The terms ‘Islamic fascism’ or ‘Islamofascism’ are applied not only by political figures (together with the president of the United States) but advertisers as well; thus creating an inconsequential storm and leading to an examination of the roots of the word in numerous countries.
Walter Laqueur has been exploring the origins of Islamic fascism as well including in the framework of popular Arab media and numerous Internet resources; moreover, he appears to be probably amongst the first to discover the roots of the term ‘clerical fascism’ and its connotation (Ruthven par. 5).
In his book ‘Fascism: Past Present Future’, which was written in 1996, Walter Laqueur stated that the description of the concept of ‘fundamentalism’ was defective for an assortment of causes; however, in the contemporary framework it had come to characterize a fundamental, aggressive fanatic faction that is willing to enforce its principles and opinions on other people and nations by the application of military force.
Furthermore, Walter Laqueur stated that fundamentalism is not unquestionably an Islamic domination, for the reason that it can be traced in various other faiths, such as Christianity and Judaism. In its dangerous methods the Islamic fascism is demonstrated in political radicalism: “for example, the antiabortionist homicides in the United States, in Kahanism in Israel, in Hindu attack against Muslims in India” (Laqueur par. 4).
Fundamentalists have applied dogmatic compression on nonspiritual administrations in the United States, some countries in Europe and even in Asia. Nonetheless, only the Muslim region still has extremists that assimilated stations of impact and control and expected to have more accomplishments on the world map.
During the past several years, there have been a lot of debates regarding the fact that there could be no permanent apprehension between fascism and faith merely for the reason that both were a complete world view entitlements to the entire humanity in all perspectives.
Moreover, a fascist-religious combination was believed to be unmanageable due to all diversities of fascism being extremely xenophobic; contemporary nonspiritual xenophobia was inappropriate, if not abomination, particularly for Islam.
Nonetheless, if Hizb al Tahrir and various new radical Islamic assemblies disallowed xenophobia and supported Khalifat, many other aggressive Islamic assemblies established that it was not principally problematic to syndicate an obsessive religious faith with confrontational nationalism (several East European countries came to apply this idea as well) (Levy par. 2).
The identical idea is factual with respect to the current administration of Iran that with all their spiritual passion has an intention of the control over the Persian Gulf region (and outside) by the Persian state, and at no time tried to hide their purposes (Laqueur par. 6).
According to the researchers, there are several similarities between the fascists and radical Islamists, such as “the populism, the anti Westernism, the antiliberalism, the anti-Semitism” (Laqueur par. 7), its violent, extensive, and anti-humanist appeal, the explanation of Islam not only as a faith but as a totalitarian political-social directive which delivers reactions to every debate of the modern world.
However, simultaneously there are alterations that could not be ignored. Fascism remains to be a European singularity; the despotisms beyond Europe (for example, the Japanese regime during the 1930s and 1940s) were destined to progress on altered paths conferring to historic customs and political situations of the region.
One of the issues of the discussion on Islamofascism is that some of the people who have contended that Islamic fundamentalism is rather ethnic than a governmental or fighting encounter to other countries have had less reluctances to plea Christian fundamentalism in the United States and worldwide at any rate possibly fascist. Another issue is that one of the primary opinions against the usage of the word ‘Islamofascism’ as it is believed to be extremely belligerent to Muslims worldwide.
Works Cited
Laqueur, Walter 2006, The Origins of Fascism: Islamic Fascism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism.
Levy, Bernard-Henri 2015, Thinking the Unthinkable: This is War. Web.
Ruthven, Malise 2015, Inside the Islamic State. Web.