Islam as Opposed to Islamism

They are not the same.  One is a religion, the other is a political ideology purportedly based on the tenets of Islam with an emphasis on violent jihad.  Islamic moderates view jihad as a moral obligation in surrender to Islam, but their jihad is that of an inner struggle to combat within themselves their base inclinations invested in human emotions, to find a finer human being within in service to the religion they have faith in.

Those who subscribe to and take pride in their fundamentalist view of Islam prefer another kind of jihad, one dependent on physical violence in their struggle to be 'worthy' in response to the Islamic calls to submission in totality.  Theirs is a totalitarian Islamism, one that will not recognize the legitimacy of other religions nor equality among peoples, invested as they are with the intention to subordinate all other religions to their own.

Traditional Islam, as its faithful would have it, is a religion of peace and tolerance.  Peace and tolerance are absent from the religion as practised more widely now through sects like Wahhabism, Salafism and the Taliban with their deadly offshoots like al-Qaeda, practised in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran which led the radical new Islamism with its revolutionary zeal.

But radicalism in Islam long pre-dated Iran's revolution and the ferociously bellicose and threatening Islamism seen terrorizing the world is on a growth spurt.  In less radicalized form, but equally fundamentalist are the theocracies developing in Turkey and in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, which initiated themselves through an 'Arab Spring' initiative which became an Islamist springboard.

There are  gradations.  Bassam Tibi, a senior fellow at Stanford University who has made it his life-work to study Islam reached the stark conclusion that "Islamism is a totalitarian ideology" which cannot lend itself to democracy.  All jihadists, he points out are Islamists, yet not all Islamists are jihadists.  A riff perhaps on the observation that not all Arabs are terrorists but all terrorists are Arabs to the West.

"Can we trust Islamists who forgo violence to participate in good faith within a pluralistic, democratic system?" he posits.  And then responds, "I believe we cannot."  The answer lies in the fact that "the Islamic solution, a kind of magic answer for all of the problems - global and local, socio-economic or value-related - in the crisis-ridden world of Islam" is the goal of Islamism, through a global evangelism.  The creation of a Caliphate to rule the world.  As trite as that sounds.

The more local Islamic solution where Islamism rules has not accomplished its stated goal to solve all problems.  The evidence lies in the grimly dysfunctional state of societies in Iran, Afghanistan under the Taliban, in Gaza under Hamas and in Sudan under a president who has been charged with genocide by the International Criminal Court.  Syria is on its way to becoming an Islamist state, as is Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Turkey and Mali with more to follow.

And then we come to another stark reality; the steady creep of Islamism into the non-Muslim world.  Where violent jihad has spread terror yet its total effect in producing a devastating number of victims despite the horrors of its successes, has been relatively minimal.  It is the other way, that of migration and the jihad of inner conflict through fealty to Islam that will produce in time the democracy smothering effect of Islamist evangelism.

The wealth of the oil-rich Gulf states who have spread their largess in the establishment of madrasses and mosques abroad, who fund Islamist groups on university campuses, who encourage their recruits to infiltrate governments open to trust and the appeal of pluralistic advantages in expanding their societies and offering haven to those fleeing the oppression of religious and other types of repression.

They find themselves homes at elite universities with well-funded Islamic studies programs to teach the infidel the glory and beatitude of Islam.  Where there is a will there is a way.  And Islamists depend on God willing, Inshallah.