Islamofascism is a portmanteau of the words fascism and Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism, which advocate authoritarianism and violent extremism to establish an Islamic state, in addition to promoting offensive Jihad. For example, Qutbism has been characterized as an Islamic terrorist ideology. Interactions between Muslim figures and fascism began as early as 1933, and some used the term fascism to describe as diverse phenomenon as the Pakistan independence movement, Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism in Egypt, religious appeals used by Arab dictatorships to stay in power, and the Young Egypt Party (a fascist era-group inspired by Italian fascism). The invention of the term has been variously attributed to Khalid Duran, Lulu Schwartz, and Christopher Hitchens. 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, but by 2018 it had "largely" disappeared from use among policymakers and academics. The term Islamofascism to refer to the varying distinctions between Islam and fascism has been criticized for allegedly besmirching the Islamic religion by associating it with a violent ideology (i.e. being used as a name for Islam), and defended as a way of distinguishing traditional Islam from Islamic extremist violence (i.e. being used as a name for Islamism, a variety of Islam). In April 2008, the Extremist Messaging Branch of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center under the Bush Administration issued an advisory to branches of the U.S. federal government to avoid using the term, among other terms, in part because it was "considered offensive by many Muslims" that the U.S. government was trying to reach.
Concepts and overview
Background and origins
Meaning and history of the term The term "Islamofascism" is defined in the New Oxford American Dictionary as "a term equating some modern Islamic movements with the European fascist movements of the early twentieth century". Author and journalist Stephen Schwartz defines it as the "use of the faith of Islam as a cover for a totalitarian ideology". Historian Robert Paxton has countered the use of the term entirely, considering it as an inappropriate use of the word fascism to describe Islamic extremists. The earliest example of the term "Islamofascism", according to William Safire, 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.
"Nevertheless there 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 doubts that he himself coined the term, stating that the attribution to him is probably due to the fact that internet search engines do not go back beyond 1990.
Uses The earliest known use of the contiguous term Islamic Fascism dates to 1933 when Akhtar Husain, in an attack on Muhammad Iqbal, defined attempts to secure the independence of Pakistan as a form of Islamic fascism. 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. Halpern's work, written in the midst of the Cold War and commissioned by the United States Air Force from the RAND Corporation, gives an analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and argues that such Islamic movements were an obstacle to the military regimes who were in his view representatives of a new middle class capable of modernizing the Middle East.
Young Egypt Party
A more direct combination of a pro-Islamic and nationalist agenda, inspired by Benito Mussolini's Italian fascist movement and government, was the Young Egypt Party, a political party that operated between 1933 and 1953 within Egypt.
Post World War II After nationalizing the Suez Canal in 1956, pan-Arab nationalist Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser incensed United Kingdom's Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who reportedly told American President Dwight D. Eisenhower that Nasser was a ‘Hitler’ or ‘Muslim Mussolini’.
Advent of Islamism In 1978, as Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution in Iran was gaining momentum, and intellectuals in France and elsewhere in the west were displaying enthusiasm for it, Maxime Rodinson, a Marxist scholar of Islam, pushed back, arguing that political Islamization in Iran and other places in the Islamic world was encouraging "a type of archaic fascism" where the state would enforce totalitarian moral policing and where Western-imported nationalism and socialism was recast in religious terms, eliminating their progressive side. Historically, foreign assaults on the core Islamic world—by Crusaders, Mongols, and Western imperialists—had led to impoverished masses reacting against their Westernized elites for their lack of traditional piety.
Popularisation after the September 2001 attacks
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