On Islam and Islamism: The Essential Difference

US journalist, writing in The Guardian, about the way Islam is regarded as an inherently violent religion has written

( Maher )..has become one of the most vocal and extreme advocates of the view that - while he religion generally should be criticized - Islam is a uniquely threatening and destructive force and that Muslims are uniquely oppressive and violent, and that mentality has infected many of his policy views.

The problem is with conflating Islam as a religion with Islamism which is a political doctrine. Even then Islamism is not one monolithic ideology because , in reality, there are numerous forms of Islamisms. Some are relatively moderate, as in Turkey and some violent and militantly jihadist as with Al Qaida.

Mr Greenwald himself doesn't seem to make such distinctions because he tends to think that US foreign policy alone is responsible for 'causing' violent jihadist terror threats to the USA and rationalises jihadist violence as a mere 'response' to that foreign policy.

This is not to state that US foreign policy has not exacerbated the recruitment basis for anti-Western terrorism. Yet it is a convenient myth, shared by Utopian thinkers such as Chomsky, that if only the US changed its foreign policy, then the terrorist threat would merely not exist or have come into being.

The reason for this, paradoxically, lies in the assumption shared by neoconservatives that the world could be remade anew if democracy activists had their way. For the Chomsky brigade, the difference is that If 'we' changed our foreign policy entirely, then the threat would go away.

Such parochial perspectives tend to ignore the fact that the USA being dragged into foreign wars is precisely less due to imperialism but because the USA's high octane consumer economy and it's democratic capitalist system is legitimised by maintaining that oil fuelled lifestyle.

The next problem is that the word 'Islamophobia' conflates critism of Islamisms with Islam, and by extension, Muslims. Anti-Muslim sentiments exist and should be better called Anti-Muslim hatred which is not as catchy as 'Islamophobia' but gets at what is really being described.


Words matter as George Orwell knew in Politics and the English Language. Othwerwise, mutual misunderstandings and poisoned debates on both sides of this supposed 'civilisational' conflict averted. Greenwald completely ignores these nuances while basing his whole critique on the nature of public discourse.


Islam is a global religion and many forms are benign and peaceful such as that practiced by those in the Sufi Islam tradition as Malise Ruthven points out in his Islam: An Introduction. The current tensions are not 'civilisational' but about politics, in particular geopolitical issues in the Middle East.

If Western commentators could learn more about Islam and various Islamist political ideas and differentiate them from more militant and violent Islamist ideologies and form of Islam such as Salafi and Wahhabi Islam a lot of misunderstandings could be diminished.

Islam is not responsible for wars in the Middle East that are caused by political factors that stand in need of careful and pragmatic policies that are designed to lesson conflict. As in the Israel-Palestine conflict, fundamentalist dogmas, as Ruthven suggests in A Fury for God, only 'up the ante'.

There are dangers in using Islamism because it connects a religion which is often just that with militant political doctrines that, ironically, are based on taking the revolutionary ideas of European origin and blending them with an Islamic gloss.

Violence committed in the name of Islam has to called something as it exists. Salafism could be called just that. Salafi terrorism or Al Qaida terrorism. But during the Lebanese Civil War, the Phalange were referred to a Christian militias.

Should Christian fundamentalists commit atrocities, then they should be referred to as Christian fundamentalist terrorists as opposed to merely Christians or some stupid term such as' Christianofascism just  as in 'Islamofascism'.

That would not by implication impugn all Christians. It would just point to the fact that fanatics using religion as a pretext to murder will do so. Other nad terms include 'militant Islam' , as if only strong believers in Islam want to murder ( as if it were the essence of the religion ).

A Note on "New Atheists, Sam Harris and "Islamophobia"

There is no doubt that crude anti-islamic propaganda has been , in the course of the last decade, more than merely a crusade against religion as such. As Glen Greenwald writes,

"... the New Atheists have flirted with and at times vigorously embraced irrational anti-Muslim animus.
Sam Harris in 2005: "I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror."
Sam Harris in 2012: "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it.

However, Greenwald is utterly wrongheaded and foolish to state,

"Perhaps the most repellent claim Harris made to me was that Islamophobia is fictitious and non-existent, "a term of propaganda designed to protect Islam from the forces of secularism by conflating all criticism of it with racism and xenophobia". How anyone can observe post-9/11 political discourse in the west and believe this is truly mystifying. The meaning of "Islamophobia" is every bit as clear as "anti-semitism" or "racism" or "sexism" and all sorts of familiar, related concepts".

No it just is not.

"Islamophobia" conflates hatred of Islam with Islamism, and by extension Muslims. It has been use disingenuously by Islamists to insinuate that criticism of Islamism, of any of the various sorts that exist, with ant-Muslim hatred. The latter term could be used to describe Sam Harris's position.

A better term would be to use precise language depending on the context. As a catch-all term, "Islamophobia" has been used to conflate criticism of Islam as a religion or Islamism as a political set of idea with hatred of Muslims.The MCB and MAB specialise in using such Orwellian language.

The worst term used was "Islamofascism". The category error comes from linking all Islamist movements into one seamless continuum. The reason why those such asChristopher Hitchens used it was due to his leftist anti-authoritarianism and this idea of the USA and Britain as liberator nations in World War Two

This gave fake credence to the idea, peddled by Bush after 9/11, that the USA had suffered it "Pearl Harbour" and now "we" were embroiled in "World War Three". It seems both the self styled "liberal interventionist" left and the "anti-imperialist left" need to start getting a grip of their history.

A Note on the Term "Islamophobia"

David Miller of SpinWatch has written in The Guardian ,

There seems to be some suggestion that the review of the BBC may also examine religion in general, and Islamophobia in particular. No shortage of material there. A variety of academic studies has examined how the BBC and other media have covered Islam, especially since September 2001. One found that "the framing of Islam as a security threat can be inferred from the very large numbers of news items in which Muslim political and military or paramilitary actors have been shown in postures of hostility towards aspects of [western] societies".

The authors contend that "while distinctions are made between dangerous, fanatical, politically driven Islamism and Islam as a religion, these distinctions are not always made clear, so there is a persistent danger of conveying the issues in terms of an all-embracing clash of civilisations". Not a lot of support in these studies for the contention in a Daily Mail leader column last week that the BBC "consistently attacks Christianity (though never Islam)".

On the notion of spin and framing, the term "Islamophobia" is one that itself makes no distinction between Islamism as a political ideology or trend, Islam as a religion and Muslims as individuals, estimated some 1.6 billion of whom live on the planet and are as diverse in outlook.

The problem with "Islamophobia" is that it fails to distinguish between criticism of politicised versions of a particular, and often apocalyptic reading of the Qu'ran, and those who hold only to the religion without any belief in the Islamism of ideologues such as Qutb or Maududi.

There is, of course, hatred of Muslims which can be concealed behind the idea that Muslims as some lumpen mass consist of a potential enemy within" all believing that Islam must dominate and control any land where Muslims are present.

In which case, the term has to be 'anti-Muslim sentiment'. Words and their meaning matter. Which is why "Islamophobia" is so hopeless as a catch all description of anyone who is deemed , in some way, to be hostile to Islam.

Few would describe Richard Dawkins as "Christianophobic" for his dislike of Christian doctrines and dogmas. Likewise, it is wrong to term somebody "Islamophobic" for criticising the history and practice and dogmas of Islam. The best term would be "critic of Islam" or "anti-Islamic".

Even those hostile to Islam or anti-Islamic are not "Islamophobic" , a term that implies the person has some sort of pathological hatred for both Islam as a belief system and necessarily those who believe in Islam or are born into a family and background that is Muslim.

The term for those who oppose Islamist ideology should be anti-Islamist. Even better, for clarification, it would simply be better to describe those who oppose certain forms of Islamism precisely. A Palestinian secular Arab hostile to Hamas would be simply be described as anti-Hamas.

If the notion of some essential "clash of civilisations" is to be avoided, then these sort of nuances are essential to take into account. Otherwise, the danger is that fanatics, zealots and those who believe they are eternally victimised, the better to advance power hungry agendas and mendacious propaganda will win.