The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (Syria), or just ISIS, is a militant Islamist group that follows a variant of Islam whose beliefs concerning the ways to come up with the Day of Judgment result in its strategy. The words of God fixed in Koran and religion itself are central to ISIS’s decisions and actions. This group has similar prejudices to the characters of the short story called “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” written by Flannery O’Connor. In this piece of literature, there are two persons, The Misfit and The Grandmother, to whom beliefs and position of religion are also important, but in their own way. This essay argues that the representatives of the ISIS group have similar prejudices as The Misfit and The Grandmother, characters from O’Connor’s short story.
To begin with, The Grandmother from the story of O’Connor was sure that a good man is a product of good birth conditions: she was a racist and discriminated against people in terms of their classes. Thus, for The Grandmother to become a good person, one should be born in the right conditions and follow specific codes of conduct. In short terms, she can be called a sinner who was focused mostly on herself and her inner prejudices against other people, thinking that they should share her beliefs.
At the end of the story, she claims that The Misfit, a criminal who murdered all The Grandmother’s family, is a man of honor and does not want to hurt anyone because he came from the finest people. Addressing this, The Misfit says: “God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy’s heart was pure gold,” he said” (O’Connor 9). This citation demonstrates that for The Misfit, a cruel escaped murderer, his beliefs were only rightful, and he did not consider options that he was a bad person, hurting others. Moreover, some moments before death, The Grandmother realizes her sinful nature and builds a connection with other people.
At the same time, it has become a usual practice for the Islamic State to execute those who do not share the established ruling group’s beliefs. According to Wood (para. 20), “social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks”. Here one may see the similarity with The Grandmother’s behavior: she also did not accept whole races and social classes and their representatives. Moreover, as ISIS is a religious state, there is also discrimination against representatives of other religious groups, such as Christianity. Wood (para. 20) claims that Christians are exempted from an automatic execution as long as they do not raise against the new government.
Moreover, as it was written in the article concerning the ISIS group, “Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation” (Wood para. 20) Thus, justifying their actions with the words of God and Koran, a militant group of ISIS kill other people out of their inner prejudices, which is similar to The Misfit from O’Connor’s story behavior.
Summing up, the theme of God and beliefs are crucial to both the Islamic State and the characters of O’Connor’s short story. Indeed, representatives of the ISIS group have similar prejudices as The Misfit and The Grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” piece of literature. All these people are similar in their attitudes toward others who do not share the same ideas: both the ISIS group and O’Connor’s characters cannot accept people having other beliefs.
Works Cited
O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man Is Hard To Find. The Avon Book of Modern Writing, 1953. Web.
Wood, Graeme. What ISIS Really Wants. 2015. The Atlantic. Web.