Beyond the Organization and Ideology of ISIS

This book was published in Tehran in 2018. Arish Publications took responsibility for its publication. It was actually a more comprehensive version of my master’s thesis, which was written in the field of terrorism studies. In this book, I attempted (as the title suggests) to look beyond the ideology and organization of ISIS and write what I perceived about this phenomenon. In fact, the identification of the social existence of ISIS members and individuals was my concentration in this book. I supposed that this phenomenon had its own ontological quality and was a special way of being in the world. For this reason, in this book, I did not show any willingness to discuss the history of this phenomenon. Rather, I embarked on analyzing the behavior of ISIS where my theoretical framework for this analysis was the concept of resentment, which is derived from my studies in the philosophy of Nietzsche and the philosophy of Max Scheler. The mentioned book includes three chapters. In the first one, I reviewed and criticized the approaches of studying ISIS. In particular, I criticized the strategic approach, which was one of the theoretical frameworks of Dr. Nasri, the supervisor of my master’s thesis. In the second chapter, I discussed the philosophy of violence and analyzed the nature of violence from the viewpoints of Friedrich Hegel, Max Scheler, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Finally, in the third chapter, I showed that the theoretical capacities of Nietzsche and Scheler would be stronger than Hegel and Sartre’s ones in accounting for the behavior of ISIS and its ontology. Therefore, based on Scheler and Nietzsche’s theories, I analyzed the behavior of ISIS. In this chapter, I presented my analysis of ISIS by means of a brief historical study and the analytical framework of life hermeneutics.