Only one day after so called ISIS over ran Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city,
routing the Iraqi army and bringing their menace to world attention, our family
cat died. “Our cat” had a name and it is painful for us to remember her just as
“our cat”, particularly as she was a beloved family member for almost 17 years.
But the reason we don’t say her name is that she was
called “Isis”, a name that was given to her by our son when he was a child. He
was enthralled with the history of ancient Egypt and when we asked him to give
her a name, he immediately said: “Isis”. Isis was an Egyptian goddess of love,
magic, and healing among others. And naturally our “Isis” brought love and
magic to our lives, like all cats do.
“Our cat” died on 11th June 2014 and the day after the
terrorist group ran over large swathes of Iraq and their name “ISIS” or “ISIL”,
an acronym of their longer name, had promptly become a household name, almost
desecrating the memory of our cat and denying us the privilege to mourn her as
we knew her. It was like we lost her twice.
Names are vehicles for evoking memories, emotions and
reflection. And all of a sudden, we had become dumbstruck about how we should
mention “our cat’s” name. We couldn’t say her name even in private without
remembering this extremist group which has pirated her name and we couldn’t
mention her name in our communications for obvious reasons. At least in our
private conversation, our calamity is less as we all know who we are talking
about when we mention her name. But still the bad taste of “our cat’s” name violated
and vulgarized lingered in our minds before we finally took solace in the words
of Rumi, the 13th C Sufi: “She loved him so much she concealed his
name in many phrases, the inner meanings known only to her.”
Now, this is about a cat, but imagine your religion, your
personal name and your whole existence robbed from you every day not only by
people who commit the most heinous of crimes in your name but also by unassuming
politicians and the media who just regurgitate such names as “Radical Islam” that
only serve the goals of the extremist killers. The religious extremists claim
to have the sole ownership of the name of Islam, a religion followed by 1.6
billion people, or 23.2 % of the world population according to Pew Forum
Research Organization. This is why every extremist group who fights for a
deviant goal adds the word Islam to their name to seek legitimacy and to use it
as a trap to drag the whole world into their agenda of denigrating Islam and
Muslims by default.
This makes it incumbent upon politicians and people of
influence to understand that language, and particularly names, is at the
forefront of any war, any action, or indeed any understanding of who your real
enemy is. Names and words help us in concept formation. So if someone wants to
rob you of your normal way of understanding things, they will force you to
accept new words and names for concept formation; meaning they will attack your
language, rip your words asunder, then force feed you with a new language. Colonial
powers used this method to strip the colonized of their identity. “In my view
language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and
held the soul prisoner. The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation.
Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation,” wrote the Kenyan writer
Ngugi Wa Thiongo Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in
African Literature. (1968)
The purpose of fabricating new names is to confuse the
target audience and kill their confidence in the meaning of words. And once they
rob them of the meaning of things, they enforce them to accept their own meaning.
This is what George Orwell called “Newspeak” in his novel Nineteen-Eighty-Four
as one character describes how totalitarian parties rob people of their
personal consciousness and expression, saying: “Don’t you see that the whole
aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make
thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to
express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly
one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings
rubbed out and forgotten.”
Therefore, what we see today is a battle raging on
between Western politicians as to how to correctly name extremist groups. Some public
figures like Donald Trump insist on using the name “Radical Islam”, thus
blindly falling into the language trap of extremists who love to see them
entrapped by their propaganda. When politicians say “Radical Islam”, they are
not only grappling with an abstract idea, but they are also accusing a religion
and not specific individuals of being the perpetrator of crimes.
President Obama, however, is right in calling things by
their correct names when dealing with terrorist acts whose perpetrators claim
to have committed in the name of Islam. Instead of serving the agenda of the
extremist groups in making a blanket accusation against a religion, he
carefully picks his words to not only explain the situation with precision but also
to win the hearts and minds of the 1.6 billion Muslims around the world who are
the real victims of the actions of such murderers. And as Confucius pointed out
in his advice of the rectification of names, there are a lot of things that
could go wrong including the dispensation of justice if names were not correct.
Therefore, let us pray that we all name the enemy correctly so justice can be
dispensed correctly as well.