When I asked to see a preview of Peter Kosminsky’s Isis drama, The State, the people at Channel 4 seemed anxious. The message came back that I should be sure to watch all four parts before sitting down at my computer. After I’d done just that (always my plan), I wondered. Had they feared that the series, shown on four consecutive nights (20-23 August), appears to go too easy on the caliphate at first? That it comes off, in the beginning, as some kind of recruitment video?
The first two episodes were certainly less violent than the last two, which placed at queasy centre stage a veritable fiesta of torture and beheadings. But they were no less enraging. The sheer stupidity of these young fanatics. What morons. Their idiocy passed all understanding. For me, this was the series’ insurmountable problem. Kosminsky, for all his talents, could not hope to make sense of the motivation of those who travelled from the West to join Isis in Syria for the simple reason that, in art as in life, their cause was utterly inexplicable.
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