[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.]

The attempt by David Horowitz and his allies to launch "Islamofascism Awareness Week" on American campuses has been met with a variety of responses. One of these is a challenge to the validity of the term itself. It's quite the done thing, in liberal academic circles, to sneer at any comparison between fascist and jihadist ideology. People like Tony Judt write to me to say, in effect, that it's ahistorical and simplistic to do so. And in some media circles, another kind of reluctance applies: Alan Colmes thinks that one shouldn't use the word Islamic even to designate jihad, because to do so is to risk incriminating an entire religion. He and others don't want to tag Islam even in its most extreme form with a word as hideous as fascism. Finally, I have seen and heard it argued that the term is unfair or prejudiced because it isn't applied to any other religion.

Well, that last claim is certainly not true. It was once very common, especially on the left, to prefix the word fascism with the word clerical. This was to recognize the undeniable fact that, from Spain to Croatia to Slovakia, there was a very direct link between fascism and the Roman Catholic Church. More recently, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, coined the term Judeo-Nazi to describe the Messianic settlers who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967. So, there need be no self-pity among Muslims about being "singled out" on this point.

The term Islamofascism was first used in 1990 in Britain's Independent newspaper by Scottish writer Malise Ruthven, who was writing about the way in which traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to stay in power. I didn't know about this when I employed the term "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe the attack on civil society on Sept. 11, 2001, and to ridicule those who presented the attack as some kind of liberation theology in action. "Fascism with an Islamic face" is meant to summon a dual echo of both Alexander Dubcek and Susan Sontag (if I do say so myself), and in any case, it can't be used for everyday polemical purposes, so the question remains: Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism?

I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.

Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements. (See my column on Osama Bin Laden's Sept. 11 statement.)

There isn't a perfect congruence. Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn't much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden's own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital. As to the nation-state, al-Qaida's demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn't this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a "Greater Germany" or with Mussolini's fantasy of a revived Roman empire?...

Jason Blake Keuter - 10/31/2007

Islamofascism is a good term for the reasons Htichens mentions. Islamist is a good term, even though it sounds milder. Anyone wanting to establish "rule" by Islam is anti-democratic, illiberal, anti-modern and well...fascistic. If Islam is to exist, it must exist in a democratic and pluralist setting. If it exists through force, then it either doesn't exist or it is an inherently anti-democratic religion.

Muslims fear the same thing Christians feared: that democracy will spell the end of their religion. In other words, given a choice, people will stop being Muslim, or, some people will stop and then others will follow in thier footsteps. Hence Islamists are really fascist reactionaries, trying to turn back democracy.

Lorraine Paul - 10/29/2007

I would not considered Thomas Aquina intellectual.

Lorraine Paul - 10/29/2007

Mr Furnish, I left my husband many years ago and therefore prefer the non-marital specific title of "Ms". However, you have my permission to call me Lorraine.

I wouldn't bother to reply to your posturings except that, unlike yourself, every fool and his dog knows that religion and an enquiring mind do not mix well.

You needed one short paragraph to name individuals who managed to rise above the accepted ideas of their age. Unfortunately, the time it would take to name those burnt at the stake, tortured, banished from their homes, and those drawn and quartered for having the audacity to question 'the official story' as then told, is not available to me.

You obviously have also not heard of the Catholic Church's Index which consists of banned books.

As you are so eager to denounce those who nowadays question the 'official story' regarding US foreign policy in the ME, I can only assume that in an earlier time you would have been standing there with a fire-brand clutched in your cold little hand.

art eckstein - 10/28/2007

1. Though in my opinion Christopher Hitchens is not wrong in general on the justified use of the term "Islamofascism" to describe jihadist totalitarianism, he *is* wrong about the origins of the term "Islamofascism." Its origins lie much earlier. are academically very respectable, and are more specific than Malise Ruthven's article 1990.
(Ruthven, incidentally, had no trouble calling current Islamicist totalitarian movements "neo fascist" in the latest NY Review of Books.)

2. A leading textbook of the 1960s, Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (1963) by the late Princeton professor of Middle Eastern History Manfred Halpern, included the thesis that the neo Islamic totalitarian movements are essentially fascist movements. They concentrated on mobilizing passion and violence to enlarge the power of their charismatic leader, their form of Islam, and the solidarity of the movement. Halpern pointed especially to the totalitarian and fascist elements in the ideology and the practice of the Muslim Brotherhood.

3. At the time Halpern wrote, the Muslim Brotherhood had been weakened by repression by Nasser. But with the fall of Nasser and the breakdown of Arab nationalism and communism, the Brotherhood, and Islamism had a strong
revival. The Muslim Brotherhood, with its branches in various Arab countries, is both the direct ancestor of Hamas, AND, through Ayman al-Zawahiri, exercises strong influence in al-Qaeda.

4. The Muslim Brotherhood also had strong ties to the Nazis, esp. via the activity of SS Ensatzgruppe Egypt which accompanied Rommel in 1941-1942, and this was followed by daily radio broadcasts from Berlin throughout the war. And meanwhile the Baathists had their origin in the elements behind the Rashid Ali coup in Baghdad in April 1941, which brought a pro-Nazi regime to power in Iraq, and a Luftwaffe squadron to a base outside of Baghdad (!). The British overthrew the Rashid Ali regime in June of 1941, but not before a major massacre of Jews in Baghdad by that regime.

5. And for those of you who find this intellectual ancestry of the term Islamo-
fascism too abstruse, just google-image “Hezbollah + salutes” and check out all those terrorists making the Nazi salute." (Those, of course, are Shiites, not Sunnis--but I'd say this shows, precisely, a common fascist thread.)

6. On the newly established close connections between Nazism and the Muslim Brotherhood (in part through the Nazified Palestinian Grant Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini, one of only two non-Germans indicted for war-crimes at Nuremburg): see Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers Halbmond und Hakenkreuz. Das "Dritte Reich", die Araber und Palästina.Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft; Auflage: 2., durchges. Aufl. ( 2006). A book in English: Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 (2007), by Matthias Küntzel. Küntzel, like Mallmann and Cüppers, is a distinguished German historian, and all three base their work on new research in the German archives.

7. NONE of the above means that one is equating Islamofascism with Islam in general. And *true* moderate Muslim intellectuals are perfectly comfortable with terminology such as this, viewing the Islamofascists as their enemies. Example: the very prominent Middle Eastern expert Professor Bassam Tibi of Gottingen and Cornell. See his latest article, "The Totalitarianism of Jihadist Islamism and its Challenge to Europe and Islam," in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8 (2007), pp. 35-54. In this article Tibi (a Muslim) shows that Jihadist Islamism fits with Hannah Arendt's definition of totalitarianism.

Tim R. Furnish - 10/27/2007

Mrs. Paul,
All religions are opposed to intellectualism, eh? I suppose Thomas Aquina, Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, William of Ockham and many other anti-intellectual Christians would no doubt agree with you.

Lorraine Paul - 10/26/2007

Hitchens' ramblings on the similarities between Islam and fascism could equally be applied to the similarities between most of the world's main religions...including Judaiism.

I have yet to encounter a religion which does NOT impose on women 2nd or 3rd class status. ALL of them 'are inclined to leader worship'.

All are opposed to intellectualism, which makes me wonder why Hitchens has bothered to write this essay.