Last week, the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen published a piece under the headline “Islam and the West at War.” Something seemed amiss here. Surely a more-or-less liberal columnist at the Times wasn’t going to say what even George W. Bush was unwilling to say: that we are at war with Islam itself. Maybe this was one of those cases where the headline is meant ironically, and the piece goes on to show as much?

No such luck. The point of the column was to dismiss as “empty talk” the claim that we’re not at war with Islam. Elaborating, Cohen wrote, “Across a wide swath of territory, in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, the West has been or is at war, or near-war, with the Muslim world.”

You might ask: How could it be a war against “the Muslim world” if it’s confined to five countries that house only a minority of the world’s Muslims? Or: How could it be a war against “the Muslim world” if most of the Muslims even in these five countries are not the enemy?

Beats me. Anyway, here’s a more pressing question: Is this a sign of things to come? Is the clash-of-civilizations narrative, long favored on the right, starting to drift into the mainstream? The Cohen column isn’t the only data point suggesting as much.

On the same day Cohen’s column was posted, The Atlantic (where I was once a blogger) unveiled a cover story called “What ISIS Really Wants.” The piece, by Graeme Wood, a contributing editor at the magazine, was in part a response to President Obama’s longstanding refusal to use the kind of language favored by clash-of-civilizations aficionados. Wood quoted Obama insisting that the so-called Islamic State is “not Islamic,” and wrote, “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” The Fox News Web site, among other venues, excerpted Wood’s article and linked to it. The piece went viral.

For purposes of virulence, indeed, the timing was excellent. The article appeared right before President Obama hosted a conference on violent extremism, at which he again refused to call ISIS or any other extremists Islamic. His critics, as usual, took issue, and the Atlantic piece helped feed the conversation.

While there are good reasons that a judicious President might not want to call ISIS Islamic, there are also reasons that many scholars of religion look at the question differently. All major religions have changed so much over time, and sprouted so many branches, that a common rule of thumb is: if they say they’re Muslim, Christian, or Buddhist and don’t reject the most essential tenets of the faith, then that’s what they are. Mother Teresa and David Koresh, in this view, were both Christians. So calling ISIS Islamic isn’t novel enough to constitute news. But what did Wood mean by saying that ISIS is “very Islamic”?

He rested this claim about the deeply Islamic character of ISIS largely on the views of a single scholar, Bernard Haykel, of Princeton. Haykel’s main point seems to have been that ISIS isn’t just making up an ideology and grafting it onto Islamic beliefs. ISIS draws (if selectively) on the Koran and later Islamic texts; indeed, if you went back far enough in time, you would find its views more widely accepted by Muslims and Muslim scholars than has been the case in recent centuries.

After the Atlantic piece appeared, Haykel was interviewed by Jack Jenkins, of ThinkProgress. Haykel emphasized that the Atlantic piece as a whole represented Wood’s views, not his, and he qualified his views in ways Wood hadn’t. “This is something I did point out to [Wood] but he didn’t bring out in the piece: ISIS’s representation of Islam is ahistorical. It’s saying we have to go back to the seventh century. It’s denying the legal complexity of the [Islamic] legal tradition over a thousand years.”

Also: Wood had quoted Haykel emphatically dismissing the notion that “Islam is a religion of peace.” (“As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what people do, and how they interpret their texts.”) In the ThinkProgress interview, fleshing out his view more fully, Haykel said that what he had meant was that no religion is a religion of peace, because all religions can have violent manifestations.

Scholars often consider journalistic treatments of their work insufficiently subtle, and I have no way of knowing how clear Haykel made his views to Wood. Still, there are subjects and times that demand particular fastidiousness on the part of journalists, even if that means interrogating sources with inordinate thoroughness. My own view is that the questions of whether Islam is a religion of peace and whether ISIS is “very” Islamic—coming, as they do, amid no small amount of anti-Muslim bigotry—are perfect examples. (This defacing of an Islamic school in Rhode Island was reported the day before the Atlantic article was posted.)

In any event, the nuanced version of Haykel’s views will never fully catch up with the Graeme Wood version. The ever louder voices that depict Islam itself as in some sense the problem will thus find it easier to cite “even the liberal” Atlantic. Just as, if they take the next step and describe a war between the West and Islam, they can cite “even the liberal” New York Times.

In 1996, when I reviewed Samuel Huntington’s book "The Clash of Civilizations" for Slate, I fretted that Huntington’s world view could become “a self-fulfilling prophecy.” This was before 9/11, and I wasn’t thinking about Islam in particular. Huntington’s book was about “fault lines” dividing various “civilizations,” and I was just making the general point that if we think of, say, Japanese people as radically different from Americans—as Huntington’s book, I believed, encouraged us to do—we were more likely to treat Japan in ways that deepened any Japanese-Western fault line.

Since 9/11, I’ve realized that, in the case of Islam, the forces that could make the clash of civilizations a self-fulfilling prophecy are particularly powerful. For one thing, in this case, our actual enemies, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, themselves favor the clash-of-civilizations narrative, and do their best to encourage it. When the Atlantic tells us that ISIS is “very Islamic” and the New York Times runs the headline “Islam and the West at War,” it’s party time in Mosul. Order up another round of decapitations! Get Roger Cohen more freaked out! Maybe he’ll keep broadcasting a key recruiting pitch of both Al Qaeda and ISIS: that the West is at war with Islam! (Wood noted, a week after his article appeared, its “popularity among ISIS supporters.”)

People who insist on linking terrorism to Islam often say that only by doing this—only by seeing the problem “for what it is”—can we figure out what to do about it. Really? Long before last week, we knew that ISIS does a good job of convincing some young Muslims that its cause is authentically Islamic. What value has been added if we grant Wood’s point that ISIS, in doing this job, can quote selectively from Islamic texts and point selectively to ancient Islamic traditions? I guess this helps us understand one rhetorical advantage that ISIS has in its recruiting. But since that particular advantage—what ancient texts say, what ancient people did—is something we can’t change, where do we go from there?