Howard
Richler is a Montreal-area word nerd and author of these seven
books on a variety of language themes: Dead Sea Scroll Palindromes,
Take My Words, A Bawdy Language, Global Mother Tongue, Can I
Have a Word With You?, Strange Bedfellows and his most
recent book Wordplay:
Arranged and Deranged Wit ( May 2016, Ronsdale
Press, Vancouver).
The Holy Roman Empire
was neither holy, Roman nor an empire.
Voltaire
I had
noticed that BBC News always adds the qualifier ‘so-called’
when describing the Islamic State. As I find this usage clumsy,
I decided to investigate why the BBC employs it. I discovered
that back in June 2015 a large number of British Members of
Parliament, from all the major parties, accused the BBC of legitimizing
the terrorist group by calling it “the Islamic State.”
Even Prime Minister David Cameron entered the fray: “I
wish the BBC would stop calling it Islamic State. What it is,
is an appalling barbarous regime . . . It’s a perversion
of the religion of Islam and many Muslims listening to this
programme (BBC Radio 4) will recoil every time they hear the
words Islamic State.” Others argued that giving it the
designation ‘state’ also adds legitimacy because
the self-styled caliphate is no more than an organization that
is not recognized as a sovereign state by any country in the
world.
Of
course there are other designations for this terrorist group
such as ISIS and ISIL, the latter being the preferred term of
President Obama. This is explained by those trying to establish
a caliphate, calling themselves, Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shaam.
Al-Shaam translates roughly as the Levant (the areas near the
East coast of the Mediterranean), also known as Greater Syria.
If you translate al-Shaam as the Levant you get ISIL, if you
translate it as Syria or just Shaam you get ISIS.
So
as you can see there is no consensus on what to call the group
and as a result there is much variance in designations. While
I understand the reluctance of people who feel that the words
‘Islamic’ or ‘state’ lend legitimacy
to a terrorist organization, I find adding the qualifier so-called
to be somewhat silly. After all, this qualifier has not been
generally added to other similar organizations. I don’t
know if I ever heard Hezbollah (Party of Allah) referred to
as the “so-called Hezbollah” because it doesn’t
represent Muslim values, or the IRA referred to as the “so-called
Irish Republican Army” because it didn’t really
qualify as an army. One could equally argue that because a leader
of the former Soviet Union didn’t adhere to Communist
principles it should be dubbed as having a “so-called
Communist” government or an opponent to the former East
German regime could have suggested that the government be labelled
the “so-called Democratic Republic.” I remember
when Menachem Begin was Prime Minister of Israel (1977-1983),
he always referred to the “so-called PLO” because
he couldn’t bring himself to suggest it was a liberation
movement even in its acronymic form. However, to my recollection,
few media outlets conformed to this ‘so-called’
modifier.
Thankfully,
there is a simple solution to this naming conundrum. In 2013,
Syrian Khaled al-Haj Salih coined the term Daesh (usually
pronounced Dash or Da-ish). It is a transliteration of the Arabic
acronym and is formed of the same words that make up ISIS in
English, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and is rendered in
Arabic as al-dawla-al-islamiya fi-al-Iraq wa-ash-shaam.
But Daesh also sounds in Arabic very similar to the
word daes that means ‘someone or something that crushes
or tramples.’ This definition is why the terrorist organization
detests the name. In an article in Freeword, February
2015 entitled Decoding Daesh: Why is the new name for ISIS so
hard to understand?, Arab translator Alice Guthrie says that
the term is despised because they (the terrorist group) hear
it as a challenge to their legitimacy: a dismissal of their
aspirations to define Islamic practice to be “a state
for all Muslims’ and – crucially – as a refusal
to acknowledge and address them as such.” Guthrie adds
that the name Daesh “lends itself well to satire,
and for the arabophones trying to resist Daesh, humour and satire
are essential weapons in their nightmarish struggle.”
In Guthrie’s article, al-Haj Salih asks “If an organization
wants to call itself ‘the light,’ but in fact are
‘the darkness,’ would you comply and call them ‘the
light’?” Al-Haj Salih adds that Daesh is
a fictitious name for the nonsensical fictional concept proposed
by the terrorist organization and thus serves the purpose of
discrediting it.
As
of December 2015, UK government ministers started referring
to the militant group as Daesh but unfortunately the
BBC has not followed suit. A BBC story in July of this year
referred to the perpetrators of the siege and murder in Bangladesh
as supporters of the “so-called Islamic State.”
For me, a qualifier such as “so-called” should be
reserved for something morally reprehensible such as honour
killings. Although the name Daesh is widely used in
the Arab world and has gained great currency in Europe it is
not often employed in Canada or the United States. As far as
I am aware, the only major North American political figure who
employs the word is US Secretary of State John Kerry.
As
language can be a powerful weapon of war, it is time for the
anglophone world to join the coalition using the term Daesh.
Let’s echo Voltaire and add words to the arsenal when
combatting terrorists.
For
more of Howard Richler:
Wordplay:
Arranged and Deranged
How
Happy Became Homosexual
Linguistic
Correctness Redux
No
Apology for Neology
The
Enigmatic Palindrome
We
Stand on Cars and Freeze
As
You Like It.
Can
I Have a Word With You
The Significant Other Conundrum
Yinnglish-Schminglish
The
Oxfordization of Poutine
