Islamintern

I've been struggling to come up with the right name for our enemy, and failing really. (I'm not the only one; the US hasn't formally named the enemy and we've been at war for 3 years!) Clearly, neither all Arabs, nor all Muslims, nor all Arab Muslims are our enemies; this rules out using either Arabs or Muslims or Arab Muslims as the proper term.

The problem with coming up with a good term, really, is this: the actual description of our enemies is "those Muslims who act according to a particular form of Islam which requires them to make war (jihad - a war specifically to obtain the approval of god, for lack of a better definition) against non-Muslims, and encourages any brutality against non-Muslims, and in particular those who accept the strictest interpretations of Shari'a law; as well as those who support, fund and shelter them; but only in the case that those people are attempting to make war against non-Muslims outside of their home area". Clearly, some way of shortening that is needed.

Islamists is suggestive, but not definitive, because you can be an evangelical Muslim without similarly believing that non-Muslims must be killed or forced into dhimmi status. Granted that there are significant tenets of Islam which would lead an evangelical Muslim to also believe that non-Muslims must in fact be killed or forced into dhimmitude, the term is useful, and I've used it quite a bit. Plus, it has the association with Fascist and Communist as ideologies divorced from explicit religion, which is nice since the enemy perverts Islam so thoroughly.

Islamo-fascist is useful, as it combines the personal ideology with the governmental ideology, as indeed the enemy combines them. The problem is that they are not two separate complementary ideologies for the enemy, but a single all-pervading whole. For the enemy, their god mandates that they kill us, as their god mandates every aspect of life, down to the most trivial. Indeed, anything not mandated by their god is not real to them. So the term is not very accurate, since it combines two Western idea-types to approximate one non-Western idea-type.

Fundamentalist Muslims used to be the term, but really it's inaccurate in that the brand of Islam at issue is not particularly true to Islam, per se, but draws extensively from the tribal customs of some particularly brutal tribes. In particular, the Taliban were an example of this, drawing from the Pashtun tribal heritage, which is among the most horrible set of customs I've come across.

Perhaps taking it from the point of view of a common doctrine will work, which is why I believe that the US government uses the term "terrorists and those who support them" as an all-purpose designation. Of course, that's pretty clumsy, and jihadi is better, as it incorporates both those who practice jihad and those who preach it as a mandatory duty. In fact, jihadi is one of the terms I've most commonly used.

I think Dan Darling, though, has just come up with a really useful referent: "Islamintern". By analogy to Comintern, it suggests a social (and in this case also religious) and governing structure which co-ordinates otherwise unrelated (but sympathetic) groups to further the ideology of the central leadership. That just about fits the bill.

Dan's actual quote, by the way, that got me thinking on this line is:

The complete lack of mention of Abdullah Azzam here is one of the first things that comes to mind. Azzam was bin Laden's mentor as well as the spiritual leader of the Afghan Arabs who were fighting the Soviets (I believe Hamas also claims him as one of their founders) and he was the man who first came up with the idea of establishing an Islamist internationale and helped to establish connections that went beyond traditional ethno-nationalist divisions that had previously divided various Islamist groups. There is also no mention of bin Laden's prior role in assisting the Saudi government in setting up jihadi groups to fight against the communists in South Yemen, which is how he first forged his ties to Prince Turki, who was then the head of the Saudi Mukhabarat. These would all seem to be rather important details.

(The references are to the 9/11 comission report, which I believe to be so deeply flawed as to be embarrassing and useless.)

Posted by Jeff at June 19, 2004 02:01 AM | Link Cosmos