Dabiq is the name of a small town in northern Syria with no special claim to fame apart from the fact that the Umayyad caliph Sulaiman ibn Abd al-Malik (674-717 CE: reigned 715-717) was buried there in 717. So why has Islamic State (ISIS) called the magazine it publishes Dabiq? The main reason appears to be that according to Muslim eschatological tradition it will be the site of a major battle that will be fought between Muslims and Christian invaders, a battle that will be one of the signs that the end-times have begun[1].
Category Archives: Opinion
‘Wars of religion’: A career opportunity in Religious Studies?
For those who maintain that Religious Studies has an identity and concerns distinct from those of Theology, it is galling to find the higher education sector and the media, which reports it, subsuming Religious Studies under Theology. I came across this again most recently in a Sunday newspaper supplement on UK university places available through the clearing scheme. I doubt whether it would have helped recruitment to Religious Studies – catching the attention of prospective students who might be ill-advised enough actually to look for places under Religious Studies. But then a number of other disparate reports that bear upon the prospects and concerns of Religious Studies have made me ponder of late. For example, a recent, routine emailing about research opportunities headlined a new career direction for researchers in the study of religions – charting the decline of religion in Western Europe; hardly new waters, more back to familiar debates about secularisation theory. It is not, perhaps, the career opportunity to persuade a new generation of potential researchers that Religious Studies is a vibrant and durable discipline, which offers new, unfolding frontiers to explore.
Opinion: Violence, Information and the Radicalisation of the Last Men
Between Friedrich Nietzsche’s despair at the Last Men (1961) who revere nothing and who have fallen into nihilism, and Francis Fukuyama’s crass celebration that the Last Men’s wants have been satisfied under the liberal democratic settlement (1992) – between in short, cynicism and complacency – there is a lesson. How will the government respond to a British citizen apparently beheading two American journalists in Islamic State (IS) propaganda videos? What is it that draws British citizens to fight in Syria and Iraq for organisations like IS? What is radicalisation and how does it occur?