The Problem with "Islamofascism"

Terrorist Attacks Attributed to Al-Qaeda

(Image from Wikipedia)

In a recent post, I took a skeptical look at Youssef M. Ibrahim's "The West Needs To Fight Islamofascists With Big Ideas" (The New York Sun, September 1, 2006), but I didn't single out his use of the popular term "Islamofascist" for describing groups such as Al Qaeda.

One of my regular readers, "Steph," alluded to the term as an "[u]nfortunate choice of word," and I happened to agree:

I generally avoid the term "Islamofascism" because it implies a significant connection to European fascism that I just don't see. Fascists emphasize politics of the corporate state grounded in ethnic identity. Islamists emphsize the Ummah, the worldwide Islamic community, and appeal to a religious tradition that supposedly goes all the way back to Muhammad.

The label has been bandied about since 9/11 as people try to come up with a convenient term for implying more or less what ideology Al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups adhere to. "Steph" noted that the term has been in use since at least 1990:

Dr Malise Ruthven wrote an article "Construing Islam as a Language" which appeared in The Independent September 8th 1990 and used the word but I don't know whether he coined it.

That was a bit surprising to learn, but I've since discovered an even longer pedigree. According to Madeleine Brand, "Verbal Front in the Terror War: 'Islamofascism'" (NPR, August 15, 2006):

A Lexis-Nexis search found the first time it was used in the mainstream press was back in 1979, in a Washington Post article describing Iran's Ayatollah Khomeni as an Islamic Fascist.

That's a somewhat different expression, but Brand suggests that:

Since then, the phrase has morphed into "Islam-o-fascist.' That word appeared in a 1990 article in the British newspaper The Independent, which argued that authoritarian governments are the norm in the Islamic world.

This must be the article by Ruthven that "Steph" was referring to, yet the term there doesn't appear to refer to groups similar to Al Qaeda but rather to the 'typical' form of government in the Muslim world. I haven't seen the article by Ruthven, but a Wikipedia entry on "Islamofascism" quotes him:

[T]here 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.

Ruthven doesn't clearly endorse the term, but he does use it even though the term's reference doesn't look especially specific. If he's referring to Baath governments like the one that Iraq had under Saddam Hussein, then I think one could argue for the appropriateness of the label "fascist," but in that case "Islamic" (or "Islamo-") wouldn't fit well since the Baath Party was aggressively secular.

But to return to the NPR piece ... Brand cites the leftist historian Paul Berman:

Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism, says that when fascism arose in Europe in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, similar movements cropped up in the Arab world. While different from their European counterparts, Berman says, they "had similar mythology, paranoia -- a cult of hatred and a cult of death."

I've read and learned from Berman's book, but that was about three years ago, and I don't have it at hand for checking, so I don't recall if he endorses the term "Islamofascist" or even "Islamic fascist" to refer to groups like Al Qaeda. I hope not, and so far as I recall, Berman's point was to note political connections and suggest some common ideological strands, not to identify Al Qaeda's ideology as "fascist" -- but I'll perhaps have to get back to you on that.

David Greenberg, of Slate Magazine, writing for The New Republic's "Open University" blog, also learns from Berman but rejects the term "Islamofascism" in "Another Vote Against Islamofascism" (9/1/2006):

When thinkers I admire like Paul Berman first started noting the links between Al Qaeda's murderous, anti-enlightenment ideas and those of Fascist Europe, I thought the term Islamo-fascism seemed like a reasonable effort to define an ideology for which we had (and still have) no consensus name. But Ted Widmer's post is one among several recent comments that have made me reconsider. It's not just that bin Laden's vision is simply too different from Hitler's or Mussolini's to stand up to such pigeonholing. It's also that fascism has been so degraded as an epithet over the years through casual use that even if it were now being used accurately, it would still be likely to strike most ears as mere name-calling -- an expression of sentiment, not the product of analysis. Besides, if we believe (as I do, and as I think most Americans, including President Bush, do) that we're not at war with Islam, why fuse the two words into one? In his new book The Good Fight, Peter Beinart uses "Salafism," which strikes me as a tad esoteric. On TNR's blog The Plank, Spencer Ackerman proposes "anti-Western Salafist jihadism," which he concedes doesn't trip off the tongue. I tend to prefer jihadism--unless I hear a better term.

What does Ted Widmer, of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, have to say in his Open University entry, "Thoughts About Fascism" (9/1/2006)? First, he quotes the "eminent historian Robert Paxton[, who] has provided a useful modern definition of fascism":

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood 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."

Widmer then observes, "Whom that precisely describes in the world today is difficult to say," but he pretty clearly thinks that it doesn't describe Al Qaeda, for he states that "[t]he first step toward getting this war right is to get our facts right. And the first step to getting our facts right is getting our words right."

I agree that finding the right term is essential, and given Paxton's somewhat unwieldy definition, which places the term "nationalist" at its core, I'd say that my own doubts about the aptness of the label "Islamofascism" have been on target.

Now, if we were to replace Paxton's term "nationalist" with "internationalist," we'd arrive at a definition much closer to describing Al Qaeda and its ilk ... but we wouldn't be talking about fascism anymore.

I prefer the term "Islamism" but recognize that it shades subtly into "Islam," and I can see why Greenberg opts for "Jihadism," for it identifies the problem that we face from groups like Al Qaeda.

What do the rest of you think?