Here is a sentence from today’s New York Times:
President Bush called the arrests [in Great Britain] “a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.”
I can’t think of a worse word for the people President Bush has in mind than “fascists.” The term “fascism” has both a particular and a generic meaning. (It picks out an individual as well as a type of individual.) It referred originally to the corporatist society of Benito Mussolini in Italy. The word “corporatist” comes from the Latin “corpus,” meaning body. A corporation, in the broad sense, is a body—an organic, functioning thing, a social organism. It is not a mere collection of members; it is a whole consisting of interrelated parts. The parts are valuable only as, and only to the extent that, they contribute to the health of the whole. Mussolini sought to create an organic state, where business firms, guilds, universities, the press, and other entities would function as one. The whole was supposed to be greater than the sum of its parts. Any society in which this is the case can be described as “fascist” (with a small “f”), even if it has nothing to do with the Fascist Party of Mussolini. It’s a type of society. Mussolini’s Italy was the prototype.
The reason it’s inappropriate to describe Islamists as fascists is simple: They’re not statists. To Muslims, including that subset of Muslims I call Islamists (see below), a state is at best a temporary thing, performing certain administrative, organizational, or ideological tasks. It has no independent significance, as it does in, say, the Christian tradition. (“Render unto Caesar” and all that.) Islamists aren’t trying to create a state in which all the parts work as one; their ultimate goal is a stateless world in which everyone worships Allah. Read up on Islam if this seems strange to you. Start with this.
Why would President Bush use “fascist” to describe such an ideology? I honestly don’t know. The only thing I can think of is that “fascist,” like “communist,” has negative emotive meaning. It’s an all-purpose term of abuse. To call something fascist is primarily to condemn it—that’s President Bush’s goal—and only secondarily to describe it. (This is why Brian Leiter and other leftists call President Bush a fascist. It’s pure abuse, with little or no cognitive content.) The best term to describe the people President Bush has in mind is “Islamists.” A Muslim is an adherent of Islam, which is a religion. Islamism is not a religion; it is a political morality (note the “ism”) and a set of doctrines about permissible means of social change. (Terrorism is one such means.) Those who subscribe to it are Islamists. All Islamists are Muslims, but not all Muslims are Islamists. Islamism competes not with Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Confucianism but with liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, anarchism, and socialism. See here for more on this important distinction.
Addendum: See here. I thought of a perspicuous way to express my argument:
1. All fascists are statists (by which I mean people who assign intrinsic moral significance to the state).2. No Muslims are statists.
Therefore,
3. No Muslims are fascists.
Therefore,
4. The concept of an Islamic (Muslim) fascist is incoherent.
Does that help?
Addendum 2: Here is a good encyclopedia entry on fascism.
Addendum 3: Someone wrote to deny the first premise of my argument, claiming that one fascist who is not a statist refutes it. This betrays a misunderstanding of the argument. I'm not making empirical claims. I'm making conceptual claims. Here's a version that gets closer to what I have in mind:
1. It is of the essence of fascism that the state has intrinsic moral significance.2. It is of the essence of Islam that the state lacks intrinsic moral significance (i.e., the state has, at most, extrinsic moral significance).
Therefore,
3. There cannot (logically) be an Islamic fascist.
Is that better?
Addendum 4: On the essential statelessness of Islam, see here.
Addendum 5: I said in my original post that Islamism is a proper subset of Islam. All Islamists are Muslims, but not all Muslims are Islamists. I have been arguing that there cannot (logically) be an Islamic fascist. The concepts are mutually exclusive, like male and widow. (If you’re a male, then you’re not a widow. If you’re a widow, then you’re not a male. You can be neither, but you can’t be both.) But aren’t Islamists fascists? And if they are, then, since all Islamists are Muslims, there can be, contrary to what I’ve been arguing, Islamic fascists.
Islamists are not fascists. A fascist is someone who assigns intrinsic moral significance to the state, who views the state as an independent object of attachment or loyalty. Islamists, qua Muslims, do not assign intrinsic moral significance to the state. But this doesn’t prevent them from assigning extrinsic moral significance to the state. In fact, this is a good (partial) definition of “Islamist.” An Islamist is a Muslim who is willing to use force or coercion, either individually or collectively, to promote the spread of Islam. (One way to promote something is to destroy its rivals, either directly or by destroying the cultures in which those rivals flourish.) The state is one tool with which this can be done. The state, to an Islamist, is a mere means to an end, not an end in itself. It is an instrument, a convenience, an expedient. When the state has served its purpose, which may be a long time from now, it will be discarded.
I hope nobody is having trouble with the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic moral significance. Utilitarians, for example, deny that torture has intrinsic moral significance. That an act is an instance of torture is neither here nor there, morally speaking. What matters are the consequences of the act, however one describes it. Utilitarians refuse to rule out as wrong any particular act type, such as torture, lying, killing the innocent, and breaking a promise. (In this respect, they differ from deontologists, who believe that certain types of act, such as killing the innocent, are intrinsically wrong.) Any of these acts can be right if they maximize overall utility. Suppose a utilitarian judges a particular act of lying to be wrong. What makes it wrong is not that it is a lie, which is irrelevant, but that, as an act, it fails to maximize overall happiness. To a hedonistic utilitarian such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) or John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), there is only one intrinsically valuable thing: happiness (which they oddly defined as pleasure and the absence of pain). Everything else that is of value is extrinsically valuable. Friendship, for example, is valuable, but not because it’s friendship. It’s valuable because it’s either a part of or a means to happiness.
In conclusion, a Muslim can assign value to the state, but the value is extrinsic and not intrinsic. The state, to a Muslim, is valuable only as a tool. It can be a valuable tool, for it can be an instrument for the spread of Islam, which is a very good thing (in their view), but it is never anything more than a tool.
I agree that Islamism is more a political phenomenon than it is a religious one, using the religion of Islam for its own purposes. But I can imagine someone making a decent case for the opposite, that political means are being used to achieve a religious objective. Perhaps there are both tendencies at work, something that would produce a schism if Islamism ever does establish itself.
If one is looking for an all-purpose epithet, 'feudal' might be one to consider. Even "progressives" who can't help feeling some sympathy for Islamism will have a hard time finding anything progressive about feudalism, which was finally killed off by the French and later the Bolshevik revolutions. Or, how about 'pre-feudal,' since the Mohammed's theorcratic empire building began about a century before feudalism.
Italian, German and Japanese fascism were based on national and racial identity. Islamic fascism is based on religious identity. Hence the term Islamo-fascism.
With communism, the organizing principle was anti-capitalism. The communists sought to destroy competing economies. The Islamo-fascists seek to destroy competing religions, and they proclaim it every day.
Given that undeniable fact, now can you say that Islamism (as you prefer to call it) does not compete with Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etcetra? The fact that "not all Muslims are Islamists" seems not to bear on this question at all.
You seem to be jumping to the conclusion that use of the term “Islamic fascism” brands all Muslims as fascists. That is simply incorrect. It brands the Islamo-fascists as Islamo-fascist. If more of the more of the decent people of the Islamic world would step up to distinguish themselves from this evil, maybe there would be less confusion.
American Heritage gives this as the second defintion of fascism:
2) Oppressive, dictatorial control.
Wiktionary gives this definition:
fascism
1. A political regime based on strong centralized government, suppressing through violence any criticism or opposition of the regime, and exalting nation, state, or religion above the individual
2. A system of strong autocracy.
That seems clear enough to me, whether it describes Sdaddam and Assad's more traditional, Nazilike fascism, or the "Islamic Republic of Iran" led by the theofascist dictator Ayatollah Khamenei, the Taliban's draconian rule of Afghanistan, and bin Laden's dreamed-of global caliphate.
No, the original fascists were not strongly religious. But this is why adding "theo" or "Islamo" or whatever as a prefix adds clarity.
The enemy today is fascism, just as it was in 1942. It's fascism with a new face but it's fascism still.
1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
It's that last bit that applies very clearly: suppression of the opposition through terror... belligerent nationalism and racism.
Now as to the definition of "state." Well in the west, the "state" has become the only authority which can legitimately deprive you of life, liberty or property. The goals of political Islam are to subject the world to it. Put everyone under the authority of it.
In all respects, to our western mind, a Global Caliphate indeed would be a "state" and one which would supress the opposition with terror.
And, as a last point, Sharia Law is administered by the state. The Taliban administered Sharia Law as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
Respectfully, you're either overthinking this or focusing too heavily on the economic aspects of fascism while minimizing the social.
By the way, this Wikipedia link has an excellent pictorial view of the object from which the word "fascism" is derived: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnatus
Here's more Berman on the subject but do check out his book.
Also...we blog about Berman and the meaning of Iraq at The Golden Gate
Islamo-fascists are indeed statist. Just because Islamo-fascists don't have loyalty to an existing state doesn't mean they aren't statist. The stated ultimate goal of Al Qaeda, and the whole jihadist movement, is the restoration of the Caliphate which will impose Sharia over all territories that have ever been governed by Muslims. Just because the state has no "independent significance" in Islam doesn't mean it isn't important, in fact, quite the opposite. In Islam, the religion *IS* the state. The Caliph is the equivalent of the Emperor and the Pope, all rolled into one.
Keep in mind that the constitution of Saudi Arabia is the Quran. It is an explicitly political text.
A good example was the Taliban; using the Quran as their guide, they made laws affecting the most trivial elements of day to day life. When someone advocates for a state that can administer capital punishment for shaving, listening to music, wearing the wrong clothes, eating the wrong foods, failing to pray, playing soccer, etc. that person is indeed statist.
Islamo-fascists have a different form of collectivism than the fascism of Mussolini, but it is indeed still totalitarian collectivism.
The whole idea that muslims don't get this is just kind of silly.
As for the idea that in their ideal world muslims would have no states, just one world under Islam: so bloody what? That's the ideal world as percieved by Jews and Christians too.
Look, in English you use one word to modify another, typically to narrow its meaning. Fascism means a certain type of oppressive control. By adding "Islamic" or 'islamo" to "fascism" you are modifying the word to narrow or constrain its meaning. Islamic fascism means exactly what it says: a brutal, dictatorial, oppressive and violent regime based on the Islamic religion.
Really I do not see how it could be any clearer.
Your view is certainly a good libertarian one but I think you did not go deeply enough. "Fasci" are bundles and Musso used that word for his early groups. The word really refers to working together as one -- and Musso certainly saw the State as a way of achieving that. Muslims also believe in everybody being unified in obedience to the Koran and Hadiths.
In practice, of course both prewar European Fascists and modern Muslims are about as united as Christians are -- i.e. not very
I don't see why the political movement for Sharia supremacy wouldn't qualify by that definition. See also the entry for caliphate...
...
Your overall critisism is a good one on it's face, but be carefull when trying to apply an acedemic argument to something this subjective and interpretive.
Some muslims are statists and some of those muslim statists are Islamic fascists because of their devotion to the goal of Global Caliphate.
Honestly, how can one deny that the goal of radical Islam is anything other than establishing a purified Islamic state in the mold of fascism?
If all of islamic terrorism were reduced to say, Saudi young men operating against the Saudi royals, with the express purpose of creating an oppressive, collective, statist regime, then you could call them fascists without much argument.
I agree with analphilosopher that in the majority of cases, "islamic fascist" is simply a term used to garner a kneejerk, negative reaction and has little, if any, real political legitimacy.
And in the end, the real shame is that many people will use terms like fascist in this emotive way without knowing truly what they are saying - taking much away from whatever argument they are trying to make.
I think you need to define "state" for us, because it seems like the definition you prefer is very narrow.
Unfortunately, it can be cogently argued that IF is the original and purest form of Islam, if you study the life of its founder and how he employed terrorist tactics - breaking of treaties, assassinations, etc. It's so repugnant to the Western mind that we keep insisting it's a hijacked form of Islam, but it's the reverse: "moderate" and "peaceful" Islam is the hijacked form, a regression to Muhammad's initial preachings which were subsequently "abrogated" in favor of ... more ... forceful means.
It's political dynamite, of course. No one can say this. But it's all here for debate.
1. There seems to be a heavy theocratic element in Islamic extremism. Historically, conquest by Muhammed of other peoples entailed subsequent political and civil control, did it not? Today of course we have Iran and the desire to impose Sharia, or for example in Afghanistan the desire to execute an apostate. So the non-state aspect is dimmed in this context.
2. The role of anti-state elements in fascist movement, such as the SA in Nazism. The anti-state elements organized as military gangs are used to exterminate political opposition, then they are disposed of by the newly empowered fascist state.
Having said that, I still think it is better to rely on containment in re: these formations rather than war.
I got this quote from the insightful book Without Roots by Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) and Marcello Pera (President of the Italian Senate).
Here is a review from amazon:
"...the decline and all-too-possible fall of European culture to the radical Islam... Pera, a philosopher of science who has become president of the Italian senate, dissects political correctness and the condition of which it is a symptom, cultural relativism. Ratzinger, who a year later became Pope Benedict XVI, summarizes Europe's Christian heritage with breathtaking concision and historical mastery. Both men see Europe today in a crisis of identity that has made it largely unable and unwilling to defend its culture against intransigent Islam, and both call for revivifying Christian identity. In his letter, Pera advocates nondenominational Christianity as the basis of a revitalized Europe; in his, Ratzinger propounds the conditions for a pan-European Christian civil religion such as Pera outlines."
"The reason it’s inappropriate to describe Islamists as fascists is simple: They’re not statists. To Muslims, including that subset of Muslims I call Islamists (see below), a state is at best a temporary thing, performing certain administrative, organizational, or ideological tasks. It has no independent significance, as it does in, say, the Christian tradition. (“Render unto Caesar” and all that.) Islamists aren’t trying to create a state in which all the parts work as one; their ultimate goal is a stateless world in which everyone worships Allah".
There are two types of mis-takes:
1. As clearly explained by other commenters, the Umma [all Muslims] is to be ruled by the restored Caliphate. The Caliph will have full religious, social, political, life-and-death authority over his subjects thru his application and new interpretations of the Koran, Hadiths, and Sunna. Thus, rather than NO state, there will be only ONE state permitted -- the one ruled by the Caliph. This one state's intrinsic value is proof that Muslims are now abiding by the tenets of the Koran and the true interpretations of the Koran, and are thus properly faithful. When the Muslim dies he/she will be accepted and rewarded in Heaven/Paradise. In the absence of the Caliph's final word on right/wrong the Muslim has no certainty that his acts are correct in the various situations he faces in life.
2. Your application of the terms intrinsic and extrinsic to our complex 'real' world of innumerable interactivities is not appropriate, valid, or correct. You present these terms as absolutes in the real world, whereas they are only ideals, nonmanifested extremes of the continua among these and other extremes. In other words, our world and we exist in a world where extreme values/conditions are blended and in dynamic flux with other extremes/values. That is at least one of the reasons the Utopians are really deadenders chasing the unreachable horizon.
Thus, to not speak of Fascism and Islamism in real world terms of nonideal intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics, is "to pour from the emptiness into the void" as Gurdjieff might express it.
Today, I would call it National Socialist fascism and National Communist fascism, because the key aspect of "fascism" is dictator control.
AP says: "I can’t think of a worse word for the people President Bush has in mind than “fascists.” " -- but this is predicated on the claim
2. No Muslims are statists.
This claim may well be true, in theory -- like the Marxist theorists who believed their communist state would wither away, as well.
In practice, the "state" is the local group with the most guns, the most power to enforce their own rules.
Of the 3 branches: "making law", "judging according to law", and "enforcing law" -- enforcement is first and foremost.
If you have enforcement, the enforcers can be the makers and judges. Without enforcement, "making" or "judging" is mere wordplay.
Hezbollah murderers of any Lebanese who oppose them are effective enforcers -- THIS is what makes them a "state within a state". Iran and the Taliban are similar in-practice examples.
In a very real on the ground sense, enforcement IS the law, and ONLY enforcement is real law.
Doesn't this lead to a good time for using a quote: "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not."
Because Bush is practical, calling them Islamic Fascists is good; even great. North Korea is essentially a National Communist fascism; and I think China and Vietnam are, too. [English -- the living language, where definitions drift; and likely the Chinese and Vietnamese will insult each other in English]
Extreme Mortman has pictures.