Throughout this semester we have been assigned readings in three books: The Rise of The Islamic State by Patrick Cockburn, The Myth of Martyrdom by Adam Lankford, and lastly Terrorism: A History by Randall Law. These three books all covered different fields of religion, while taking different approaches to analyzing the topic at hand. The differences these books had made for a large range of topics, but the similarities helped reinforce key aspects of the Religion 101 class. The three books not only covered general religion, but ancient/modern terrorism, mental aspects of terrorism and its relation to religion, and even certain branches of terrorism such as the Islamic State. These three texts had many differences in the topics they covered,
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I must admit my own bias; I wrote a research paper on the history of the Islamic State. I find this topic to be very interesting, given the extremely turbulent areas they rose out of and have spread to. In his book, Cockburn writes about the conditions that led to the coming about of the Islamic State. He says the roots of the Islamic State are in the 1980’s during the war fighting Russians in Afghanistan. The founder of the Islamic State started it during a ‘perfect storm of conditions. The area the group came from was ridden with violence and religious tensions were high between the Sunnis and Shias. The author continues to explain how the Islamic State really took its hold in 2011 when the civil war in Syria began. One criticism I had of the book was that it did not detail the Islamic State’s global reach. The Islamic State has sympathizers in the Philippines and northern Africa and the author neglected to talk about either. This book was similar to Terrorism: A History because it was presented in chronological order. Terrorism: A History also contained information on the Islamic State. The Rise of The Islamic State is unlike The Myth of Martyrdom because it does not seem to be opinionated. Lankford, who wrote The Myth of Martyrdom, seems to be preaching his own personal opinion, while Cockburn is stating facts. I also thought that The Rise of The Islamic State was fairly dry in relation to the other two books we read this
I must admit my own bias; I wrote a research paper on the history of the Islamic State. I find this topic to be very interesting, given the extremely turbulent areas they rose out of and have spread to. In his book, Cockburn writes about the conditions that led to the coming about of the Islamic State. He says the roots of the Islamic State are in the 1980’s during the war fighting Russians in Afghanistan. The founder of the Islamic State started it during a ‘perfect storm of conditions. The area the group came from was ridden with violence and religious tensions were high between the Sunnis and Shias. The author continues to explain how the Islamic State really took its hold in 2011 when the civil war in Syria began. One criticism I had of the book was that it did not detail the Islamic State’s global reach. The Islamic State has sympathizers in the Philippines and northern Africa and the author neglected to talk about either. This book was similar to Terrorism: A History because it was presented in chronological order. Terrorism: A History also contained information on the Islamic State. The Rise of The Islamic State is unlike The Myth of Martyrdom because it does not seem to be opinionated. Lankford, who wrote The Myth of Martyrdom, seems to be preaching his own personal opinion, while Cockburn is stating facts. I also thought that The Rise of The Islamic State was fairly dry in relation to the other two books we read this