One of the peculiarities of this week’s Bafta TV awards was the BBC receiving more prizes than Channel 4 by a ratio of 19 to 1. This may have been because of voters punishing the network for poaching The Great British Bake Off. But the results were unrepresentative of the state of television, because there is a sort of programme that only Channel 4, among British broadcasters, would and could make – and Isis: The Origins of Violence is a stark example.



Presenting foreign documentaries is often thought of as a glamorous profession – free air travel and hotel accommodation in hot places in exchange for a few pensive walking-talking shots – but this invitation to historian Tom Holland promised an explosion on his Twitter feed, and possibly one under his feet. While visiting sites of Isis atrocities that have not yet been made safe, he was required to address the philosophical question of whether Islamic doctrine contains a strain of thought that can be used to justify extreme violence and even genocide.

Although Holland rightly emphasised that the “vast majority of Muslims” find the deeds and reasoning of Isis abhorrent – and acknowledged that the west has its own history of bloodily targeting foreign lands in the name of God – this remained a courageous film exploring questions left unspoken in large parts of the media through a combination of liberalism and fear. Many articles have explained the origins of jihad and the Islamic State dream of a global caliphate, as Holland does, but he heads from there into rare depths.

Eerie … Tom Holland trudges alone through the rubbled piles of stone and concrete in Sinjar, Iraq. Photograph: Channel 4

As an essay of ideas, the film most resembles the work of Adam Curtis, although, rather than delivering his monologue of quizzical authority out of shot as Curtis does, Holland is constantly on screen, looking brooding on the tube or metro, or walking through ruins.

There is one direct overlap between Isis: The Origins of Violence and Curtis’s trilogy The Power of Nightmares (2004). Both deal with the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian official executed in 1966 for attempting to assassinate President Nasser. Qutb’s rhetoric calling for a fundamentalist enforcement of Islamic laws as a bulwark against western decadence inspired first al-Qaida and then Isis, which – in the closest this topic has to a joke – was formed by terrorists expelled from al-Qaida for having views thought too brutal.

Where Curtis makes oblique connections – from a 1960s pop song via a brand of breakfast cereal to a massacre – Holland is more singular in his approach, focusing on France. He starts and ends in the French capital, the scene of repeated Isis attacks. As he explains in a voiceover with the simple, buttonholing rhythms of Ernest Hemingway: “You come to Paris because Isis comes to Paris. Isis has a thing about Paris.”

While touching on the reasons cited for the French capital’s regularity as a target – reputation for decadence, large and disadvantaged immigrant population – the film also has a deeper thesis: that the Isis obsession with the French is simultaneously a revenge for and a homage to Napoleon. His seizure of Egypt and westernisation of Islamic culture, argues Holland, created long grudges but also gave some extremist Muslims a model of conquest and conversion that has been turned back on Napoleon’s successors at the Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo, the Stade de France and the Champs-Élysées.

Yazidi refugees on Mount Sinjar. Photograph: Channel 4

Holland also visits London, Turkey and Iraq, fretting over the issue of how Isis defines a legitimate target. One eerie sequence shows him trudging alone through the rubbled piles of stone and concrete that now mark the town of Sinjar in Iraq, where Isis killed thousands of men and older women and took younger women hostage in August 2014. The victims were targeted because they belonged to the Yazidi faith, regarded as devil-worship by some Muslims.

Slaloming through the debris, Holland becomes breathless, loosening his bulletproof vest and bending double as if about to vomit. Soon he gasps that he “needs to sit down”. These unexplained symptoms seem to be a panic attack induced by either fear (he has just noted that the toppled rocks may hide mines or bombs) or moral horror.

Even before then, he has looked for much of the time as if he might puke, which is against the form-book for TV reporters. But, although the film is going out in a pre-election period when there is much talk about editorial balance, Isis isn’t a subject on which it is possible to make an even-handed documentary, both because only a psychopath would defend the terrorists’ actions and because the organisation’s idea of media liaison is posting beheading videos online.

Sickened … Holland in Sinjar. Photograph: Channel 4

Apart from Qutb’s writings, the only voice from the other side is Abu Sayyaf, a leading figure in the Jordan jihadi Salifist movement, and even he suggests that the attempt by Isis to create a caliphate through violence was “wrong and hasty”.

This means that the arguments are largely presented from a western, Christian perspective. Warning chords on the soundtrack throughout are finally resolved as a requiem in a French cathedral for victims of Isis atrocities. At a fourth-century monastery that overlooks an Isis stronghold in Iraq, Holland sees the tiny safe cave, behind the altar, where the last monks left will huddle if their neighbours ever come for them. “This must make you feel very close to the founder of your church,” says Holland.

Is that media bias, or acknowledgement that some stories can’t have two sides? Isis: The Origins of Violence will start many arguments, but we should be grateful for having broadcasters brave and thoughtful enough to make them. Three days after the 2017 TV Baftas, we are surely seeing a frontrunner for the 2018 documentary statuette.

Isis: The Origins of Violence is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.