Islamofascism and its predecessors

by Henry Farrell on June 21, 2006

I’m reading and enjoying Steven Poole‘s _Unspeak_ at the moment, but was a little disappointed not to find one of my least favourite bits of unspeak, the term “Islamofascist,” in the index. It’s what Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty (surely the patron saint of unspeak) calls a “portmanteau”:http://www.cs.indiana.edu/metastuff/looking/ch6.html.gz word, and indeed there’s something of the badger, something of the lizard, and something of the corkscrew about it. I’m also dipping into various volumes of E. Haldeman-Julius’ _Questions and Answers_, courtesy of Scott McLemee, and was a little startled to find Haldeman-Julius using a quite similar term in the 1930s:

bq. We thus see that the people most subject to Catholic-Fascism’s idea of censorship is most given to crime … True, we have our crime problem in this country, but Catholic apologists should be the last to throw this fact into the face of those who oppose Catholic-Fascism and its policy of suppressing heterodox literature.

And so on.

Now Haldeman-Julius and his friends (most prominently former Franciscan priest, “Joseph McCabe”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_kenmacleod_archive.html ) certainly had a thing about Catholicism, but it seems to me that the term Catholic-Fascism was rather more defensible in the 1930s than Islamofascism is today. You had the practical example of Franco’s regime in Spain, and Salazar’s in Portugal. Both were fascist; both had strong elements of Catholic clericalism (and Church support). Islamofascism … not so much (you could certainly make a case that Baathism was fascist, but it wasn’t really Islamic).

{ 40 comments }

1

abb1 06.21.06 at 2:55 pm

2

JakeBCool 06.21.06 at 3:27 pm

It seems to me there’s a natural overlap between Fascism and most fundamentalist movements:

1) Both of them identify contemporary decadence as one of the greatest dangers to the survival of the group (although for the former it’s the State and the latter more likely to be Society/the Nation in a sense with less intentional emotional resonance than the State has in Fascism).

2) Both of them demand charismatic leaders–the Orwellian bully that abb1 refers to is particularly characteristic as in Mussolini’s (I paraphrase) “The Democrats of Il Mondo want to know what our goal is? It is to break the bones of the Democrats of Il Mondo.” (apologies, I can’t find the original Italian quote–this is from memory.) The fire-and-brimstone preacher glad to curse others’ misfortunes, as long as they can be seen as an outgroup, as we see in Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson’s behavior, is a similar sort of beast.

3) The “right men” (to take a notion from Colin Wilson that he, somewhat disturbingly, took it from an A.E. Van Vogt sci-fi novel) are always oppressed by the forces of wickedness, no matter how powerful they become–as we see the continual wailing of right-wing Christians in this country on the religious side, and as has been fascist propaganda in every case.

Thus I suspect that the term Islamofascist doesn’t just come from the desire to find a term of evil art for radical Muslims, but has a justification in similarities like those I mention above. There are some similarities between Fascism and some of the radical Islamic parties trying to come to power in countries in Asia and North Africa, but it seems to me there’s a crucial difference between a would-be-dictatorship of the right using the left as a totem for all evil under a charismatic leader, and the desire to install rigid religious law while presumably giving a set of religious leaders dictatorial-like powers. In the first case the leader is more important; the drive seems more diffused in some essential way in the latter case, although I am too sleepy to be able to try to define it further.

3

Tim McG 06.21.06 at 3:43 pm

Correct me if I’m wrong but centralized (i.e. supranational) church support of a regime can really only be done by the Catholic Church?

4

KCinDC 06.21.06 at 3:45 pm

“Islamofascist” isn’t a portmanteau word. It’s just a normal compound: the whole word “fascist” with the prefix “Islamo-” added. No blending.

Maybe if it were “Fascislam” or something.

5

Henry 06.21.06 at 3:58 pm

bq. “Islamofascist” isn’t a portmanteau word. It’s just a normal compound: the whole word “fascist” with the prefix “Islamo-” added. No blending.

Giving the quote from Mr. Humpty-Dumpty in its entirety:

`That’s enough to begin with,’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted: `there are plenty of hard words there. “BRILLIG” means four o’clock in the afternoon — the time when you begin BROILING things for dinner.’

`That’ll do very well,’ said Alice: and “SLITHY”?’

`Well, “SLITHY” means “lithe and slimy.” “Lithe” is the same as “active.” You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.’

`I see it now,’ Alice remarked thoughtfully: `and what are “TOVES”?’

`Well, “TOVES’ are something like badgers — they’re something like lizards — and they’re something like corkscrews.’

`They must be very curious looking creatures.’

`They are that,’ said Humpty Dumpty: `also they make their nests under sun-dials — also they live on cheese.’

Two disparate meanings jammed together into one ungainly term – seems spot on to me.

6

john m. 06.21.06 at 4:12 pm

From Catholic-Fascism to Islam O’Fascism…

7

Marlborough 06.21.06 at 4:39 pm

Re #2:

So any group following a charismatic leader that feels estranged from and oppressed by the modern world is fascist?

This definition is so broad as to make the word useless.

8

Brett Bellmore 06.21.06 at 5:04 pm

Excuse me, but as a simple matter of history, aren’t a lot of the parties in the middle east genuinely decended from actual WWII era facism? The middle east having fallen under the control of Nazis, and never having been properly deNazified after WWII?

I mean, Hamas was founded by Amin al-Husseini, one of Hitler’s cronies!

Islamo-facism, then, simply identifies a branch of actual facism.

9

Kevin Donoghue 06.21.06 at 5:20 pm

Henry: “you could certainly make a case that Baathism was fascist, but it wasn’t really Islamic”.

Brett: “Excuse me, but as a simple matter of history, aren’t a lot of the parties in the middle east genuinely decended from actual WWII era facism?”

That’s dialogue.

10

soru 06.21.06 at 5:29 pm

Do you also object to the term Islamic Socialism, as used by Bhutto, which was explicitly about taking socialist ideas and expressing them in Islamically-acceptable terms?

11

Brett Bellmore 06.21.06 at 5:33 pm

“That’s dialogue.”

That’s a rather obscure reply. What exactly does it imply to point out that I wasn’t miming?

12

Steven Poole 06.21.06 at 5:40 pm

Hey, glad you’re enjoying the book.

Sorry about leaving out “Islamofascism”, but I thought there was probably enough kicking of Christopher Hitchens in there already. ;-)

13

Jack 06.21.06 at 5:58 pm

How much of what these movements have in common stem from their origins in opposition to a corrupt state?

The requirements for an organisation to survive in a hostile state and provide a new source of legitimacy must explain quite a lot of their behaviour.

14

rea 06.21.06 at 5:58 pm

“Do you also object to the term Islamic Socialism, as used by Bhutto”

Soru, Bhutto was allowed to call his own program whatever he wanted.

“Islamofascism,” on the other hand, is not how anyone self-identifies. It’s not a real political movement. It’s just a name someone came up with to suggest some metalink between Saddam, 9/11 and (now) Iran . . .

15

Barry 06.21.06 at 7:23 pm

Brett: “The middle east having fallen under the control of Nazis, and never having been properly deNazified after WWII?”

Not in my world; here the Nazis never gained control of the Middle East.

16

Leinad 06.21.06 at 8:18 pm

’15’

Brings to mind all those alternate history hypotheses (discussed in minute detail at soc.hist.what-if) – what if Hitler had set his eyes on capturing the British oilfields in the Middle East? In a few decades we could have a properly assimilated Gauleiter Saddam Hausen von Tikritenstadt locked in a deadly rivalry with Reichsmarshall Kommein of The Pure Aryan Republic of Iran, or some such nonsense.

17

Patrick S. O'Donnell 06.21.06 at 8:21 pm

You’re spot on indeed. The term simply doesn’t have a referent in the real world (at most, it’s an awful metaphor). There is still widespread and appallingly stubborn ignorance of all-things-Islamic, be it groups like Hizbullah or Hamas, or classical Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence, or Islamic art, or Islamic mysticism (Sufism), and so forth and so on. I’ve grown quite weary of hearing so much pretentious and condescending blather from putative pundits and blinkered academics. People with little or no knowledge of such things utter pontifical nonsense in quarters high and low: highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow alike unconstrained by the elusive but no less real parameters of truth.

18

Louis Proyect 06.21.06 at 9:12 pm

People use the word Islamofascism for a very good reason. It legitimizes the war in Iraq and Afghanistan on the basis of the last “Good War” against Hitler and Mussolini. When you need to line people up behind the power of NATO or US “coalitions”, it is helpful to invoke this word, just as was done in Yugoslavia. But I wouldn’t look to Lewis Carrol for perspective on this. George Orwell is much more helpful, “1984” in particular. Whatever his latter-day sins and misdemeanors, this book is a powerful critique of exactly the sort of bullshit you hear from George W. Bush, Tony Blair and their stooges like Norm Geras, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman.

19

Quo Vadis 06.21.06 at 10:54 pm

In my understanding of Fascism it is defined as government by ruling elite with the consent of the governed but without their participation. Characteristically it is based upon unquestioning loyalty to the nation, race or some other defining characteristic. At least that’s how it has been described to me by persons who call themselves Fascists.

It could be argued that a government based upon Islamic law as interpreted by an elite group of clerics bears some similarities.

20

Patrick S. O'Donnell 06.22.06 at 12:58 am

There exists no government in the world today based solely upon ‘Islamic law’ as such. Fiqh may in fact be part of a country’s legal system as in, say, Egypt, Iran, or Indonesia, but in all ‘Islamic countries’ such law is invariably mixed with legal systems of non-Islamic provenance. And what counts for Islamic law as such is likewise different, so one needs to specify the country or countries in question in any reference to or discussion of Islamic law (fiqh).

Furthermore, not a few contemporary Muslims and quite a few non-Muslims mistakenly conflate Shariah with fiqh, as if there were no conceptual, logical, and practical distinctions between the two, while in fact there is, and these distinctions are of the utmost importance, as Abou El Fadl, among others, makes plain.

If one argues, say, that Iran is a country ‘based upon Islamic law as interpreted by an elite group of clerics’ and therefore bears some similarities to a Fascist government, one in fact says very little: it illuminates virtually nothing about putatively Islamic governance in Iran, which has some similarities with democratic modes of governance as well. It ill-serves us to view matters here as a contemporary instance of the historic conflict between ‘fascism’ and ‘democracy’ on the order of the Spanish Civil War, when such a conflict was all-too-real. Although I’m a Marxist of sorts (with regard to the critique of capitalism), I agree with Roger Griffin that some culpability for ‘eroding fascism’s lexical value must be placed at the door of Marxist theoreticians.’ This lexical laxity lends license to the likes of Hitchens and helps account for the ease with which some will speak of ‘Islamofascism,’ one of the nastier neologisms of late.

If we want to express our moral indignation and opprobrium at, or political revulsion and rejection of, the political agendas, strategies, and tactics of self-described ‘jihadist’ Islamists, then surely we can find terms better suited to their actual ideology and politics. For example, it behooves us to retain some distinction between a political ideology and a religious ideology, even if the former has mythic elements at its core, as Griffin claims for fascism: ‘a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in various permutations is a palingenetic forms of populist ultra-nationalism.’ In Griffin’s words, fascism is ‘a political ideology not a political religion.’ That said, there may yet exist reasons for making comparisons between aspects of fascist ideology and elements found in militant Muslim critiques and political agendas (for example, the approach to features of modernity or the nostalgia for an earlier age, although in the case of fascism the ‘arrow of time…points not backwards but forwards, even when the archer looks over his shoulder for guidance on where to aim.’).

But in the end, if we’re to understand the motley Islamists of the modern and post-modern world we need to spend more time carefully examining what they say and do, relying on phenomenologically sensitive descriptions that evidence a deep understanding of the history of Islamic civilizations and peoples, including the interactions and intermingling with, and integrations and absorptions of, non-Islamic religions, cultures, and civilizations. Recent and quite accessible (for the non-specialist) illustrations include Charles Glass’s review essay, ‘Cyber-Jihad,’ in the London Review of Books, 9 March 2006 (Vol. 28, No. 5), and Henry Siegman’s essay, ‘Hamas: The Last Chance for Peace?,’ in the New York Review of Books, 27 April 2006 (Vol. 53, No. 7). In neither article will one find facile invocations of fascism, let alone ‘Islamofascism.’

And now for a discussion of the problems with the appellation, ‘Islamic fundamentalist’….

21

Patrick S. O'Donnell 06.22.06 at 12:59 am

correction: ‘while in fact there are’

22

Z 06.22.06 at 3:38 am

You had the practical example of Franco’s regime in Spain, and Salazar’s in Portugal.

And don’t forget the Ustachi in Yugoslavia, fighting a terrorist war for the independance of Croatia at that time, and, though this less clear, french fascistoid movements like the Camelot du Roi.

23

soru 06.22.06 at 4:51 am

For example, it behooves us to retain some distinction between a political ideology and a religious ideology, even if the former has mythic elements at its core

I agree – it is a fundamental category error to describe or think of al Qaeda as a religous movement, or to use theological terms such as jihadism, salifism or fundamentalism to describe it.

It is a political movement, and if it is going to be described in in a short english phrase ‘a variant of fascism’ is less misleading than any alternative I have seen.

Of course, describing, say, the Iranian or Saudi governments as fascism is generally a sign of pure concentrated ignorance, probably based on bigotry. They are, of course, a semi-democratic theocracy and a religiously-backed monarchy respectively.

24

abb1 06.22.06 at 5:32 am

Soru,
wikipedia describes Al-Qaeda as

…an international Sunni Islamic fundamentalist paramilitary organization and campaign comprising independent and collaborative cells that all profess the same cause of reducing outside influence upon Islamic affairs.

If this is correct, I would like you to provide a definition of fascism where “reducing outside influence” is considered a main feature.

…Robin Cook, the late British member of Parliament and former foreign secretary, wrote in 2005 that “Al-Qaida, literally ‘the database’, was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians.”

Was it “a variant of fascism” at the time when they fought the Russians in Afghanistan or did they become fascists later? In fact, I assume they were indeed called ‘fascists’ in the Soviet media at the time, while in the US they were a “moral equivalent of the founding fathers”.

25

Syd Webb 06.22.06 at 5:34 am

Louis Proyect wrote:

People use the word Islamofascism for a very good reason. It legitimizes the war in Iraq and Afghanistan on the basis of the last “Good War” against Hitler and Mussolini.

But the irony is that it was Hitler who was waging the Second World War against his portmanteau word ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’. It was of no matter that none of the governments of his opponents, the United Nations allies, described themselves as ‘Judeo-Bolsheviks’. It was a term he was comfortable using. And after all, there were some Jews who were Communists. And the best Big Lie always has a tiny kernel of truth.

The staggering thing is that both portmanteau words, ‘Islamofascism’ and ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’, have the same structure. The creator takes a religion of which they disapprove – Judaism and Islam respectively – and couples it with an equally disliked political movement.

I’m surprised a contemporary propagandist would borrow such an approach but perhaps enough time has passed since WWII that we are now free to admire the cleverness of a Gobbels while still tarring our opponents with the Fascist/Nazi brush.

Er, I haven’t broken Godwin’s Law here, have I?

26

soru 06.22.06 at 7:07 am

If this is correct, I would like you to provide a definition of fascism where “reducing outside influence” is considered a main feature.

I don’t need to: #25 just did. In short: ‘Empower the authentic German culture and nation, by getting rid of those sinister foreign Bolsheviks and Jews, and anything touched by them’.

27

Patrick S. O'Donnell 06.22.06 at 11:10 am

Soru,

I think ‘jihadism’ and ‘salifism’ [better: Salafis or Salafiyah] are not just ‘theological’ terms, indeed, they are better described as jurisitic and political categories, and thus al Qaeda is a religio-political movement of a kind of Muslim(s), however much we might find resources from within Islamic tradtions to articulate a normative critique of this or that aspect or claim made by its leadership. Indeed, from the earliest period of Islam, theological controversies, for better and worse, often entailed or reflected political conflict. The obsession with ‘lesser jihad’ by contemporary Islamists reflects the clear intertwining of religion and politics often found in the Islamic tradition, although one might certainly argue with (contest, oppose) the manner in which this jihad has been interpreted and applied by al Qaeda and kindred movements. The definition quoted above from wikipedia by Abb1 is in the main correct (although, with my former teacher Juan E. Campo, I find not a few problems with the notion of ‘fundamentalism’ being used in an Islamic context).

Some Muslims have plausibly argued that al Qaeda (and thus by implication, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbullah, Hamas, etc.) represents the unwarranted ‘politicization’ of Islam, and there is much to be said for such arguments. Nonetheless, there is some textual warrant and historical precedent from within Islam for not segregating the political (broadly or generously conceived) and religious realms in the sense that the latter might be consigned to the private arena of everyday intimate social life (hence, for Muslims there’s some truth in the slogan that the ‘personal is political’ although by this their meaning is not quite–or typically–that of feminists). This is an enormously complicated subject that presumes an intimate acquaintance with Islamic history and traditions, so I cannot pretend to have addressed matters in any but the most superficial sense….

28

r4d20 06.22.06 at 11:55 am

In my experience it seems people like to nitpick language when they cannot adequately respond to the substance of an argument. People who will causally use the word ‘facist’ to describe any number of causes they don’t like suddenly become hyper-sensitive to the ‘correct’ dictionary definition when the word is used against causes they idenitify with.

The term Islamofacism was an invented because the term “theocracy”, although more techincally accurate, simply does not pack the emotional punch that “Facism” does. Its the same reason people around here use the terms “social justice” to describe ‘taking shit from one guy and giving it to another’. So, considering many of you play the same game, I find all these complaints to be so much worthless bullshit.

29

PRB 06.22.06 at 12:41 pm

But I wouldn’t look to Lewis Carrol for perspective on this.

Ah, but you’re forgetting your Humpty Dumpty:

When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.

30

JakeBCool 06.22.06 at 12:50 pm

Re #7–

I was simply listing some of the elements of fascism that seem to have a relatively close parallel in fundamentalist movements, or that involve intermixed elements. It wasn’t intended to be a full definition.

31

Tom T. 06.22.06 at 2:35 pm

Ted B. once cited to this post by Patrick Smith that generally concluded that the Republican Party was “truly fascist.” Smith used the definition set forth in The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton, which might provide some useful context for this discussion:

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” (Page 218)

32

soru 06.22.06 at 3:23 pm

Nonetheless, there is some textual warrant and historical precedent from within Islam

Similarly, there is some textual warrant and historical precedent for young Earth creationism within Christianity. That does not mean that testable factual claims derived from that tradition are religious, and so outside the domain of science.

It seems to me that there is a strong danger of gross error or miscommunication if you analyse and describe a movement primarily on the basis of self-descriptions written in a different language by people of a different culture who divide the world into subtly different categories.

As a possible miscommunication, ‘al Qaeda are just Muslims who take the Islamic religion seriously’ does seem to be both more common and more pernicious than the alternatives.

33

sglover 06.22.06 at 4:50 pm

People use the word Islamofascism for a very good reason. It legitimizes the war in Iraq and Afghanistan on the basis of the last “Good War” against Hitler and Mussolini. When you need to line people up behind the power of NATO or US “coalitions”, it is helpful to invoke this word, just as was done in Yugoslavia. But I wouldn’t look to Lewis Carrol for perspective on this. George Orwell is much more helpful, “1984” in particular.

Precisely so; no further parsings are necessary.

I think the tendency of some Forever War advocates to speak of GWOT/GSAVE/Gwhatever as “World War IV” (III being the Cold War, natch, but without the actual “war” bit) is a similar attempt at conflation.

34

Geoff R 06.22.06 at 7:11 pm

Maybe the (very small) rational kernel in the Islamofascism concept is that Islamic fundamentalism is a form of populist radical conservatism that annexes some left rhetoric for its own ends, such as anti-imperialism, whilst ruthlessly destroying genuine left forces. Franz Neumann made this point about Nazism. But fascist themes have been present in other forms of contemporary conservatism; the anti-elite rhetoric of the Australian and American right comes to mind.

35

Steven Poole 06.22.06 at 7:20 pm

sglover, Bush actually called the WoT “world war three” a couple of months ago.

36

r4d20 06.22.06 at 11:49 pm

“Maybe the (very small) rational kernel in the Islamofascism concept is that Islamic fundamentalism is a form of populist radical conservatism that annexes some left rhetoric for its own ends, such as anti-imperialism, whilst ruthlessly destroying genuine left forces.

For the past two decades the message from the radicals has been “Democracy didn’t work. Socialism didn’t work. Lets return to Islam”.

The Nazis had the SAME message: “The Monarchy failed us, The Weimar Republic failed us, so lets look for glory in the past”. This went hand in hand with the demonization of “the other” where “the other” was marked by by it’s absence from “true” Germanic culture – which was defined in reference to the mythical far past.

While Nazism drew much from modern theories, it always tried to root such theories in a ceonception of history. While given a modern “racial” veneer, the stereotype of the tall, muscular, blond, german is rooted in Greco-Roman conception of their Celtic and Germanic adversaries. They tapped into the romantic “Noble Savage” sterotype which predates Rousseau by millenia – the urbanized Greeks and Romans had a long tradition of posing the “Barbarians” as a savage, but also noble and uncorrupted, “other” against which to compare their civilized, but overly-decadent and unvirtuous, selves. Hitler appealed to the image of the “true’ German as one of these noble, but furious, savages. The policy of Euthenasia was justifed “scientifically” but also by refering to the ancient traditions of exposing infants to weed out the weak. The Nazis took pains to fake historical finds in order advance the theory that the Indo-European migrations (including the branch called themselves the ‘Arya’ – meaning pure) had originated in Germany, and his plan for Russia was fundamentally inspired by his vision of the these as well as the Volkerwanderung – the Germanic Migrations which marked a demographic shift over all of Western Europe and Central Europe as well as the Balkans and took down the Western Roman Empire.

37

Gene O'Grady 06.22.06 at 11:58 pm

What I think we need is a term like “Democrofascism” to describe the ideas of Dick Cheney and his cronies, with their fascination with with violence and action, concentration of power in a “unitary executive,” and insistence that they, like Mussolini, are always right, and discussion is not appropriate.

38

minerva 06.23.06 at 3:34 am

One Canadian (a Muslim) complained after the alleged terrorists were arrested there recently that Islamic supremacists are ruining Islam and causing all Muslims to suffer.

I thought that was an interesting term and maybe a little accurate.

For Fundamentalist–Christian, Muslim or whatever, maybe Supremacist works better.

39

soru 06.23.06 at 5:28 am

But fascist themes have been present in other forms of contemporary conservatism

Wel yes. There are small nationalist parties commonly called neofascist in the UK, France, Belgium and most (all?) Western countries, collecting single digit popular support. Every modern and post-modern country has people like that, to a greater or lesser extent.

It is a quirk of the US electoral system that the corresponding people in the US vote Republican.

And it is a quirk of the Saudi and Egyptian political systems that the corresponding people in those countries present themselves as preachers and holy warriors.

40

r4d20 06.23.06 at 8:20 pm

“I think we need is a term like “Democrofascism””

We do. Its called “Democratic Centralism”.

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