Islamofascism

Islamofascism is a portmanteau of the words ''fascism'' and ''Islamism'' or ''Islamic fundamentalism'', which advocate authoritarianism and violent extremism to establish an Islamic state, in addition to promoting offensive Jihad. For example, Qutbism has been characterized as an Islamofascist and Islamic terrorist ideology.

Interactions between Muslim figures and fascism began as early as 1933, and some used the term fascism to describe as diverse phenomenon as the Pakistan independence movement,. Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism in Egypt, religious appeals used by Arab dictatorships to stay in power, and the Young Egypt Party (a fascist era-group inspired by Italian fascism). The invention of the term has been variously attributed to Khalid Duran, Lulu Schwartz, and Christopher Hitchens. Beginning in the 1990s, some scholars have described fascist influences to refer to violent Islamist movements such as those of Ruhollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden, and "reached its apogee" following the September 11 attacks, but by 2018 it had "largely" disappeared from use among policymakers and academics.

The term Islamofascism to refer to the varying distinctions between Islam and fascism has been criticized for allegedly besmirching the Islamic religion by associating it with a violent ideology (i.e. being used as a name ''for'' Islam),. and defended as a way of distinguishing traditional Islam from Islamic extremist violence (i.e. being used as a name for Islamism, a ''variety'' of Islam). In April 2008, the Extremist Messaging Branch of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center under the Bush Administration issued an advisory to branches of the U.S. federal government to avoid using the term, among other terms, in part because it was "considered offensive by many Muslims" that the U.S. government was trying to reach.

Concepts and overview

Background and origins

Meaning and term history

The term "Islamofascism" is defined in the ''New Oxford American Dictionary'' as "a term equating some modern Islamic movements with the European fascist movements of the early twentieth century". Author and journalist Stephen Schwartz defines it as the "use of the faith of Islam as a cover for a totalitarian ideology". Historian Robert Paxton has countered the use of the term entirely, considering it as an inappropriate use of the word fascism to describe Islamic extremists.

The earliest example of the term "Islamofascism", according to William Safire, occurs in a 1990 article by Malise Ruthven to refer to the way in which traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to stay in power.

Ruthven doubts that he himself coined the term, stating that the attribution to him is probably due to the fact that internet search engines do not go back beyond 1990.

Uses

The earliest known use of the contiguous term ''Islamic Fascism'' dates to 1933 when Akhtar Husain, in an attack on Muhammad Iqbal, defined attempts to secure the independence of Pakistan as a form of ''Islamic fascism''. Some analysts consider Manfred Halpern's use of the phrase 'neo-Islamic totalitarianism' in his 1963 book ''The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa'', as a precursor to the concept of Islamofascism, in that he discusses Islamism as a new kind of fascism. Halpern's work, written in the midst of the Cold War and commissioned by the United States Air Force from the RAND Corporation, gives an analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and argues that such Islamic movements were an obstacle to the military regimes who were in his view representatives of a new middle class capable of modernizing the Middle East.

Young Egypt Party

A more direct combination of a pro-Islamic and nationalist agenda, inspired by Benito Mussolini's Italian fascist movement and government, was the Young Egypt Party, a political party that operated between 1933 and 1953 within Egypt.

Post World War II

After nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1956, pan-Arab nationalist Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser incensed United Kingdom's Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who reportedly told American President Dwight D. Eisenhower that Nasser was a ‘Hitler’ or ‘Muslim Mussolini’.

Advent of Islamism

In 1978, as Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution in Iran was gaining momentum, and intellectuals in France and elsewhere in the west were displaying enthusiasm for it, Maxime Rodinson, a Marxist scholar of Islam, pushed back, arguing that political Islamization in Iran and other places in the Islamic world was encouraging "a type of archaic fascism" where the state would enforce totalitarian moral policing and where Western-imported nationalism and socialism was recast in religious terms, eliminating their progressive side. Historically, foreign assaults on the core Islamic world—by Crusaders, Mongols, Turks and Western imperialists—had led to impoverished masses reacting against their Westernized elites for their lack of traditional piety.

Popularisation after September 2001 attacks

Origins of popularization

The term used much more broadly in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Khalid Duran is often credited with first using the term "Islamofascism" to characterize Islamism, generally, as a doctrine that would compel both a state and its citizens to adopt the religion of Islam. Neo-conservative journalist Lulu Schwartz is regarded as the first Westerner to adopt the term and popularise it in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center. In an article in ''The Spectator'', Schwartz used it to describe the ideology of Osama Bin Laden.. She defines it as the "use of the faith of Islam as a cover for totalitarian ideology" and alleges that various Islamist movements shares fundamental ideological features of fascism.

Accounts differ as to who popularized the linkage. President George Bush used the term Islamofascism briefly in 2005 during his presidency, and clarified that it was distinct from the religion of Islam. According to Safire, author Christopher Hitchens was responsible for its diffusion, while Valerie Scatamburlo d'Annibale argues that its popularization is due to the work of Eliot Cohen, former counselor to Condoleezza Rice, an influential neoconservative at the time. It circulated in neoconservative circles for some years after 2001 and the War on Terror. After the arrest of Islamic terrorists suspected of preparing to blow up aircraft, Bush once more alluded to "Islamic Fascists".

Criticism

Use of the term has met with criticism. According to Fred Halliday, it was used to intimate that either all Muslims, or those Muslims who spoke of their social or political goals in terms of Islam, were fascists. In 2002, cultural historian Richard Webster stated that British interference in the early 20th century engendered a virulent anti-Semitism generally unknown to Islam, and Western writers such as Andrew Sullivan mischaracterized the "response of militant Islam to the continued interference by the West in Muslim affairs" as Islamofascism. Katha Pollitt, stating the principle that, "if you control the language, you control the debate", remarked that while the term looked "analytic", it was emotional and "intended to get us to think less and fear" more. David Gergen, former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, commented that the phrase "confuses more than it clarifies", for "Islamic fascism has no meaning" in the Arab world. Writers, critics and scholars such as Robert Wistrich, however, responded that the Muslim religion itself is fascistic. In 2007, Christopher Hitchens said that identifying certain Islamic sects, such as Salafism, with political fascism was not unique to Islam, e.g. ''Judeo-Nazi'' coined in the 1970s by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, to characterize Jews settling in the West Bank and the linkage between fascism and Roman Catholicism in Spain and Croatia.. Hitchens also stated that it was another form of what left-wing analysts considered clerical fascism, and applicable to certain extremist believers of multiple religions.

Usage of Islamofascism and the related term ''Islamic fascism'' increased for about a month during the run-up to the U.S. 2006 midterm elections, after then President George W. Bush talked about being at war with "Islamic fascists" in an August 2005 speech. The phrase was dropped from the president's vocabulary almost as quickly, according to Sheryl Gay Stolberg, after provoking a storm of protest from Muslims.

Critics call Islamofascism a conservative "buzzword." The term has also been seen to have been popularized by the counter-jihad movement. A number of Republicans, such as Rick Santorum, used it as shorthand for ''terrorists'', and Donald Rumsfeld dismissed critics of the invasion of Iraq as appeasers of a "new type of fascism". In 2007, American writer Norman Podhoretz, while arguing that the United States was in the midst of World War III, identified Iran as the main center of the Islamofascist ideology, calling on the United States to bomb the country as "soon as logistically possible".

2008 Homeland Security memo

In April 2008, the Associated Press reported that US federal agencies, including the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, were advised to stop using the term ''Islamo-fascism'' in a fourteen-point memo issued by the Extremist Messaging Branch of the National Counterterrorism Center. The memo states: "We are communicating with, not confronting, our audiences. Don't insult or confuse them with pejorative terms such as 'Islamo-fascism,' which are considered offensive by many Muslims."

From 2014 to 2017, "journalists, bloggers and some academics" used the term to "equate" radical Islamism (particularly ISIS) with fascism, but by 2018 the term Islamofascism had "largely disappeared" from use in the world of policymakers in the US and other Western countries, according to Tamir Bar-on.

Perspective of Islamists on fascism

Islamist thinkers themselves have often denounced the idea that Islam does or should have any connection to Western ideologies like fascism. Since Islamism seeks unity of religion (with, for example, a pan-Islamic state such as ISIS) and not of ethnicity or nationality Hassan al-Banna and others especially have problems with nationalism.

Islamist theoretician Sayyid Qutb in his manifesto '' Milestones'' emphasizes that Islamists should never "propose similarities" between the Islamic and non-Islamic "system or manners" (including political systems):

Qutb was mainly interested in the ideologies of democracy, nationalism and socialism that dominated his country and much of the Muslim world at the time since by the time his manifesto was written (1964), World War II was over and fascism was a defeated ideology.

He was adamant that there is no compromise to be made:

Hassan al-Banna on nationalism

Anti-Islam writer Hamed Abdel-Samad states in his book "''Islamic Fascism''" that Al-Banna's organization, the Muslim Brotherhood "had always eulogized the principles of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini". Al-Banna compared pan-Germanism with pan-Islamism, but clarified that "it is not permissible to allow the racist factor to overpower the belief factor". The Muslim Brotherhood received a £5,000 payment from Nazi Germany in August 1939 to spread anti-British messaging, but any further relationship was terminated by the beginning of the war.

Ayatollah Khomeini on fascism

Writing during World War II, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini criticized Adolf Hitler and the Nazi takeover of Poland, calling it "unjust and evil," and that "This Hitlerite mentality ... is one of the most poisonous and heinous products of the human mind."

After the Iranian Revolution, in an interview with Oriana Fallaci in the New York Times, Fallaci asked him about the "fanaticism" of some of his followers, the total control he had over the country, and how "many people call you a dictator". Khomeini rejected the claim that his movement was fascist, saying that it was "unjust and unhuman to call me a dictator" and that "Fascism and Islamism are absolutely incompatible".

Impact of Julius Evola on Islamism

Julius Evola (1898–1974) was an Italian philosopher and fascist writer who also had a high opinion of Islam and its future as a world power. He wrote many books and articles on tradition and modernity, supporting reactionary and traditionalist ideas. In ''Metaphysics of War'', Evola comments on the philosophy of war in the Hindu, Islamic and Western traditions, describing the idea of jihad in Islam. In Evola's description of Islam, he praises its traditional morality and clear social roles. Evola characterized Islam as "a tradition at a higher level both Judaism and the religious beliefs that conquered the West." Evola's esotericist beliefs and praise of Islam have led Frank Gelli to accuse him of being a crypto-Sufi. Evola has been cited as an influence of the Russian Islamic activist Geydar Dzhemal.

In '' Revolt Against the Modern World,'' Evola writes

Evola predicted a resurgence in Islam following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, saying:

Tunisian Hezbollah militant Fouad Saleh cited Evola during his trial, reading passages from ''Revolt Against the Modern World''.

Journalistic perspectives

The American journalist and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire wrote that the term fulfilled a need for a term to distinguish traditional Islam from Definition of terrorism, terrorists: "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." Eric Margolis (journalist), Eric Margolis denied any resemblance between anything in the Muslim world, with its local loyalties and consensus decision-making and the historic, corporative-industrial states of the West. "The Muslim World", he argued, "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."

Malise Ruthven opposed redefining Islamism as "Islamofascism," a term whose usage has been "much abused".. The Islamic label can be used for legitimizing and labeling a movement, but ideology must be distinguished from the brand name associated with it. The difference between Islamic movements and fascism are more "compelling" than the analogies. Islam defies doctrinal unification. No particular order of government can be deduced from Islamic texts, any more than from Christianity. Spanish fascists drew support from traditional Catholic doctrines, but by the same token, other Catholic thinkers have defended democracy in terms of the same theological traditions.

Scholarly perspective

The widespread use in mass media of the term "Islamofascism" has been challenged as confusing because of its conceptual fuzziness. George Orwell, it has been noted in this connection, observed as early as 1946 that "[T]he word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable'", and linking Islam to that concept was more a matter of denigration than of ideological clarity. Chibli Mallat, while noting that the term is controversial, thinks it warranted but notes that there is something anomalous about Islam being singled out, since fascist practices among Jews in Israel, Buddhists in Burma do not generate the same terminology: one rarely hears of Hindu-, Buddhist- or Judeo-fascism. A number of scholars and thinkers, such as Michel Onfray, Michael Howard (historian), Michael Howard, Jeffrey Herf, Walter Laqueur, and Robert Wistrich have argued that the link between fascism and Islam/Islamic radicalism is sound. Many scholars who specialize in Islam and the Arabic world are skeptical of the thesis: Reza Aslan, for one, identifies the roots of jihadism not in the Qur'an, but in the writings of modern Arab anti-colonialists and, doctrinally, to Ibn Taymiyyah, Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah Historians like Niall Ferguson dismiss the word as an "extraordinary neologism" positing a conceptual analogy when there is "virtually no overlap between the ideology of al Qaeda and fascism". Some scholars have compared the tactics, conspiratorial thinking, and recruitment styles of white supremacists and radical Islamic terrorists, asserting that while they have different ideologies, they have "structurally very similar modes of thought".

Walter Laqueur, after reviewing this and related terms, concluded that "Islamic fascism, Islamophobia and antisemitism, each in its way, are imprecise terms we could well do without but it is doubtful whether they can be removed from our political lexicon."

Support

Some of the liberal public intellectuals accused (by Tony Judt) of being supporters of the concept following the 9/11 attacks are Adam Michnik, Oriana Fallaci; Václav Havel; André Glucksmann, Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick, Thomas Friedman and Michael Walzer.

Manfred Halpern, the first major thinker to characterize Islamism, politicized Islam as a fascist movement, called it "Neo-Islamic Totalitarianism" in his classic 1963 study ''The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa.''

The French Marxist Maxime Rodinson described Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood as a "type of archaic fascism" whose goal was the establishment of a "totalitarian state whose political police would brutally enforce the moral and social order." He accused the French left of celebrating in Islamism a religious form of fascism.

Professor David Meir-Levi wrote in his book History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression, History Upside Down that Islamofascism was "a guarantor of the movement of the destruction of Israel," and that the Palestinian cause had become "part of the Islamofascist jihad against the West."

The sociologist Saïd Amir Arjomand has argued that since 1984 (at least in Iran) Islamism and fascism share essential features, an argument he made at some length in his 1989 book ''The Turban for the Crown; The Islamic revolution in Iran.''

Tamir Bar-On writes that "while Islamism and fascism are different political ideologies with differing visions of human nature, the ideal state, and historical processes, both ideologies share the quest for totalitarianism. Both Islamism and fascism mobilize the masses, ignoring class distinctions, in order to combat internal or external threats. As Michael Whine explains, both replace the practice of religion with their own monopolistic ideology, relying on mass communication and suppression of dissent in order to construct a single party regime, a new state with the vision of a ‘new man’, and the aim of conquering existing society, which it believes has deviated from its ideal."

Criticism

The term "Islamofascism" has been criticized by several scholars, and journalists for being "ahistorical and simplistic" (Tony Judt): incriminating an entire religion (Alan Colmes); lacking in scholarly precision (Robert Paxton); "politically biased and polemical" (Stefan Wild); and for being used in "right-wing circles ... to help spread the alarming notion that all Islamists—ranging from the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias of Iraq to Osama bin Laden to the mullahs of Iran to angry Palestinians—are part of a single, terrifying threat on the order of Nazi Germany" (by ''The Week'');

While ''Islamic Fascism'' has been discussed as a category of serious analysis by the scholars mentioned above, the term "Islamofascism" circulated mainly as a propaganda, rather than as an analytic term after the September 11 attacks, September 11 attacks on the United States in September 2001, but also gained a foothold in more sober political discourse, both academic and pseudo-academic. Many critics are dismissive, variously branding it as "meaningless" (Daniel Benjamin); a "figment of the neocon imagination" (Paul Krugman); and as betraying an ignorance of both Islam and Fascism (Angelo Codevilla).

Tony Judt, in an analysis of Liberalism in the United States, liberal acquiescence in President George W. Bush's foreign policy initiatives, particularly the War on Terror and the Iraq War, invasion of Iraq, argued that this policy was premised on the notion there was such a thing as Islamofascism, a notion Judt considered catastrophic. In his diagnosis of this shift he detected a decline in the old Liberalism, liberal consensus of American politics, and what he called the "deliquescence of the Democratic Party". Many former left-liberal pundits, like Paul Berman and Peter Beinart having no knowledge of the Middle East or cultures like those of Wahhabism and Sufism on which they descant authoritatively, have, he claimed, and his view was shared by Niall Ferguson, latched onto the war on terror as a new version of the old liberal fight against fascism, in the form of Islamofascism. In their approach there is a cozy acceptance of a binary division of the world into ideological antitheses, the "familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us" has been revived. Christopher Hitchens was also criticized by Judt, as making unhistoric simplifications, to justify use of the term.

See also

* Arab fascism
* Islam and violence

Citations

References

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*Landgrebe, Phillip
Arabische Muslim_innen und der Nationalsozialismus und die Bestände des International Tracing Service (ITS)
In: Lernen aus der Geschichte, 31 July 2017 [in German].
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Further reading

* Hamed Abdel-Samad, Abdel-Samad, Hamed. ''Islamic Fascism'', Prometheus Books, 2016 ().
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* Bassam Tibi, Tibi, Bassam
From Sayyid Qutb to Hamas, The Middle-East Conflict and the Islamization of Antisemtism
in Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, online working paper, 2010
* David Ignatius, Ignatius, David
"Toward a Definition of 'Islamic Fascism'"
''Daily Star (Lebanon)'', August 19, 2006

External links

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