calling for a
fundamentalist enforcement of Islamic laws as a bulwark against western
decadence inspired first al-Qaida and then Isis, which – in the closest this
topic has to a joke – was formed by terrorists expelled from al-Qaida for
having views thought too brutal… read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/17/isis-the-origins-of-violence-a-brave-documentary-that-will-start-many-a-fightsee also
