Islamist-Islamism

Islamism (and the associated Islamist) are terms that are used very widely in contemporary discourse.

History of usage

The term Islamism historically referred to adherents of Islam. It was a term used widely in English from as early as 1800, peaking in books published in English around 1860 and declining to residual use by the turn of the century. Its occurrence only picked up, as the Google Ngram image shows, but this time in a mostly new sense, at the end of the 1980s.

What caused the reinvention and reinterpretation of the term Islamism (and around the same time, the coining of a new term to go with it - Islamist)?

Google Ngram of mentions of Islamism, Islamist, Jihadist, Jihadi and Islamic terrorism in English books from 1800 to 2010

Bernard Lewis

One of the earliest articles of note was by Bernard Lewis a 'renowned British-American historian of Islam and the Middle East. A former British intelligence officer, Foreign Office staffer, and Princeton University professor.'

In January 1976 he published a piece in the Zionist/Neoconservative magazine Commentary, which at that stage was still published by the American Jewish Committee. Titled 'The return of Islam' it raised the spectre of 'new forms of pan-Islamic activity.' It sets out to insist that the problem with Islam is that it is a religion. Thus he chides the West for not understanding that Muslims are not like us. 'We are prepared' he states 'to allow religiously defined conflicts to accredited eccentrics like the Northern Irish, but to admit that an entire civilization can have religion as its primary loyalty is too much.'

The phrase 'pan-Islamism' was used nine times in the piece in an account that proposed that the problem with Muslims in politics is that they take their religion too seriously. Lewis traces the 'Islamic' connections and rationale of a whole host of organisation's including secular nationalist groups like Fatah:

The imagery and symbolism of the Fatah is strikingly Islamic. Yasir Arafat’s nom de guerre, Abu ‘Ammar, the father of ‘Ammar, is an allusion to the historic figure of ‘Ammar ibn Yasir, the son of Yasir, a companion of the Prophet and a valiant fighter in all his battles. The name Fatah is a technical term meaning a conquest for Islam gained in the Holy War. It is in this sense that Sultan Mehmet II, who conquered Constantinople for Islam, is known as Fatih, the Conqueror. The same imagery, incidentally, is carried over into the nomenclature of the Palestine Liberation Army, the brigades of which are named after the great victories won by Muslim arms in the Battles of Qadisiyya, Hattin, and Ayn Jalut. To name military units after victorious battles is by no means unusual. What is remarkable here is that all three battles were won in holy wars for Islam against non-Muslims—Qadisiyya against the Zoroastrian Persians, Hattin against the Crusaders, Ayn Jalut against the Mongols. In the second and third of these, the victorious armies were not even Arab; but they were Muslim, and that is obviously what counts. It is hardly surprising that the military communiqués of the Fatah begin with the Muslim invocation, “In the name of God, the Merciful and the Compassionate.”

Bernard Lewis 'was' writes Hamid Dabashi, 'not a regular rogue. He was instrumental in causing enormous suffering and much bloodshed in this world. He was a notorious Islamophobe who spent a long life studying Islam in order to demonise Muslims and mobilise the mighty military of what he called "the West" against them.'

Enter Francophone testimony - 1979-80

Gilbert Achcar has argued that the origins of the new version of the term were in the declarations of a Tunisian nationalist and then the work of French Islamic scholars.

“The first recorded use of “Islamism” in the new sense occurred in 1979 in an article published in Le Nouvel Observateur (12 March) by Habib Boularès, a Tunisian nationalist who had been a member of the cabinet under Habib Bourguiba in 1970–71 and was to join the Tunisian government again under Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. His assessment of what he called “Islamism” was not apologetic, of course. The term then found its first use in the realm of French scholarly Orientalism under the pen of Jean-François Clément in 1980.

Clément was quite unsympathetic to the movements he described. Thus a further paradox is that the term “Islamism” itself, before it became the pet label of the “Orientalists in reverse”, was first applied to the new generation of Islamic fundamentalists by authors who despised them. These authors merely wanted to cover, with a single word, the whole spectrum of political currents raising the banner of Islam, from the most progressive to the most fundamentalist/intégriste (a term they did not refrain from using). By providing scholarly legitimation to the application of the label “Islamism” to various political movements referring to Islam, many of them violent and fanatical, they contributed to the confusion increasingly fostered by unscrupulous mass media between the religion of Islam and some peculiar and detestable uses made of it.

Martin Kramer - 1980

Cover of Martin Kramer's book Political Islam, published in 1980 in the 'Washington Papers' series under the auspices of the CSIS and the editorship of Walter Laqueur

Four years later Martin Kramer - both student and friend of Lewis - introduced the term 'Political Islam':

Terminology for the phenomena characterized as Political Islam varies among scholars. The first scholar to introduce the term Political Islam was Martin Kramer in 1980. Some scholars use the term Islamism for the same set of phenomena, or use the two terms interchangeably. Dekmejian 1980 was among the first to place the politicization of Islam in the context of the failures of secular governments, although he uses the terms Islamism and fundamentalism (rather than Political Islam) interchangeably. Dekmejian 1995, still using fundamentalism and Islamism, is an influential treatment of Political Islam as increasingly mainstream and moderate. Some scholars, using descriptive terms such as conservative, progressive, militant, radical, or jihadist, distinguish among ideological strains of Political Islam.

Kramer's book was published by Sage but in a series called the 'Washington Papers'. This was edited by Walter Laqueur the historian, journalist, propagandist and 'terror expert' who was at the time attached to the Georgetown University think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The book only used the term 'Islamism' on four occasions, in each case with the prefix 'Pan' as in 'Pan-Islamism'. the idea that Muslims involved in politics might all be part of the same phenomenon seems to have been an intoxicating one.

The Second Conference on International Terrorism - 1984

The Second Conference on International Terrorism was held in Washington DC and the topic of the association of Islam with terrorism was explicitly on the agenda.

Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy

'Islamism', 'political Islam' and Islamic fundamentalism in the Anglophone press 1970-2020

Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy, both French academics helped to give the term Islamist currency in early adoptions of the term. Kepel wrote a piece in a French journal in 1984 focused on Egypt. Meanwhile Roy wrote three early pieces in 1983/4, all focused on the Afghan conflict. Kepel and Roy eventually fell out over their differing views.

Central Asian Survey

When Roy published his first piece in Central Asian Survey, the fledgling journal was in its second year. According to Kuzio, 'Enders Wimbush and Marie Broxup founded and directed the Oxford-based Society for Central Asian Studies that published the journal Central Asian Survey and Russian language books on Islamic problems, many of which were smuggled into the USSR.' This appears to have been a propaganda operation funded by the US government.

According to Kuzio:

the Rand Corporation think tank received U.S. government funding to publish studies on nationality problems in the Soviet armed forces. Some of the scholars who authored these articles went on to publish books predicting growing nationality problems in the USSR, particularly due to the Soviet demographic dynamic turning in favor of the Islamic peoples of Central Asia and Azerbaijan.

Immediately before setting up the Society in Oxford UK, Wimbush had been 'a Senior Analyst for the Rand Corporation and led its pioneering studies on nationality problems in the Soviet armed forces.' Indeed after his role in Oxford he went on to work from 1987–1993 as Director of Radio Liberty in Munich, Germany.

Among those in recipt of the funding Kuzio identifies Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, Wimbush, Broxup and her father Alexandre Bennigsen with whom she wrote one of the products of the largesse.

Bennigsen was a key figure in US covert ops against the USSR.

Resources

• Dekmejian, R. Hrair. “The Anatomy of Islamic Revival: Legitimacy Crisis, Ethnic Conflict and the Search for Islamic Alternatives.” The Middle East Journal 34, no. 1 (1980): 1–12.
• Krieg, Andreas Laying the ‘Islamist’ bogeyman to rest Lobelog, October 10, 2019
• Lewis, Bernard, “The Return of Islam.” Commentary 61, no. 1 (1976): 39–49.
• Sayyid, Salman, (2015). A fundamental fear: Eurocentrism and the emergence of Islamism. Zed Books Ltd.
• Scardino, Albert, 1-0 in the propaganda war The guardian, 4 February 2005.
• Smith, Blake, Why We Say ‘Islamism’ and Why We Should Stop, Quillette. 11 February 2018