Some conservatives make an issue of the fact that President Barack Obama routinely refers to the organization that seized the Iraqi city of Mosul and declared a caliphate not as the "Islamic State in Iraq and Syria," or ISIS, but as the "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant," or ISIL. In his televised address about the group on Sept. 10, for example, he used the acronym ISIL twenty times.
The ISIS vs. ISIL controversy first emerged, as far as I can tell, when FoxNews.com published "Obama's Use of ISIL, not ISIS, Tells Another Story" on Aug. 24, an analysis of the two acronyms by Liz Peek of the Fiscal Times. Peek argued:
both describe the same murderous organization. The difference is that the Levant describes a territory far greater than simply Iraq and Syria. It's defined as this: The Levant today consists of the island of Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and part of southern Turkey
In other words, Levant inflates the group's ambitions from merely two countries to significantly more. Some go even further; Phyllis Chesler tentatively adds Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates.
Peek sees in this a cunning sleight of hand by Obama de-emphasizing his failures in Syria and Iraq. Others suspect him of gratuitously yanking Israel into the equation. For example, Now The End Begins website claims to have discovered a "really nasty, diabolical" plan:
When Barack Obama refers over and over to the Islamic State as ISIL, he is sending a message to Muslims all over the Middle East that he personally does not recognize Israel as a sovereign nation, but as territory belonging to the Islamic State.
But there is no meaningful geographic or political difference between the two translations.
In Arabic, the organization (at least until it was renamed in late June 2014) is Ad-Dawla as-Islamiya fi'l-Iraq wa'sh-Sham (الدولة الإسلامية في العراق والشام, known in Arabic by the acronym Da'sh). All but the final word are simple to translate; Sham, usually translated as Greater Syria, has no exact equivalent in English. Greater Syria is a amorphous geographic and cultural term like Middle West or Middle East that lacks official boundaries: it always includes the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan, as well as the Palestinians territories, but some also consider it to include parts of Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and even all of Cyprus.
 The ISIL/ISIS flag with "The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham" written under the shahada. |
Inasmuch as there has never been a sovereign country called Sham, the term's geographic meaning remains a theoretical debate. For most of the twentieth century, from 1918 to 2000, politicians (such as King Abdullah I of Jordan and Hafez al-Assad of Syria) and movements (notably the Syrian Social Nationalist Party) aspired without success to create and dominate Sham. (I wrote a book on this topic, Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition, published by Oxford University Press in 1990.)
Because "Greater Syria" is heavy on the tongue, Da'sh's name gets simplified to "Syria." But that name being so easily confused with the existing state of Syria which first came into existence in 1946, others choose to translate "Sham" as "Levant." Although Levant has the distinct advantage of not being thus confused, it is an archaic word dating to the fifteenth century full of gentle and exotic connotations utterly inappropriate to the murderous Da'sh. Its borders are also imprecise, referring vaguely to the countries of the eastern Mediterranean, where the sun rises (levant is French for "rising").
In short, both translations are accurate, both are correct, both define a similar area, and both have deficiencies – one refers to a state, the other has an archaic ring. For reasons unknown to me, the executive branch of the U.S. government adopted the ISIL nomenclature and its staff generally use this term, even though members of Congress, the media, and specialists (including me) generally prefer ISIS.
So, let's not worry how to translate Da'sh and concentrate our efforts instead on ridding the world of this barbaric menace.
 Greater Syria as portrayed in Da'sh's map of the umma. |
Sep. 12, 2014 addenda: (1) Here's one reason why the U.S. government may have chosen ISIL over ISIS: the Integrated Sensor is Structure program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Pentagon is known as ISIS. According to Politico, it
is intended to research the risks tied to building a next-generation airship should the Pentagon ever decide to build such a blimp. The program, which is contracted to Lockheed Martin, is designed to provide the Air Force enhanced radar and intelligence and surveillance capabilities. But unlike some others unfortunate enough to share an acronym with the militant group, DARPA has no intention of renaming ISIS, DARPA spokesman Rick Weiss told Politico. "It is scheduled actually to end in March [2015], so it won't be around that much longer."
(2) Unfortunately for British lingerie maker Ann Summers, it came out with its new "Isis Plunge Bra," named after the ancient Egyptian goddess, at just about the time as Baghdadi proclaimed the caliphate.
Dec. 6, 2015 update: Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president, wants Obama to use ISIS rather than ISIL: "Wish Obama would say ISIS, like almost everyone else, rather than ISIL".
Jan. 30, 2017 update: Now president, Trump brought ISIS with him to the White House. The New York Times explains:
An executive memorandum that Mr. Trump signed on Saturday afternoon in the Oval Office repeatedly referred to the Islamic State as ISIS — not ISIL, as President Barack Obama and the rest of the federal government had called the terrorist group since 2014.
"This is the plan to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, in other words, ISIS," Mr. Trump said as he signed the memorandum, which called on the Pentagon to devise a "comprehensive plan" within 30 days.
The White House also used the name ISIS in summaries of the calls Mr. Trump had on Saturday with the Russian and French presidents.
Feb. 6, 2017 update: The incompetence of Trump's White House is a wonder to behold and here's a microscopic sign: after Trump repeatedly criticized Obama for using the abbreviation ISIL rather than ISIS, his team issued today a document containing 78 terrorist incidents between September, 2014 and December, 2016 that it claims were underreported. It's in many ways a terribly deficient list but of interest here is that, no less than 14 times, it cites "ISIL" (and not once "ISIS"). Feb. 7, 2017 update: Aaron Blake of the Washington Post documents Trump's attacks on Obama for the use of "ISIL." (And cites me why the whole brou-ha-ha is irrelevant)
