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Islamism
OED: Islamic fundamentalism, esp. regarded as a religious or political ideology.
The term Islamism has either neutral or negative connotations, with no consensus on its usage. In fact, radically different usages are found within Muslim circles, within academia and even within the major English dictionaries.
An example of a neutral understanding of the term may be a “peaceful democratic, constitutional, and moderate political activism based on Muslim ideology” whilst an example of a negative understanding of the term would be “radical and violent takfiri Jihadist activism”. Further definitions are in the background section below.
Unfortunately, the lack of a consensus on its meaning and usage, has meant that the term has been used to refer to political Islam, terrorism, a synonym for Islam, and/or a mixture of these, often without clarity as to which is intended.
Term Variants: Islamist
How this term should be used
There are certain usages of the term, which are unjustifiable in today’s context. For example, the usage of the term “Islamist” to merely describe a form of Muslim practice, however conservative, is wrong. For example, the wearing of the hijab, or the conforming to a Halal diet, should not be called “Islamist”.
If an argument is being made that a specific Muslim practice is an indication of the growth of a more visible and political Islam, then that argument should be explicitly made, and using the term “Islamist” would be insufficient.
Our recommendation goes further. Given the necessity of clarity in the media, we would recommend the avoidance of the term as a descriptor altogether, specifically because the potential meanings of the term are so different that an ordinary reader may infer a very different meaning from that which is intended by the author. Also, because the term Islamist has now become synonymous with extremist or terrorist, even when the term is being used to decribe a democratically elected government or organisation, the connotation will be that they are linked to extremism when they are not.
There are two core challenges with this recommendation.
Firstly, many groups self-identify as “Islamiyyun” (translated as “Islamist”). For such groups, there is a trade-off between using the term they use for themselves, and using a specific term that may be more understandable to the average reader.
Our recommendation specifically in media discourse, would be to prioritise the latter, rather than import a word from Arabic into English without sufficient context that would allow the reader to distinguish between a peaceful and violent group.
Secondly, the term is often used with what is claimed to be a positive intention, to distinguish ordinary Muslims and the faith of Islam, from the acts of those deemed beyond the pale. The proponents of this usage argue that blaming Islamists for terror attacks rather than Muslims, creates an important distinction, and that they are not against Muslims, only Islamists. If the term Islamist was only used to describe Muslims who commit violent acts of terror, such a distinction may have some value. However, that is not the case. The undefined “Islamist” is used to not only mean a violent terrorist, but often also a Muslim who may challenge the government on certain policies relating to Muslims &/or Islam, or disagree with its foreign policy or refuse to shake the hands of someone of the opposite sex, not celebrate Christmas, or other non-violent acts, even if perceived to be problematic to some. The line of what is an “acceptable” or an “unacceptable” Muslim by the author, is then articulated by the term “Islamist”.
In the case you wanted to distinguish ordinary Muslims from the perpetrators of terror attacks, we would recommend specificity in the descriptors. For example, where there is an identified cause (e.g. Daesh-inspired, or Al-Qaeda inspired), then that should be the descriptor. And where there is no identified cause, that should be made clear.
Our final recommendation is that if you disagree with the arguments presented, the very minimum is to ensure clarity and consistency across news and opinion pieces in the usage of the term, such that an ordinary reader is not misled into only associating the term with extremism or terrorism.
Mehdi Mozaffari traced the first usage of the term Islamism back to 1697. Then and in the decades following, he suggests that the words Islam and Islamism were used interchangeably to mean the religion of the Muslims. He argues that “Prior to the Islamist revolution in Iran in 1978-79, the terms ‘Islamism’ and ‘Islamists’ are also practically absent from the vocabulary of newspaper reporters.”
Since then, the term has acquired a number of definitions.
The Oxford Dictionary of English, for instance, defines Islamism simply as, “Islamic militancy or fundamentalism.” Mehdi Mozaffari goes a step further and proposes the following: “Islamism is a religious ideology with a holistic interpretation of Islam whose final aim is the conquest of the world by all means.”
Diverging from this kind of definition, the Cambridge Dictionary defines Islamism as: “the belief that Islam should influence political systems”[5] with the implication being that the quest for supremacy is not quite global in nature, while Emin Poljarevic, who wrote an entire article analysing the term Islamism in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Politics, gives the following guidance for usage:
The term Islamism at the very least represents a form of social and political activism, grounded in an idea that public and political life should be guided by a set of Islamic principles. In other words, Islamists are those who believe that Islam has an important role to play in organizing a Muslim-majority society and who seek to implement this belief. As such, Islamist activism is a public manifestation of religiously informed political will, often expressed as resistance to various types of competing ideas, policies, and even lifestyles.
Another important point to note, is that the “ism” suffix has been applied to a number of religions in order to differentiate between the religion and those who adhere to it. Therefore, the words “Judaism”, “Hinduism”, “Sikhism”, “Jainism”, “Buddhism” etc, have developed as largely uncomplicated terms. Judaism is used to mean “the religion of the Jews”; Hinduism is used to mean “The religion of the Hindus” and so on and so forth. Even though Islamism is almost never used to mean “the religion of the Muslims”, the fact that every other “ism” when applied to a religious group is used to mean “the faith/religion of” will necessarily colour the interpretations of some readers. Some of them will look at the term Islamism when it is used to describe acts of terror and conclude that there is something inherently terroristic about Islam and Muslims.
Statistical trends of usage
A number of groups are routinely referred to as Islamist (see tables in Appendix). It immediately becomes apparent, that the term “Islamist” is being used to describe groups that differ widely both in outlook and in their modus operandi.
Along with these examples, the media corpus is littered with instances of “Islamist” having to be qualified or modified to make the meaning clearer. Examples of words used to modify Islamist include: “violent”, “moderate”, “jihadi”, “non-jihadi”, “political”, “radical”, “Salafist” etc. Often, these sentences operate in such a way that a removal of the qualification would inject a significant amount of ambiguity.
Examples in context
The following is a selection of examples showing how the term Islamism is being used in the media.
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Expanded context:
But it augurs well that outgoing president Moncef Marzouki did eventually recognise his defeat, while Rached Ghannouchi, president of the Islamist party Ennahda, implicitly endorsed Essebsi between the two rounds, assuring everyone that there was no risk of a return to dictatorship.
The Ennahda party was the proper noun used most frequently alongside the term “Islamist” in both the worldwide and Great Britain corpus.
The intention in this case, is to imply that the Ennahda Party has an agenda that revolves around the furtherance of “Political Islam”.
The Islamism of Ennahda is sometimes qualified, as can be seen in the following example.
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Expanded context:
Tunisia succeeded in creating a democratic government but the moderate Islamist Ennahda party lost power after winning the first elections.
In order to show that Ennahda does not have a violent modus operandi, the adjective “moderate” is used to modify the term Islamist.
However, it may also be used with a different meaning.
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Expanded context:
There was a scathing piece in Le Figaro two years ago, shortly after the Islamist attack on London Bridge, when Corbyn was described as championing’ islamo-gauchisme’ but of late there have been precious few hard-nosed analyses of the implications for France of a Corbyn government.
The intention of the usage of “Islamists” is not activists who wanted to promote political Islam. In this example, which is quite common in media discourse, “Islamist” means a terrorist committing acts of violence in the name of Islam.
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Expanded context:
Gaza militants fire a barrage of rockets at Israel, drawing retaliatory air strikes and tank fire, as the territory’s Islamist rulers Hamas seek more concessions from Israel as part of a fragile ceasefire
In this example, there are 3 potential reasons why the author used the term Islamist: (1) because Hamas call themselves “Islamiyyun”; (2) because Hamas is perceived to be driven by an ideology of “political Islam”; or (3) because Hamas is designated by the EU as a terrorist group, and it engages in acts of violence.
An ordinary reader may struggle to understand what is being intended.
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Expanded context:
De Bellaigue has little to say, for example, about Wahhabism, the rigid Islamism of Saudi Arabia that has had a significant influence throughout the Middle East, and which developed autonomously.
Wahhabism is defined as “the rigid Islamism” of Saudi Arabia, likely intending that Islam is used politically as the state religion.
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Expanded context:
Tehran’s government has waved its sabers with new intensity in recent weeks as the Islamist nation’s economy has shown signs of damage from punishing economic sanctions.
In this case, Iran – a very different country to Saudi Arabia, with a very different understanding of Islam – is described as an “Islamist” nation.
A lay reader may, however, conclude the ideology they subscribe to is broadly similar, given the similar usage of the term.
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Expanded context:
The wide-reaching app covers electricity and internet use and can even raise the alarm when someone other than the registered keeper fills up a car at a petrol station. The Government in Beijing says the moves are necessary to combat Islamic terrorism in the Muslim majority province which is home to 13 million Islamist Uighurs.
The minority Uighur group, is described as Islamist even though there is no evidence either that it seeks to promote Political Islam or that it commits acts of organised terror.
Appendix: Worldwide and Great British Corpus
Worldwide Corpus
The following table illustrates the top twenty proper nouns that collocate with the root word Islamist if we conduct our search on the worldwide corpus.
| Group | Frequency | All | % | MI | ||
| 1 | Ennahda | 329 | 1228 | 26.79 | 11.99 | |
| 2 | Morsi | 1672 | 15443 | 10.83 | 10.69 | |
| 3 | Shabaab | 688 | 12306 | 5.59 | 9.73 | |
| 4 | Al-Sham | 255 | 5151 | 4.95 | 9.56 | |
| 5 | Hamas | 2240 | 48748 | 4.6 | 9.45 | |
| 6 | Boko9 | 2368 | 138329 | 1.71 | 8.03 | |
| 7 | Sunni | 620 | 41634 | 1.49 | 7.82 | |
| 8 | Mohamed | 1163 | 108369 | 1.07 | 7.35 | |
| 9 | Brotherhood | 491 | 45767 | 1.07 | 7.35 | |
| 10 | Mali | 416 | 52156 | 0.8 | 6.92 | |
| 11 | Al-Qaeda | 312 | 40848 | 0.76 | 6.86 | |
| 12 | PAS | 429 | 59750 | 0.72 | 6.77 | |
| 13 | Gaza | 587 | 89391 | 0.66 | 6.64 | |
| 14 | Somalia | 481 | 79554 | 0.6 | 6.52 | |
| 15 | Palestinian | 515 | 133633 | 0.39 | 5.87 | |
| 16 | Egypt | 725 | 223412 | 0.32 | 5.63 | |
| 17 | Taliban | 331 | 147741 | 0.22 | 5.09 | |
| 18 | ISIS | 312 | 182307 | 0.17 | 4.7 | |
| 19 | Syria | 646 | 443306 | 0.15 | 4.47 | |
| 20 | Muslim | 592 | 513638 | 0.12 | 4.13 |
N.B: The All tab refers to the number of times the word in question appears in the corpus. So if we look at Hamas as an example, it occurs exactly 48748 times in the NOW database. The Frequency tab refers to the number of times the word in question occurs within five words (on the left or the right) of the word Islamist. Taking Hamas as an example once more, we can see that the number of times “Hamas” occurs within five words of “Islamist” in the corpus is 2240. This means that 4.6% of all usages of the word “Hamas” are in relation to the word “Islamist”, thus yielding a high Mutual Information score of 9.45.
Great Britain Corpus
If we narrow down our database to yield results solely from the British press, our results are as follows.
| Group | Frequency | All | % | MI | |
| 1 | ENNAHDA | 52 | 235 | 22.13 | 10.66 |
| 2 | AHRAR | 42 | 283 | 14.84 | 10.08 |
| 3 | AL-SHABAB | 102 | 978 | 10.43 | 9.57 |
| 4 | ANSAR | 53 | 638 | 8.31 | 9.25 |
| 5 | AL-SHAM | 53 | 693 | 7.65 | 9.13 |
| 6 | MORSI | 168 | 2220 | 7.57 | 9.11 |
| 7 | BOKO | 264 | 3989 | 6.62 | 8.92 |
| 8 | HAMAS | 221 | 6557 | 3.37 | 7.95 |
| 9 | AL-NUSRA | 45 | 1357 | 3.32 | 7.92 |
| 10 | BROTHERHOOD | 123 | 5481 | 2.24 | 7.36 |
| 11 | MALI | 65 | 4234 | 1.54 | 6.81 |
| 12 | SOMALI | 51 | 3654 | 1.4 | 6.67 |
| 13 | AL-QAEDA | 95 | 7895 | 1.2 | 6.46 |
| 14 | SUNNI | 63 | 5491 | 1.15 | 6.39 |
| 15 | MOHAMED | 108 | 11009 | 0.98 | 6.16 |
| 16 | GAZA | 79 | 12675 | 0.62 | 5.51 |
| 17 | EGYPT | 114 | 28364 | 0.4 | 4.88 |
| 18 | NIGERIA | 67 | 17403 | 0.38 | 4.81 |
| 19 | MUSLIM | 153 | 44603 | 0.34 | 4.65 |
| 20 | PALESTINIAN | 60 | 18432 | 0.33 | 4.57 |
| 21 | BANGLADESH | 44 | 13482 | 0.33 | 4.58 |
| 22 | ISIS | 107 | 37498 | 0.29 | 4.38 |