QZ.com: Despite what conservative political leaders want you to think, the reason the Muslim world hasn’t done more to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) isn’t because it secretly sympathizes with the terror movement. No, the Muslim world has remained maddeningly ineffective against ISIL because it can’t agree on a unified definition of the Islamic faith.
The rise of ISIL is due to a complicated conflagration of issues, both geopolitical and ideological. But the fact remains that we could be having a much more realistic conversation about how to defeat ISIL if we first admitted a few upsetting truths. First, that the Muslim world isn’t a homogenous bloc, and second, that while most Muslims are sure the Islamic State isn’t Islamic, there’s little agreement on what is.
Geopolitics 101
Unlike the United States, “Islam” is not a country. The United States is a superpower; no Muslim-majority country is. Unlike the European Union, however, there’s no initiative, at least not overtly, for Muslim-majority countries to pool sovereignty. There’s nothing in the Muslim world comparable to the Five Eyes alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or the Schengen Agreement. There’s not even a Muslim version of the African Union, which aspires to continental unity.