Fascism and Religion - Islam

Islam

See also: Islamofacism, Islamism, Political aspects of Islam, Islamic Fundamentalist, Islamic democracy, and Islamist terrorism

The contemporary religious movements in Islam that have been compared to fascism include Islamic terrorism and Wahhabism.

In 2001, Christopher Hitchens opined, "he bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state." Robert S. Wistrich has described Islamic fascism as adopting a totalitarian mindset, a hatred of the West, fanatical extremism, repression of women, loathing of Jews, a firm belief in conspiracy theories, and dreams of global hegemony.

In late 2005, President George W. Bush and other high United States government officials began to use the terms Islamo-fascism or Islamic fascism, and they suggested that opposing militant Islamic terrorism was similar to opposing the Nazis during World War II. This created a storm of controversy as supporters and opponents debated these contentions and the term Islamofascism.

Some writers claim that certain strands of Wahhabi or Salafi Islam display some of the signifiers of fascism or totalitarianism.

J. Sakai has suggested that some middle class Islamists have formed groups that can be called fascist.

Part of the Politics series on
Islamism
Basic topics Political aspects of Islam Client state Internationalism Islamic fundamentalism Pan-Islamism Sharia law Ummah Antinationalism Postcolonialism
Movements All-India Muslim League Al-Qaeda Muslim Brotherhood Hamas Hizb-ut-Tahrir Jamaat-e-Islami Millî Görüş Taliban
Manifestations Islamization Islamic democracy Islamic economics Sex segregation Resistance movements
Concepts Khilafah Ummah Sharia law
Key texts The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Iqbal) Milestones (Qutb) Islamic Government (Khomeini)
Islam Portal Politics portal

Academic Roger Griffin believes that the word fascist is being stretched too far when applied to "so-called fundamentalist or terrorist forms of traditional religion (i.e. scripture or sacred text based with a strong sense of orthodoxy or orthodoxies rooted in traditional institutions and teachings)." However, he concedes that the United States has seen the emergence of hybrids of political religion and fascism in such phenomena as the Nation of Islam and Christian Identity, and that Bin Laden's al Qaeda network may represent such a hybrid. He is unhappy with the term clerical fascism, and says that "in this case we are rather dealing with a variety of 'fascistized clericalism.'"

Author Malise Ruthven, a Scottish writer and historian who focuses his work on religion and Islamic affairs, opposes redefining Islamism as `Islamofascism`, but finds the resemblances between the two ideologies "compelling," both embracing spirituality and rejecting reason. He compares Islamism first to Marxism but then draws a stronger comparison with fascism.

... the fascist parallels go deeper than the Marxist ones. In his explicit hostility to reason (alluded to in the reference to Ahmad ibn Hanbal's struggle against the Mu'tazilite doctrine of the `created` Quran) it is not Marx, grandchild of the Enlightenment, but Nietzsche, an anti-rationalist like the anti-Mu'tazilite al-Ash'ari, whom `Azzam echoes. The attachment to the lost lands of Palestine, Bukhara and Spain (unlike a rational and humane concern for Palestinian rights) is, like Mussolini's evocations of Ancient Rome, nostalgic in its irredentism, its `obliteration of history from politics` The invocation of religion is consistent with the way fascism and Nazism used mythical modes of thought to mobilize unconscious or psychic forces in the pursuit of power, a task made easier in a population sanctified by a millennium of Islamic religious programming. Georges Sorel, sometimes seen as the intellectual father of fascism, declared that `use must be made of a body of images which, by intuition alone, and before any considered analyses are made, is capable of evoking as an undivided whole the mass of sentiments which corresponds to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by Socialism.` Mussolini, to whom Sorel in his later years lent his support, saw fascism as `a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raise him to conscious membership of a spiritual society`. In the same line of thinking Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue, stressed the other-worldly, spiritual aspect of Hitler's racial theories: `The life of a race does not represent a logically-developed philosophy nor even the unfolding of a pattern according to natural law, but rather the development of a mystical synthesis, an activity of soul, which cannot be explained rationally.`