Islamofascism

[8] 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,[9] but by 2018 it had "largely" disappeared from use among policymakers and academics.

[16] The earliest example of the term "Islamofascism", according to William Safire,[12] 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.

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.

[4] 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.

[30][31][32] 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.

[38] 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.

[41] A number of Republicans, such as Rick Santorum, used it as shorthand for terrorists,[30] and Donald Rumsfeld dismissed critics of the invasion of Iraq as appeasers of a "new type of fascism".

[51] In Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola writes As in the case of priestly Judaism, the center in Islam also consisted of the Law and Tradition, regarded as a formative force, to which the Arab stocks of the origins provided a purer and nobler human material that was shaped by a warrior spirit.

"The Muslim World", he argued, "is replete with brutal dictatorships, feudal monarchies, and corrupt military-run states, but none of these regimes, however deplorable, fits the standard definition of fascism.

George Orwell, it has been noted in this connection, observed as early as 1946 that "[T]he word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable'", and linking Islam to that concept was more a matter of denigration than of ideological clarity.

[59] A number of scholars and thinkers, such as Michel Onfray,[60] Michael Howard, Jeffrey Herf, Walter Laqueur, and Robert Wistrich have argued that the link between fascism and Islam/Islamic radicalism is sound.

Many scholars who specialize in Islam and the Arabic world are skeptical of the thesis: Reza Aslan, for one, identifies the roots of jihadism not in the Qur'an, but in the writings of modern Arab anti-colonialists and, doctrinally, to Ahmad Ibn Taymiyyah[61] Historians like Niall Ferguson dismiss the word as an "extraordinary neologism" positing a conceptual analogy when there is "virtually no overlap between the ideology of al Qaeda and fascism".

[62] Some scholars have compared the tactics, conspiratorial thinking, and recruitment styles of white supremacists and radical Islamic terrorists, asserting that while they have different ideologies, they have "structurally very similar modes of thought".

[69] Manfred Halpern, the first major thinker to characterize politicized Islam as a fascist movement, called it "Neo-Islamic Totalitarianism" in his classic 1963 study The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa.

[70][71][19] The French Marxist Maxime Rodinson described Islamic movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood as a "type of archaic fascism" whose goal was the establishment of a "totalitarian state whose political police would brutally enforce the moral and social order.

[19] Professor David Meir-Levi wrote in his book History Upside Down that Islamofascism was "a guarantor of the movement of the destruction of Israel,"[72] and that the Palestinian cause had become "part of the Islamofascist jihad against the West.

As Michael Whine explains, both replace the practice of religion with their own monopolistic ideology, relying on mass communication and suppression of dissent in order to construct a single party regime, a new state with the vision of a ‘new man’, and the aim of conquering existing society, which it believes has deviated from its ideal.

"[74] [9] The term "Islamofascism" has been criticized by several scholars,[75] and journalists for being "ahistorical and simplistic" (Tony Judt):[6] incriminating an entire religion (Alan Colmes);[6] lacking in scholarly precision (Robert Paxton);[16] "politically biased and polemical" (Stefan Wild);[76] and for being used in "right-wing circles ... to help spread the alarming notion that all Islamists—ranging from the Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias of Iraq to Osama bin Laden to the mullahs of Iran to angry Palestinians—are part of a single, terrifying threat on the order of Nazi Germany" (by The Week);[77] While Islamic Fascism has been discussed as a category of serious analysis by the scholars mentioned above, the term "Islamofascism" circulated mainly as a propaganda, rather than as an analytic term after the September 11 attacks on the United States in September 2001,[78] but also gained a foothold in more sober political discourse,[79] both academic and pseudo-academic.

[80] Many critics are dismissive, variously branding it as "meaningless" (Daniel Benjamin);[81][82] a "figment of the neocon imagination" (Paul Krugman);[83] and as betraying an ignorance of both Islam and Fascism (Angelo Codevilla).

Many former left-liberal pundits, like Paul Berman and Peter Beinart having no knowledge of the Middle East or cultures like those of Wahhabism and Sufism on which they descant authoritatively, have, he claimed, and his view was shared by Niall Ferguson,[85] latched onto the war on terror as a new version of the old liberal fight against fascism, in the form of Islamofascism.

In their approach there is a cozy acceptance of a binary division of the world into ideological antitheses,[86] the "familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us" has been revived.