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. 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, and defended as a way of distinguishing traditional Islam from Islamic extremist violence. 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 history of the term
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, and Western imperialists—had led to impoverished masses reacting against their Westernized elites for their lack of traditional piety.Popularisation after the September 2001 attacks
Origins of the 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".
Ismael Hossein-zadeh criticized Bush's use of the term, calling it "offensive and inflammatory and, therefore, detrimental to international understanding and stability". He insists on a definition of fascism as "interventionist policies on behalf of corporate interests" during economic crisis, which require a "corresponding package of political fascism" that cracks down on civil liberties and democratic controls to manage unrest. He writes, "Radical movements and individuals of the Muslim world maybe called fundamentalist, populist, nationalist, or terrorist; but they cannot be called fascist", believing that the label itself served fascist corporate interests in the US who stood to benefit from "wars of aggression."
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 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.