Does Islamofascism exist?

The word "Islamofascism" has entered the language the last few years. It is an unprecise word, taken to describe everything from the authoritarian regimes throughout the Muslim world to radical Islamist ideologies that have been suppressed and fought against by those very same authoritarian regimes.

Often it is used in the same kind of context as the American radio host Michael Savage (a pseudonym for Dr. Michael Alan Weiner) - the best-selling author of "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder" and other books - uses it, as an excuse for attacking the "vermin of the Left", "the verminist traitors at MSNBC" and "the scum at CBS":

You're talking about four or five outlets with maybe one czar -- or two czars rather, three maybe, at the top, in control of the news. They're all the product of the '60s. They're vehemently anti-military. Vehemently anti-war. And ultimately suicidal. And they are dangerous for your children and other living creatures. If they airbrush the enemy, and they have sympathy for the enemy, and they paint horns on our soldiers, and have hatred for our soldiers. And if the enemy is willing to die for their cause, and our administration is not even willing to kill for our survival we are going to lose this war against radical Islam or Islamofascism.

These "very evil" and "very dangerous" people in the media were apparently paying too much attention to American human rights abuse at Abu Ghraib, and not focusing enough on the evils of "these sub-humans", Savage's word for Iraqi prisoners. When he states "a thousand of them should be killed tomorrow. I think a thousand of them held in the Iraqi prison should be given 24 hour -- a trial and executed. I think they need to be shown that we are not going to roll over to them. It won't happen. It won't happen because of the CBS Communists".

Hearing Michael Savage spout his very own variant of modern-day fascism it is tempting to agree with Joseph Sobran, who calls Islamofascism "nothing but an empty propaganda term, [...] crafted to create hysteria", "the destruction of any sense of proportion".

It is tempting. But I do not agree with Sobran.

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Historically, fascism did not go away after the Second World War. It did not die with Hitler or Mussolini. It did not simply disappear. The ideology survived in different forms throughout Europe; in Germany, in Sweden, in England, in France, in Belgium, in Italy, and today it is very much alive in several of these countries and perhaps even more so in Russia and some former East Bloc countries. And, of course, the ideas of fascism did not simply stop at the Bosporus strait or upon reaching the Mediterranean. In Turkey, the Bozkurtlar (Grey Wolves) was founded in 1969, inspired by Giovanni Gentile, the philosopher of Italian fascism.

In the Arab world, the movement with the perhaps most obvious similarities to fascism was founded in 1940 by the Syrian Christian Michel Aflaq. His ideology combined anti-colonialism, pan-Arabism, nationalism and ideas on an Arab socialism, and the movement he founded was Ba'ath (meaning renaissance or resurrecion). The Ba'ath party eventually came to power in both Iraq and Syria. "It was he who created the Party", Saddam Hussein told an interviewer in 1980. "How could I possibly forget what Michel Aflaq did for me? If it were not for him, I would never have come to this position". As the Italian historian and diplomat Sergio Romana pointed out in Corriere della Serra in August (an English translation is found here), there's an obvious irony in this: From 1980 to 1988, the United States was on the side of the fascists against the Islamists [of Iran].

But the Ba'ath-party was not the only party to draw inspiration and support from European fascists. A number of Arab nationalist movements teamed up with the Nazis, in the hope that the Germans could help them rid their countries of British and French influence. Romana writes:

At the end of 1941, as the Africa Korps advanced toward Alexandria, a group of Egyptian officers gathered intelligence for Rommel’s General Staff on the movement of British troops.

One of their leaders was Anwar al-Sadat, who became President of Egypt following the death of Nasser. Several crossed through the lines to join Axis troops only to reappear next to Nasser during the 1952 revolution. Jean Lacouture, in his 1971 biography of Nasser, recounted that during those days, while the Germans and the British were fighting in al-Alamein, there were demonstrations in Cairo and in Alexandria. The crowd chanted the praises of Rommel and mangled Mussolini’s name calling him Mussa Nili, the Moses of the Nile.

Often, these connections between Arab nationalists and European fascists were a union based on the principle of the enemy of my enemy being a friend. However, the unquestioned authority of the leader, a single party, the role of the armed forces and the bureaucracy etc. did have ideological appeal and the anti-Semitism of today's Arab societies is to a large degree a direct import from the West.

Early Islamists also drew inspiration from fascist thinkers. Still, I do not think it is wise to describe Islamist ideology as a whole as Islamofascism. In fact, Islamism draws its inspiration from so many different sources that it is difficult to talk of Islamism as a whole at all. Rather, one could consider Islamism a whole range of different ideologies with only a few common traits, ranging from the jihadism of al Qa'eda to Muslim variants of European Christian Democratic parties. To group them all together is like identifying Swedish Social Democracy with Kim Il Sung's Juche ideology. It might give you the status of a hero in parts of the blogosphere, but it just does not make much sense.

But does it then make sense to speak of some socalled Islamist thinkers as Islamofascists? Stephen Schwartz writes about a speaker at a pro-Hezbollah demonstration:

The Washington Post of August 14 quoted a speaker at a pro-Hezbollah demonstration in Washington, as follows: "'Mr. Bush: Stop calling Islam "Islamic fascism,' said Esam Omesh, president of the Muslim American Society, prompting a massive roar from the crowd. He said there is no such thing, 'just as there is no such thing as Christian fascism.'"

As Schwartz points out that is simply not true. There is such a thing as Christian fascism:

The fascist Iron Guard in Romania during the interwar period and in the second world war was explicitly Christian--its official title was the "Legion of the Archangel Michael;" Christian fascism also exists in the form of Ulster Protestant terrorism, and was visible in the (Catholic) Blue Shirt movement active in the Irish Free State during the 1920s and 1930s.

Both the Iron Guard and the Blue Shirts attracted noted intellectuals; the cultural theorist Mircea Eliade in the first case, the poet W.B Yeats in the second. Many similar cases could be cited. It is also significant that Mr. Omesh did not deny the existence of "Jewish fascism"--doubtless because in his milieu, the term is commonly directed against Israel. Israel is not a fascist state, although some marginal, ultra-extremist Jewish groups could be so described.

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Perhaps we should not only look at fascism from a historical point of view, but also from an ideological point of view? In the article quoted above, Schwartz draws a number of a parallels between the ideology of various extremist groups and the fascists of Italy and Germany. But are these paralells enough to call these Islamic extremists fascists? And what could we achieve by labelling them as such?

One thing we could hope to achieve is an end to the stupidity of parts of the left. If Hizb'allah was recognised as being a fascist organisation, self-declared anti-fascists might have been more reluctant supporting them. And while there's a risk of obscuring the actual ideology of for instance jihadist groups by referring to them as fascist, there is a chance that the designation might lead to increased understanding on one point: some of the underlying reasons for the blossoming of radical Islamist thinking in parts of the Middle East and amongst the Muslim diaspora in the West could become clearer. After all, German Nazism is rarely seen entirely out of its historical, economical and social contexts. Radical Islamism often is.
Does Islamofascism exist? In "The Anatomy of Fascism", Stephen O. Paxton writes:

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.

Replace "nationalist" with "religious" and I'd say you come pretty close.