Dr. Nader Hashemi:

It is a very important question, but the root causes in my view have much less to do with religion and much more to do with politics. What I mean by that is the following. The roots of the ISIS crisis is fundamentally to be located in the broken politics of the Middle East. The broken politics of the Middle East is a function of two converging variables that have produced the ISIS crisis. First, the legacy of political tyranny and political despotism that has characterised the politics of the region has been most manifested in the two countries that have been most adversely affected by the legacy of political tyranny, Iraq and Syria. When compared to the countries of the Arab League, Iraq and Syria are the two countries whose post-colonial political condition has been most severely decimated by political authoritarianism. The human rights record for example of the Ba'ath Party under President Assad and Saddam Hussein has devastated this society. That is a main cause.

The other main cause is that Iraq and Syria have been devastated by the predictable consequences of state breakdown that has resulted from ongoing war. The state in Iraq and Syria no longer functions as a normal state. Iraq has been in constant war for the past 35 years - the Iran-Iraq war, the Iraq-Kuwait war, devastating sanctions, the American occupation from 2003 until today. It is a devastated society. Syria has been the site of the worst humanitarian and moral crisis of the 21st century with borderline genocidal conditions. The state has withered away.

In this vacuum produced by state breakdown, war and also the legacy of political tyranny and chaos ISIS has emerged. It provides a narrative. Most of the people who join ISIS have been born, bred and raised in politically authoritarian tyrannical societies, where the state has broken down and where they or their families have either been in prison, as a political prisoner, have been suffocated or have been scared. This is the enveloping context that produced the ISIS crisis.

One has to ask oneself why this is happening in Iraq and Syria. If this is a religious question, a problem of Islam, how come in those parts of the Muslim world where Muslims are in the greatest majority, Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh, one does not see these thing happening? One sees them happening in Iraq and Syria precisely for the reasons I mentioned, namely, the predictable consequences of the convergence of the legacy political tyranny; state breakdown; war and chaos which put together creates a fertile soil for this particular group to emerge.

On top of that, religion is important here. There is a particular theological interpretation of people who subscribe to the ISIS world view that comes out of a puritanical, ultra conservative, anti-humanistic and intolerant interpretation of Islam rooted in the Arabian peninsula, coming out of the Wahabi creed of Islam. If one looks at the theological interpretation of ISIS, the books they are using in their classrooms, the intolerance, the beheading, the animosity toward Shia, towards women, towards culture, toward peoples who are minorities, all of this is straight out of the playbook of a particular puritanical and ultra-conservative orientation that comes out of the Saudi peninsula. One does not see this in other parts of the Islamic world. One does start to see it in the later half of the 20th century largely as a result of the marriage of Wahabi Islam, ultra-conservative puritanical Islam and the development of oil and the wealth that is generated in the Persian Gulf area that allows this particular interpretation of Islam to be disseminated.

If one looks at the whole history of Islam, 1,400 years, one does not see these types of manifestations of Islam but one sees them happening at certain moments in certain places of time because of the convergence of what I would call three factors, state breakdown and war, the legacy of political tyranny and also this ultra puritanical conservative interpretation of Islam. Put it all together and one gets ISIS.