Islamofascism

“Islamic fascism” (first described in 1933), also known since 1990 as “Islamofascism”, is a term drawing an analogy between the ideological characteristics of specific Islamist movements and a broad range of European fascist movements of the early 20th century, neofascist movements, or totalitarianism.

Origins of the term “Islamofascism”

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”. The earliest known use of the contiguous term Islamic Fascism dates to 1933 when Akhtar Husayn Rā’ēpūrī, in an attack on Muhammad Iqbāl, 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 primary case was based on an analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and he argued 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. Halpern’s work, commissioned by the United States Air Force from the Rand Corporation, arguably represents a mix of mid-Cold War analysis and orientalism.

In 1978, Maxime Rodinson, a distinguished Marxist scholar of Islam, responded to French avant-garde enthusiasm for Khomeini’s revolution in a three part article in Le Monde, by arguing that, in response to successive assaults by Crusaders, Mongols, Turks and Western imperialism, Islamic countries had come to feel embattled, and the impoverished masses had come to think of their elites, linked to foreigners, as devoid of traditional piety. Both nationalism and socialism imported from the West were recast in religious terms, in a process of political Islamicization which would be devoid of the progressive side of nationalism and revert to what he called “a type of archaic fascism” characterized by policing the state to enforce a totalitarian moral and social order. The earliest example of the term “Islamofascism,” according to William Safire, occurs in an article penned by the Scottish scholar and writer Malise Ruthven writing in 1990. Ruthven used it to refer to the way in which traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to stay in power. Malise Ruthven, Construing Islam as a Language, The Independent 8 September 1990. “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 Islamofascism, is the rule rather than the exception from Morocco to Pakistan.” Ruthven doubts that he himself coined the term, stating that the attribution to him is probably due to the fact that internet search engines don’t go back beyond 1990.

Criticism of theory of a link between Islam and fascism

The term “Islamofascism” has been criticized by several scholars. While Islamic Fascism has been discussed as a category of serious analysis by the scholars mentioned above 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 2001but 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 kosher-halal” throwback version of the “vacuous” old leftist epithet “fascist pig” (Norman Finkelstein);a “figment of the neocon imagination” (Paul Krugman);[65] and as betraying an ignorance of both Islam and Fascism (Angelo Codevilla)

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, 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. Judt cited many others who, once liberals have fallen in lockstep with the American idea of a global war against Islamic jihad: Adam Michnik, Oriana Fallaci; Václav Havel; André Glucksmann, Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick, Thomas Friedman and Michael Walzer. Christopher Hitchens was also criticized by Judt, as making unhistoric simplifications, to justify use of the term.

In 2012 a special issue of Die Welt des Islams was dedicated to surveying the issue of Islamophobia in recent Western reportage and scholarly studies, with essays on various facets of the controversy by Katajun Amirpur, Moshe Zuckerman, René Wildangel, Joachim Scholtyseck and others. Their positions were almost invariably critical of the term and the concept underlying it.

In a 2016 lecture, American historian Paul Gottfried proposed that some strains of Islam could accurately be described as Islamist or Islamic terrorist but definitely not fascist, because he maintains that the only accurate use of Fascism is to describe the government of Italy under Mussolini from 1922 to 1938.