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October 29, 2006
In this article in the News and Notes section of Telos James V Schall explores the word 'Islamo fascism' with regard to the 'war on terrorism". I must admit to being uneasy about the term, as I'm not sure it helps us much to understand what is going on. It may even mislead us in linking us back to the 1930s and thinking that it is the same as German or Italian fascism, which is appropriately understood as 'corporatism' because it is a merger of state and corporate power..
So I am glad that the term is being analysed. Schall says:
The war in which we are currently engaged confuses us, in part because many will not admit it is a war. We do not know what to call it. Nor do we know what to call the self-declared enemy who has been attacking us in one form or another for some twenty-five years, ever more visibly and dangerouslysince September 11, 2001, with subsequent events in Afghanistan, Iraq, Spain, London, Bombay, Bali, Paris, Lebanon, and Israel ..... More recently, the term "Islamo-fascism" has been coined in an effort to describe the source and nature of "terrorism." I want to examine the appropriateness of this term, as I think it serves to get at the core of the problem. Is "Islamo-fascism" really accurate for what the reality is?
Schall says that initially, the term obviously is not a product of Islamic thinkers thinking of themselves, though some more recent Muslim thinkers have studied the Marxists and the fascists. No Imam in Iran or Egypt, however, suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night and shouts, "That's it! I am an Islamo-fascist; why did I not think of that before?" No pious youth in Mecca reads the Collected Works of Benito Mussolini and muses to himself, "Yes, this is what Mohammed was about in the Koran."
Schall says that the term comes from Western politicians and writers. They are desperately seeking a word or expression that they can use, one that avoids suggesting that the war in fact has religious roots, as the people who are doing the attacking claim it does. To say that war has "religious" roots violates a code, a constitutional principle as wars are political not religious.
Update: 30 October
How useful is the term 'Islamofascism' when the political program is to establish an Islamic theocracy? Or more accurately, to describe it in James Weeldon's words, as the programe of the 'Wahhabis, Salafists, and other violent jihadists who would seek to establish, by force if necessary, a utopian system of government based upon sharia law and the values and cultural ethic of seventh century Arabia.'
Schall says that:
My only point in following this question of the use of the word "Islamofascism" is that it does not describe what these men think they are doing. Nor does it help that some thus far ineffective Muslim apologists do not think that the term describes what the religion means. It is what these men think and evidently practice. What has to take place, in response, is some more adequate confrontation with the incoherence of this claim to world-subjection to Allah as an inner-worldly political mission powered by a quasi-mystical devotion to its cause. In this sense, in the minds of the ones carrying out the attacks, it is religious, not ideological, in origin.
James Weeldon says that it is correct to say that there is a totalitarian impulse in radical Salafism and Wahhabism that is akin to fascism. But he adds:
I fear that thinking of radical Islamism as just another form of fascism will lead the West to conclude that what worked to defeat European fascism (namely, superior military force) will also work to defeat so called "Islamofascism". While I agree that the Salafists and Wahhabists would like to see established a system of government that is as intrusive and controlling – as totalitarian – as Nazi government, the symbolism and ideology of the radical Islamists depends on images of victimhood and subjugation to almost as great an extent as the Nazis relied on images of strength and domination.
Weeldon says that the strategies that worked against fascism will not be the strategies that will work against violent Islamist extremism. Fascism was defeated militarily. But as the example of Iraq shows, military defeat does not deflate but rather inspires radical Islamism.
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Gary,
I did a lengthy post on this topic a couple of weeks ago over at
James Weeldon
J.