Islamofascism

"Green-Fascism" redirects here. For environmentalism with fascist elements, see Ecofascism.

"Islamofascism" is a term drawing an analogical comparison between the ideologies of fascism and Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism, ^{[1] [2] [3]} which advocates authoritarianism and violent extremism to establish an Islamic government, in addition to promoting offensive Jihad. ^[3] For example, Qutbism has been characterized as an Islamofascist and Islamic terrorist ideology. ^[3]

First coined as "Islamic fascism" in 1933, the term and related ones were used to describe as diverse phenomenon as the Pakistan independence movement, ^[4] Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism in Egypt, ^[5] religious appeals used by Arab dictatorships to stay in power, ^{[6] [7]} and the Young Egypt Party (a fascist era-group inspired by Italian fascism). ^[8] The term was popularized in the 1990s 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, ^[9] but by 2018 it had "largely" disappeared from use, at least among policymakers. ^[9]

The term 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), ^{[10] [11]} 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). ^[12] In April 2008, the Extremist Messaging Branch of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center issued an advisory to branches of the U.S. federal government to avoid using the term because it was "considered offensive by many Muslims" that the U.S. government was trying to reach. ^[13]

History and concept

Background and origins

Meaning

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". ^[14] Author and journalist Stephen Schwartz defines it as the "use of the faith of Islam as a cover for a totalitarian ideology". ^[15] Historian Robert Paxton describes it as an inappropriate use of the word fascism to describe Islamic extremists. ^[16]

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. ^[4] 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. ^[17] Halpern's work, written in the midst of the Cold War and commissioned by the United States Air Force from the RAND Corporation, ^[18] 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. ^{[19] [20]}

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. ^{[8] [21] [22]}

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’. ^{[9] [5]}

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 Islamicization in Iran and other places in the Islamic world was encouraging "a type of archaic fascism" where the state would enforced 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 lead to impoverished masses reacting against their Westernized elites for their lack of traditional piety. ^[23]

The earliest example of the term "Islamofascism", according to William Safire, ^[12] 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. ^{[6] [7] [24]}

"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." ^[25]

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. ^[26]

Popularisation after September 2001 attacks

Origins of popularization

The term was used much more broadly in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Khalid Duran is often credited with devising the phrase at that date and using it to characterize Islamism, generally, as a doctrine that would compel both a state and its citizens to adopt the religion of Islam. ^{[14] [27] [28]} 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. ^{[4] [29] [30]} 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. ^[31]

Accounts differ as to who popularized the term. President George Bush introduced the term officially during his presidency. ^{[32] [33]} 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, reputed occasionally to be "the most influential neocon in academe". ^{[34] [35]} It circulated in neoconservative circles for some years after 2001 and came into wider currency after President George W. Bush, still grappling to find a phrase that might identify the nature of the "evil" which would define the nature of his enemy in the War on Terror, stated in 2005 that Islamofascism was an ideology synonymous with Islamic radicalism and militant jihadism, which, he then clarified, was decidedly distinct from the religion of Islam. ^[36] It moved into the mainstream in August 2006. ^[37] After the arrest of Islamic terrorists suspected of preparing to blow up airlines, Bush once more alluded to "Islamic Fascists", apparently a "toned-down" variant of the word, ^[38]

Criticism

Use of the term was also disparaged. 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. ^[39] In 2002 cultural historian Richard Webster complained that it combined into one single idea of "Islamofascism" dissimilar political ideologies, terrorist and insurgent groups, governments, and religious sects, thus both oversimplifying and ignoring root causes, particularly "the history of Western colonialism in the Middle East, and above all in Palestine". ^[40] 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. ^[37] 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. ^[30] Neoconservative writers, critics and scholars from Hitchens to Robert Wistrich however responded that the Muslim religion itself is fascistic, a view which, in identifying Islam with political fascism, was lambasted for being as offensive as the term Judeo-Nazi ^[41] coined in the 1970s by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, editor of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, to characterize Messianic Jews settling in the occupied West Bank. ^[42] Hitchens replied that the link is no more deleterious than that made by Leibowitz, or by left-wing analysts who wrote of clerical fascism.

The public use of Islamofascism and the related term Islamic fascism increased during the run-up to the U.S. 2006 mid-term elections, ^[43] perhaps with a specific focus group in mind. ^[44] "Islamic fascists" became "hot new conservative buzzwords" after Pres. George W. Bush talked about being at war with them in a 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. ^[30]

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

Islamofascism banner in Denton, Texas

David Horowitz developed an "Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week" consisting of 26 workshops on university campuses, between 22–26 October 2007. ^{[34] [42]} Critics call it a (conservative) buzzword. ^{[28] [36]} The term has also been seen to have been popularized by the counter-jihad movement. ^[45] A number of Republicans, such as Rick Santorum, used it as shorthand for terrorists, ^[36] and Donald Rumsfeld dismissed critics of the invasion of Iraq as appeasers of a "new type of fascism". ^[43] In 2007 Norman Podhoretz, arguing that the United States was in the midst of World War IV, identified Iran as the main center of the Islamofascist ideology, which he called on the United States to bomb as "soon as logistically possible". ^{[46] [47]}

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, a department of another federal body known as the National Counterterrorism Center. Aimed at improving the presentation of the War on Terrorism before Muslim audiences and the media, 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." ^[13]

From 2014-2017, "journalists, bloggers and some academics" used the term to "equate" ^[9] 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. ^[9]

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. Islam is divine, while non-Islamic systems are all "man-made". ^[48] Since Islamism seeks unity of religion (with, for example, a pan-Islamic state) and not of ethnicity or nationality (like nationalism), Sayyid Qutb, 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),

to please them [non-Muslims] as some do today when they present Islam to the people under the names of `Islamic Democracy` or `Islamic Socialism,` or sometimes by saying that the current economic or political or legal systems in the world need not be changed except a little to be acceptable Islamically. ^[49]

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 on the issue of

Islam ... is the only Divine way of life ... those who deviate from this system and want some other system, whether it be based on nationalism ... class struggle, or similar corrupt theories are truly enemies of mankind! ^[50]

Hassan al-Banna on nationalism

According to AlArabiya News, Hassan al-Banna, the founder and leader of the oldest and largest Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, had Hitler's Mein Kampf translated into Arabic, titling it My Jihad. He also had the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer "adopted to suit the Arab world". ^[51] According to scholar Hamed Abdel-Samad, Al-Banna's organization, the Muslim Brotherhood "had always eulogized the principles of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini", and al-Banna himself said in a 1935 book, Al-Banna himself stated "that Benito Mussolini was practicing one of the principles of Islam." ^[9]

Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

However, a Muslim Brotherhood collection of sayings by al-Banna has him criticizing the fascism movement after its defeat in WWII, declaring that while it first led Germany and Italy "to stability and a vital international role", cultivating "much hope, reawakened aspiration, and united the whole country under one leader", it then brought those countries to "a deadly war" and a collapse of their regimes. ^[52] Al-Banna praises the "Nationalism of Glory", the "Nationalism of Political Community", and the "Nationalism of Discipline", while denouncing the "Nationalism of Paganism" and "Nationalism of Aggression", where other races are disparaged and victimized and which will lead to the human race being liquidated. ^[53]

The collection also has him denounced militarism, citing Quran 8:61 "If the enemy is inclined towards peace, make peace with them". ^{[54] [55]}

Another example of the Muslim Brotherhood's dismissal of nationalism and embrace of Pan-Islamism even in the face of popular disapproval is former Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Akef publicly declaring "to hell with Egypt", which led to an outcry among Egyptian nationalists. ^[56]

Ayatollah Khomeini on fascism

Writing during World War II, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini criticized Adolf Hitler and the Nazi takeover of Poland calling the transgression "against the property and rights of others ... unjust and evil". ^{[57] [58]}

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". ^[59]

Impact of Julius Evola on Islamism

Julius Evola

Further information: Julius Evola

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. ^{[60] [61]} In Evola's description of Islam, he praises its traditional morality and clear social roles. ^[62] Evola characterized Islam as “a tradition at a higher level both Judaism and the religious beliefs that conquered the West.” ^[63] Evola's esotericist beliefs and praise of Islam have led Frank Gelli to accuse him of being a crypto-Sufi. ^{[64] [65]} Evola has been cited as an influence of the Russian Islamic activist Geydar Dzhemal. ^[66]

In Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola writes

As in the case of priestly Judaism, the center in Islam also consisted of the Law and Tradition, regarded as a formative force, to which the Arab stocks of the origins provided a purer and nobler human material that was shaped by a warrior spirit" ^[67]

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

The Arabs are a great people, too, of course. Now they are in the dumps. Arab socialism does not suit them. It has sapped their energies. You can't mix atheism, Marxism and the Qur’an. The Arabs already have their own prophet in Muhammad. They'll never exchange Muhammad for Marx...Besides, Nasser has shown himself to be a dud. He deserved defeat. Arab socialism will die with him. There will soon be a resurgence of Islam. That is certain. Islam's worldwide advance has not stopped yet... When the time comes – I am sure it will be soon - they can restore the Caliphate. When the Islamic awakening comes, the Arabs will bounce back but not before. ^[64]

The terrorist Fouad Ali Saleh cited Evola during his trial, reading passages from Revolt Against the Modern World. ^[68]

Journalistic perspectives

The phrase "Islam with a fascist face" was deployed by Fred Halliday to describe developments in Iran after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, ^[69] Christopher Hitchens insisted that Bin Ladenism and Salafism shared similarities with clerical fascism, a term already used by Walter Laqueur to refer to the recent form a resurgent Islamic fundamentalism was taking. ^[70]

The American journalist and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire wrote that the term fulfilled a need for a term to distinguish traditional Islam from 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." ^[12] 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." ^[71]

Malise Ruthven opposed redefining Islamism as "Islamofascism," a term whose usage has been "much abused". ^[26] 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. ^{[10] [72]} 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. ^[73]

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. ^{[74] [75]} 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, and Narendra Modi's Hindi constituencies in India do not generate the same terminology: one rarely hears of Hindu-, Buddhist- or Judeo-fascism. ^[76] A number of scholars and thinkers, such as Michel Onfray, ^[77] 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 Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah ^[78] 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". ^[79]

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." ^[80]

Support

Cover of the book of Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2014). According to the authors, there is a nexus between Nazism and Islamism and the vector would have been Amin al-Husseini (left).

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. ^[81]

Manfred Halpern, the first major thinker to characterize 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. ^{[82] [83] [17]}

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." ^[17] He accused the French left of celebrating in Islamism a religious form of fascism. ^[17]

Professor David Meir-Levi wrote in his book History Upside Down that Islamofascism was "a guarantor of the movement of the destruction of Israel," ^[84] and that the Palestinian cause had become "part of the Islamofascist jihad against the West." ^[85]

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. ^[17]

Michael Howard

American scholar Michael Howard has defended usage of the term, drawing parallels between Wahhabism and fascist ideologies in Europe. ^[86] Howard has stated that he was initially "deeply opposed" to Bush's idea of a global "war on terror": it was not a war in his view, except metaphorically, and according to Howard, it's not possible to wage war against an abstract concept such as terror. He further noted that giving one's adversary a belligerent status by reciprocating their idea that they are engaged in a war, as opposed to a confrontation where the question was one of "criminal disruption of civil order," would only increase their support among the civilian population. ^[86] Despite this, Howard endorsed Bush's description of the adversary as "Islamic fascists", though he qualified this by stating that "although they are no more typical of their religion than the fanatics who have committed abominations in the name of Christianity", and their teachings are as much derived from Western notions as from Islamic schools of thought. ^[87] Fascism is, for Howard, "the rejection of the entire legacy of the Enlightenment" with its values of "reason, toleration, open-ended inquiry and the rule of law". ^[86]

Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens compares clerical fascism to Islamic fundamentalism in its devotion to a charismatic leader, a point contested by Frederick W. Kagan. ^[88] While Hitchens said Islamofascism was not perfectly congruent with European fascism, in that the latter idealized the nation-state, the notion of a revived Caliphate might lend itself to an analogy with Hitler's Greater Germany, and Mussolini's desire to revive the Roman Empire. ^[42] Hitchens found comparisons between Islamism and fascism on issues such as

• exaltation of death, killing and destruction, as exemplified in the fascist motto (of Spanish fascist Gonzalo Queipo de Llano) “Death to the intellect! Long live death!”; ^[42]
• nostalgia for lost empires and glories, obsession with “humiliations”—real and imagined—and the thirst to avenge them; ^[42]
• obsessive hatred and paranoia against Jews (and to a lesser extent Freemasons); ^[42]
• inclination towards leader worship and an exclusive devotion to one book; ^[42]
• sexual repression against “deviance”, contempt for what is feminine, and subordination of the female gender; ^[42]
• hostility to modernity; ^[42]
• contempt for art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; ^[42]
• tendency to burn/destroy books and other objects of art; ^[42]
• Celebration of the pure believer as opposed to the kuffār suggests a non-ethnic based form of cleansing.

Tamir Bar-On

Tamir Bar-On writes,

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. ^{[89] [9]}

Criticism

The term "Islamofascism" has been criticized by several scholars, ^[90] and journalists for being "ahistorical and simplistic" (Tony Judt): ^[6] incriminating an entire religion (Alan Colmes); ^[6] lacking in scholarly precision (Robert Paxton); ^[91] "politically biased and polemical" (Stefan Wild); ^[92] 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); ^[93]

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 on the United States in September 2001, ^[94] but also gained a foothold in more sober political discourse, ^[95] both academic and pseudo-academic. ^[96] Many critics are dismissive, variously branding it as "meaningless" (Daniel Benjamin); ^{[97] [98]} a "figment of the neocon imagination" (Paul Krugman); ^[99] and as betraying an ignorance of both Islam and Fascism (Angelo Codevilla). ^[100]

Tony Judt, in an analysis of liberal acquiescence in President George W. Bush's foreign policy initiatives, particularly the War on Terror and the 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 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, ^[101] 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, ^[102] 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. ^[42]

See also

• Christian nationalism
• Hindu nationalism
• Jewish fascism

Citations

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29. Schwartz 2001: The Islamofascist ideology of Osama bin Laden and those closest to him, such as the Egyptian and Algerian 'Islamic Groups', is no more intrinsically linked to Islam or Islamic civilisation than Pearl Harbor was to Buddhism, or Ulster terrorists — whatever they may profess — are to Christianity. Serious Christians don't go around killing and maiming the innocent; devout Muslims do not prepare for paradise by hanging out in strip bars and getting drunk, as one of last week's terrorist pilots was reported to have done
30. Stolberg 2006.
31. Schwartz 2006. "Islamofascism refers to use of the faith of Islam as a cover for totalitarian ideology. This radical phenomenon is embodied among Sunni Muslims today by such fundamentalists as the Saudi-financed Wahhabis, the Pakistani jihadists known as Jama'atis, and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. In the ranks of Shia Muslims, it is exemplified by Hezbollah in Lebanon and the clique around President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran."
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44. Raum 2006:
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71. Margolis 2006.
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73. Ruthven 2012 , p. 31.
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75. Halliday 2010 , p. 187.
76. Mallat 2015 , p. 155, n.5
77. Onfray 2007 , p. 206:"the overthrow of the Shah ... gave birth to an authentic Muslim fascism": "the Iranian Revolution gave birth to an Islamic fascism never before associated with that religion".
78. Aslan 2010 , pp. 25–6:"It has more in common with the Bolsheviks and the French revolutionaries than it does with militant Muslim nationalist groups such as Hamas and Hizballah. To talk about Jihadism as Islamofascism is to misunderstand both Jihadism and fascism. Fascism is an ideology of ultranationalism; Jihadism rejects the very concept of the nation-state as anathema to Islam. In that regard, Jihadism is the opposite of Islamism" ... "What was for centuries considered a collective duty waged predominantly within the confines of an empire or state and solely in defense of life, faith, and property ... has, in Jihadism, become a radically individualistic obligation utterly divorced from any institutional power."
79. Ferguson 2006.
80. Laqueur 2006.
81. Judt 2006.
82. Halpern 1963
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86. Howard 2006–2007 , pp. 7–14.
87. Howard 2006–2007 , p. 9.
88. Stolberg 2006."I'd prefer to call them Islamists," said Frederick W. Kagan, a military historian and neoconservative thinker at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Fascists, Mr. Kagan said, idealize a strong man, like Hitler or Mussolini. "Bin Laden's stated aim is for Allah to be venerated, so I think it's a very different thing."
89. Michael Whine (2001). "Islamism and Totalitarianism: Similarities and Differences". Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions. 2 (2): 54–72.
90. Boyle, Michael, 'The War on Terror in American Grand Strategy', International Affairs, 84, (March 2008), p196
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94. Wildangel 2012 , p. 526
95. Zuckerman 2012 , pp. 353–354.
96. Gershoni 2012 , p. 472.
97. Greene 2006, 'Security expert Daniel Benjamin of the Center for Strategic and International Studies agreed that 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. "This is an epithet, a way of arousing strong emotion and tarnishing one's opponent, but it doesn't tell us anything about the content of their beliefs. "The people who are trying to kill us, Sunni jihadist terrorists, are a very, very different breed."'
98. Larison 2007, "The word 'Islamofascism' never had any meaning, except as a catch-all for whatever regimes and groups the word's users wished to make targets for military action. Hitchens is also well known for his tendentious misunderstandings of all forms of religion, likening theism to a supernatural totalitarian regime and attributing all of the crimes of political totalitarianism to religion. It was therefore appropriate that he should promote the term 'Islamofascism' since it defines a religious movement in the language of secular totalitarianism."
99. Krugman 2007, '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.'
100. Codevilla 2009 , p. 25
101. Ferguson 2006, '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, ... 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.'
102. Judt 2014 , p. 386

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Further reading

• Abdel-Samad, Hamed. Islamic Fascism, Prometheus Books, 2016 ( ISBN   978-163-388-124-2).
• Bar-On, Tamir (2018). "'Islamofascism': Four Competing Discourses on the Islamism-Fascism Comparison". Fascism. 7 (2): 241–274. doi: 10.1163/22116257-00702005 . ISSN   2211-6257.
• 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
• Ignatius, David. "Toward a Definition of 'Islamic Fascism'", Daily Star (Lebanon) , August 19, 2006

External links

• The dictionary definition of islamofascism at Wiktionary