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ISIS or ISIL? Why militants' name spells confusion
Everyone seems to agree that the Sunni extremists who are striving to carve out a caliphate in Syria and Iraq have upended the region, but there is no consensus on what to call the militant group, in English at least.Many news outlets, including New York Times, have been translating the group's name as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS for short. But the United States government and several news agencies call it the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL (The BBC, curiously, uses the ISIS acronym, but "Levant" when spelling the name out.) Neither way is an exact rendering of the group's Arabic name "al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil-Iraq wa al-Sham". The difficulty is with last word "al-Sham", which is the Arabic term for Damascus and its hinterlands. Al-Sham is the classical Arabic term for Damascus and its hinterlands, and over time, it came to denote the area between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates, south of the Taurus Mountains and north of the Arabian desert. Similarly, in Egypt, "Masr" may refer either to Cairo or to the whole country. Used in that sense, al-Sham takes in not just Syria but also Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, and even a part of southeastern Turkey. That is fairly similar in extent to what Western geographers call the Levant, a once-common term that now has something of an antique whiff about it, like "the Orient." Because of the term's French colonial associations, many Arab nationalists and Islamist radicals disdain it, and it is unlikely that the militant group would choose "Levant" to render its name. The scum find the term "Levant" to be insulting. ISIL it is! Posted by: Squinty 2014-06-20 |
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