Then there are those who use “Islamist” to tar all Muslims with a broad brush. Some of these people are also against the use of such Muslim terms as “Ansar”, “jihad”, “mujahid”, etc. etc. I think Tacitus argued that some time ago though I can’t find it now.

Is Will Bennet a Christianist? Or how about Billy Graham? Or James Dobson?

Yes, yes, and yes. As opposed to, say, Bill Clinton, who is a Christian politician but not a Christianist politician like Jesse Helms.

I won’t even try to discuss “bent.” WTF????

In describing pre-modern Islam, Hodgson coined the term ‘Islamicate’ as distinct from ‘Islamic’ in order to designate the secular elements of the civilizational ideas that spread coterminously with Muslim empires, as opposed to those considered to be religiously founded (in this case, tracable to precedent in the Quran or Sunnah). A problematic distinction to make on a lot of levels, but nevertheless indispensible to scholars of much of the pre-modern world.

‘Islamism’ is equally problematic, since the line between the political and the social, personal and religious (very difficult to define precisely in its own right) is impossible to accurately sketch. Nevertheless, to refer specifically to the peculiarly modern way that political rhetoric is presented as scripturally-derived and divine inspired directive, ‘Islamism’ is crucial (far better than ‘fundamentalism’, which is meaningless in a Muslim context, in my view). One should be careful to distinguish in principle between militant, xenophobic and fanatical Islamism (Al-Qaeda) ultraconservative capitalist Islamism (wahhabism) and progressive anti-imperialist Islamism (al-Afghani), though on the ground the picture is a lot less clear cut (Osama bin Laden, Omid Safi and the Aga Khan probably all see al-Afghani as a progenitor of the agendas they are trying to advance to one degree or another). But to the extent that we coin neologisms to describe emergent cultural phenomena, Islamism is useful. Sepoy very rightly points out that the term all too often serves as a code word for ‘Islamofascism’. People like Pipes and the other members of the neocon quadrant of the blogosphere are going to express positions of this kind no matter what terms are or are not available to them. It is indeed troubling that NYT is now trumping out Islamism so generalized a manner that a lot of people will immediately associate Jaafari with the extensively demonized ‘bad Muslims’ of the world. But I still think that a careful use of the term provided alongside a fairly dense description is useful to signify specific ways that Islam is invoked in modern political discourses.

Also, I agree that a term something like Christianist (as opposed to Christian fundamentalist) would be useful to describe people such as Graham, Helms, perhaps even Bush. This would distinguish them from the Bill Clintons and Benny Hinns of the world. It also occurs to me that we have not had to come up against this quandary of terminology so much to describe Hindu majoritatian politicing, since in their own rhetorics they have provided us with the effective term ‘Hindutva’ (a practitioner of which is ‘Hindutva-vadi’).

Finally, I supose we have to believe the OED, but I always thought nowadays a scholar of Islam is to be referred to as an Islamicist. (The OED also gives “Oriental style or quality” as the first definition of Orientalism, but the way).

dacoit’s comments about the distinctions obscured by the term seem on target to me (I made a very similar, but not as detailed, comment elsewhere recently) with two caveats: even “Islamo-fascism” is a sloppy term, when we don’t distinguish in studies of fascism between Western European neo-pagan or Catholic fascism (i.e. German and Italian/Spanish) and Asian neo-pagan/neo-confucian fascism (i.e. Japanese and Chinese Nationalist) on the basis of religion; and it’s not clear to me that the generally accepted hallmarks of fascism are really met by most of the movements so termed.

As David Neiwert recently argued, in his award winning series (I can say that now!), and the award winning Suburban Guerrilla has other references, the US has almost as many proto-fascist hallmarks as some of the movements we officially deem dangerous.

I think the term “Islamist” is very useful in the way it was originally used by the French sociologists/poliscientists, i.e. Olivier Roy, Gilles Kepel, Dorronosoro, etc. For them, Islamism didn’t refer to just anyone who viewed the world through the lenses of “Islam”, but rather it referred to a very specific group within that who had a specific ideology and sociological profile. For Roy, Kepel, et al “Islamism” was a movement born out of modernity (not as a reaction to it)… prime examples of Islamists are the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat in Pakistan. Islamism was specifically concerned with taking control of the State, rather than perceived societal piety. Since the State was their goal, the Islamists succumbed to adopting nationalistic rhetoric and icons, and were never able to organize themselves on a transnational level, etc etc etc.

I’ve written too much already… interseting stuff..

My view is that you taint the Muslim politician/doctor/whatever to begin the conversation. Ja’afri has to clear his name from association with terrorists [the fracas with Hilary Clinton shows that brilliantly] while Bush never had to defend himself from the work of Eric Rudolph.

1. “islamofascist” is a great term since adding “fascist” to anything is kind of great. I don’t mean this entirely flippantly, but, rather, in a way that manages to automatically delegitimise one half of the arguing parties. The knowledge of that moves one into using code. “Islamist,” in the MSM, means, I think, what the nuts like Pipes probably imagine it to mean: hates America, hates freedom, etc. That’s why there is the “bent”–to make us understand that the fellow ain’t exactly George Washington. I think they very explicitly, in a dumbing-down program that is motivated by sales and laziness, have conflated “islamist” with “freedomhater.”

It’s funny–that’s a word I immediately got a sense of the meaning of the first time I read it, in, probably, a Hitch article in The Nation. The backbone of French sociology is new to me, but fits in with the motto of “simplify!”; we had a nuanced, specific term, and now it’s just one way we continue to other brown people.

2. Yes, Bush is a Christianist. However, Christianists are, in the US understanding (alleged), Ideal subjects–they get to move through space without having to contest themselves or explain or justify themselves. This is, at least, the fantasy. This then gets mobilised in a persecution complex (as it were) that provides us with the evidence of Bush’s Christianism.

This is all fucked, of course, since he’s a corporatist before a Christianist, so there’s a way that he has to mobilise the persecution, again, as proof of his Christianism.

3. Why no equivalent hate for “fundamentalism”? I would never have thought about this before overhearing in one of Bernard Wasserstein’s office hours how he sort of encouraged a student to strike all descriptions of “radical” or “orthodox” (I’m imagining these qualifiers) Islam as “fundamentalist.” He said that word had far too specific a prod connotation, and applying it to Islam sugggests that it has reacted similarly and developed similar sects based on similar disgareements. I don’t think anyone would agree with that. But it’s probably no worse than saying “islamofascist.”

I guess I don’t understand the original question though. We all know about framing and the power of terminology. Then why try to salvage the term? Isn’t it beyond salvaging? (this is how I used to justify the Nation’s calling itself a magazine of “progressive” instead of “liberal” politics. But that was before I knew anything)