Islamofascism

This article is about the term "Islamofascism"; See the broader treatment of possible relations between religion and fascism in Clerical fascism and Neofascism and religion.

Islamofascism is a controversial neologism suggesting an association of the ideological or operational characteristics of certain modern Islamist movements with European fascist movements of the early 20th century, neofascist movements, or totalitarianism.

The word is included in the New Oxford American Dictionary, defining it as "a controversial term equating some modern Islamic movements with the European fascist movements of the early twentieth century". Critics of the term argue that associating the religion of Islam with fascism is offensive and inaccurate.

Origins and usage

Although Islamofascism is usually a reference to Islamism or radical Islamism, rather than Islam in general, comparisons have been made between fascism and Islam, as far back as 1937, when the German Catholic emigré Edgar Alexander compared Nazism with "Mohammedanism" , and again, in 1939, when psychologist Carl Jung said about Adolf Hitler, "he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic, warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god."

According to Roger Scruton, the term was introduced by the French historian Maxime Rodinson to describe the Iranian Revolution of 1978. Scruton claims that Rodinson "was a Marxist, who described as 'fascist' any movement of which he disapproved", but credits him with inventing a "convenient way of announcing that you are not against Islam but only against its perversion by the terrorists."

In 1990 Malise Ruthven wrote:

"Nevertheless there is what might be called a political problem affecting the Muslim world. In contrast to the heirs of some other non-Western traditions, including Hinduism, Shintoism and Buddhism, Islamic societies seem to have found it particularly hard to institutionalise divergences politically: authoritarian government, not to say Islamo-fascism, is the rule rather than the exception from Morocco to Pakistan."

Albert Scardino attributes the term to an article by Muslim scholar Khalid Duran in the Washington Times, where he used it to describe the push by some Islamist clerics to "impose religious orthodoxy on the state and the citizenry".

The related term, Islamic fascism, was adopted by journalists including Stephen Schwartz and Christopher Hitchens, who intended it to refer to Islamist extremists, including terrorist groups such as al Qaeda, although he more often tends to use the phrases "theocratic fascism" or "fascism with an Islamic face" (a play on Susan Sontag's phrase "fascism with a human face", referring to the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981). The terms Islamic fascism and Muslim fascism are used by the French philosopher Michel Onfray, an outspoken atheist and antireligionist, who notes in his Atheist Manifesto that Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution "gave birth to an authentic Muslim fascism".

Some commentators including Paul Berman and Christopher Hitchens, believe there are similarities between historical fascism and Islamofascism:

• rage against historical humiliation;
• inspiration from what is believed to be an earlier golden age (one or more of the first few Caliphates in the case of Islamism);
• a desire to restore the perceived glory of this age -- or "a fanatical determination to get on top of history after being underfoot for so many generations" -- with an all-encompassing (totalitarian) social, political, economic system;
• belief that malicious, predatory alien forces (Jews in the case of Nazi Fascists or Islamofascists) are conspiring against and within the nation/community, and that violence is necessary to defeat and expel these forces;
• exaltation of death and destruction along with a contempt for "art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence", and strong commitment to sexual repression and subordination of women.
• offensive military, (or armed) campaign to reestablish the power and rightful international domination of the nation/community.

Examples of use in public discourse

The following are examples of use of the term:

• "In the wake of July's London transport bombings by home-grown British Islamists, the dangers of mistaking one type of Muslim community for another have become obvious. Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has gone from ignoring Islamofascists in its midst — if not actually accommodating their efforts to proselytize and recruit in Britain — to cracking down forcefully on their activities and presence in the United Kingdom." — Frank J. Gaffney

• "What we have to understand is ... this is not really a war against terrorism, this is not really a war against al Qaeda, this is a war against movements and ideologies that are jihadist, that are Islamofascists, that aim to destroy the Western world." — Clifford May

• "Islamic terrorist attacks serve a clear and focused ideology, a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane. Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom." — George W. Bush

Support

American author and Nixon speechwriter William Safire writes, "Islamofascism may have legs: the compound defines those terrorists who profess a religious mission while embracing totalitarian methods and helps separate them from devout Muslims who want no part of terrorist means."

In his book Terror and Liberalism, New York University journalism Professor Paul Berman "carefully teased out the intellectual origins of Islamic fundamentalism, looking primarily at Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual godfather of al-Qaeda. It was not hard to find the links: Qutb was explicitly and openly influenced by European fascism. Nor was this a merely intellectual influence: when his ideas eventually became a state ideology—in Taliban Afghanistan—it looked hideously familiar to historians of fascism, with its fanatical Jew-hatred, homophobia, misogyny, the banning of all dissent (and even of music), and the suppression of all liberal freedoms. Jihadists even inherited the most eccentric lacunae of fascist conspiracy-thought: on March 9, 2004, a meeting of Freemasons in an Istanbul restaurant was blown up by Islamist suicide-murderers."

Matthias Küntzel is a Hamburg-based political scientist and a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In his book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, he traces the impact of European fascism on the Arab and Islamic world, drawing parallels between ancient prejudice and modern radicalism. In an essay excerpted from his book, he writes,

"Despite common misconceptions, Islamism was born not during the 1960s but during the 1930s. Its rise was inspired not by the failure of Nasserism but by the rise of Nazism, and prior to 1951 all its campaigns were directed not against colonialism but against the Jews...Not to confront the ideological roots of Islamism--notably its well-documented connection to Nazi Jew-hatred--stymies any Western push for political, economic, and cultural modernization in the Muslim world. Yet only such modernization can split the majority of Muslims, who would benefit from social progress, from the Islamists, who are willing to die to prevent it. Without challenging the ideological roots of Islamism, it is impossible to confront the Muslim world with the real choices before it: Will it choose life and hope, or does it prefer the cult of death? Will it stand up for individual and social self-determination, or will it finally submit to the mullahs' program of Jew-hatred and jihad?"

Norman Podhoretz, who received the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University, argues in his book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism that the current struggle is an ideological conflict against a totalitaritan idea.

Criticism

Critics have argued that grouping disparate ideologies into one single idea of "Islamofascism" may lead to an oversimplification of the causes of terrorism. Cultural historian Richard Webster says

"The idea that there is some kind of autonomous "Islamofascism" that can be crushed, or that the west may defend itself against the terrorists who threaten it by cultivating that eagerness to kill militant Muslims which Christopher Hitchens urges upon us, is a dangerous delusion. The symptoms that have led some to apply the label of "Islamofascism" are not reasons to forget root causes. They are reasons for us to examine even more carefully what those root causes actually are."

He adds "'Saddam, Arafat and the Saudis hate the Jews and want to see them destroyed' . . . or so says the right-wing writer Andrew Sullivan. And he has a point. Does the western left really grasp the extent of anti-Semitism in the Middle East? But does the right grasp the role of Europeans in creating such hatred?"

The use of the term "Islamofascist" by proponents of the War on Terror has prompted critics such as Joseph Sobran and Richard Allan Greene to argue that the term is a typical example of wartime propaganda.

Newspaper columnist Joseph Sobran has said

Islamofascism is nothing but an empty propaganda term. And wartime propaganda is usually, if not always, crafted to produce hysteria, the destruction of any sense of proportion. Such words, undefined and unmeasured, are used by people more interested in making us lose our heads than in keeping their own."

In the aftermath of the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot, George Bush described the fight against terrorists as a battle against "Islamic fascists... will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom". The Council on American-Islamic Relations wrote to him to complain, saying that the use of the term "feeds the perception that the war on terror is actually a war on Islam".

Security expert Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies claims the term was meaningless. "There is no sense in which jihadists embrace fascist ideology as it was developed by Mussolini or anyone else who was associated with the term," he said.

American journalist Eric Margolis agreed: "There is nothing in any part of the Muslim World that resembles the corporate fascist states of western history. In fact, clan and tribal-based traditional Islamic society, with its fragmented power structures, local loyalties, and consensus decision-making, is about as far as possible from western industrial state fascism. The Muslim World is replete with brutal dictatorships, feudal monarchies, and corrupt military-run states, but none of these regimes, however deplorable, fits the standard definition of fascism. Most, in fact, are America’s allies."

The head of the Islamic Society of North America, Ingrid Mattson, said that recasting the war on terrorism as "a war against Islamic fascism" by U.S. President George W. Bush and other Republicans was inaccurate and added to a misunderstanding of the religion. Mattson did acknowledge, however, that terrorist groups "do misuse and use Islamic concepts and terms to justify their violence."

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman remarked that

"...there isn’t actually any such thing as Islamofascism — it’s not an ideology; it’s a figment of the neocon imagination. The term came into vogue only because it was a way for Iraq hawks to gloss over the awkward transition from pursuing Osama bin Laden, who attacked America, to Saddam Hussein, who didn’t."

Conservative British historian Niall Ferguson states that:

…what we see at the moment is an attempt to interpret our present predicament in a rather caricatured World War II idiom. I mean, “Islamofascism” illustrates the point well, because it’s a completely misleading concept. In fact, there’s virtually no overlap between the ideology of al Qaeda and fascism. It’s just a way of making us feel that we’re the “greatest generation” fighting another World War, like the war our fathers and grandfathers fought. You’re translating a crisis symbolized by 9/11 into a sort of pseudo World War II. So, 9/11 becomes Pearl Harbor and then you go after the bad guys who are the fascists, and if you don’t support us, then you must be an appeaser.

In 2007, conservative academic David Horowitz launched a series of lectures and protests on college campuses under the title of "Islamofascism Awareness Week" which at least 40 campuses moved to distance themselves from. In response to the lectures and protests, The Muslim Student Group at Penn State University said it feared "that this Islamophobic program will have hazardous consequences on the Penn State community."

Norman Finkelstein considers the term to be meaningless, arguing that it is 'a throwback to when juvenile leftists, myself among them, labeled everyone we disagreed with a 'fascist pig'.'

The left-wing National Security Network argues in a report that the term dangerously obscures important distinctions and differences between groups of Islamic extremists. The report also asserts that the term "creates the perception that the United States is fighting a religious war against Islam, thus alienating moderate voices in the region who would be willing to work with America towards common goals." The report argues that "dividing these groups and dealing with them separately is a far better policy than lumping them together."

See also

• Eurabia
• Islamism
• Islamic fundamentalism
• Neo-fascism and religion
• Islamist terrorism
• Islamophobia
• Clerical fascism
• Haghani Circle

• Islamic State
• Theocracy
• Fascism
• Neofascism
• Fascist (epithet)
• Dave Emory
• Talibanization
• Al-Qaedaism

External links

• Walter Laqueur. The Origins of Fascism: Islamic Fascism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Oxford University Press blog.

Further reading

• Ignatius, David. "Toward a Definition of 'Islamic Fascism'", Daily Star (Lebanon), August 19 2006
• Marty, Martin. "Irony and Islamofascism", Christian Post, August 21 2006.
• Nunberg, Geoffrey. '"Islamo-Creeps' Would Be More Accurate", L.A. Times, August 17, 2006
• Nyquist, J.R. "Islam and Fascism".
• Podhoretz, Norman. World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. New York: Doubleday, 2007.
• Pollitt, Katha. "Wrong War, Wrong Word", The Nation, August 24, 2006.
• Scardino, Albert. "1-0 in the propaganda war", The Guardian, February 4 2005.
• Sullivan, Andrew. 'Interview' (satire) from INDC Journal