Islamofascism and its predecessors

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.

“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.

From Catholic-Fascism to Islam O’Fascism…

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.

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?

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. ;-)

“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’

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.

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.

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’….

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.

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”.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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

We do. Its called “Democratic Centralism”.