At The Corner, Michael Rubin believes he has found the magic bullet to defend the ridiculous terms “Islamic fascist” and Islamofascist:

Is Islamism Totalitarian? [Michael Rubin]
 

These prominent Muslim intellectuals and writers think so.It makes the criticism of President Bush by some American pundits for using the term Islamic fascism seem, well, silly.  

 

Why, Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, among others–ever the paragons of defining normative Islam–have declared Islamism (as opposed, I guess, to plain vanilla Islam) to be totalitarian.  Along with a lot of other standard left-liberal rhetoric, they declare:

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity, and secular values for all.

That’s all very predictable, but it suggests that they would likely see  any dogmatic religion that makes extensive demands on its believers to be totalitarian in many respects.  This tends to undermine their assessment of something as totalitarian–which, if properly used, refers to the total integration of state and society (as it was originally used) or, as it is used more conventionally, the abolition of any and all barriers to the control of the state that is undertaken in most cases for ideological reasons.  Islamism and, indeed, Islam do make totalising claims about all spheres of life and their strict adherents would seek to implement those claims through government coercion if and when they obtain power, so there is reason to describe them as totalitarian.  But this has next to nothing to do with fascism. 

Indeed, if we look at the historic fascist regimes, particularly the regime in Italy, we look in vain for precisely this kind of totalising interference in every aspect of life.  As I have suggested before, to elide fascism and Islamism is basically to insult the name of fascism.  It could be argued that referring to someone as an Islamic fascist, while rhetorically useful, is even less accurate because it minimises the nature of the threat by comparing it with the relatively unthreatening and weak Fascist regime of Italy.  Totalitarianism, a term invented by the Italians, never fully existed in Fascist Italy in the way that we use it now.  The connections between the totalitarianism of secret police, control of the public through propaganda and fear, and massive state coercion and violence we associate with Nazi Germany and the USSR and fascism in Italy are very tenuous.  In any case, the two terms are not syonymous, even if we argue that a generic fascism is totalitarian. 

Next, one might ask why Ms. Ali and Mr. Rushdie would take this view.  It could have something to do with their hostility to most forms of normative Islam and their personal negative experiences at the receiving end of hatred and threats from Islamic revolutionaries and fundamentalists.  Another signatory is Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not A Muslim, which ought to rather preclude defining him as a “Muslim intellectual” or Muslim writer.   

It might be that secular Muslims who see eye-to-eye with Bernard Henri Levy (another signatory of this “Muslim intellectual” statement) may not have much more authority in describing Islamism definitively as totalitarian than any other Westerner.  In fact, I think the description of “Islamism” as totalitarian is accurate, but it tells us nothing about whether the term “Islamic fascist” is accurate.  The differences between generic term “totalitarian” and the specific term “fascist” are essential to stating and understanding things clearly.  To say that something is totalitarian (to continue to abuse a word that virtually no one understands) is not necessarily to say that it is fascist, which makes Mr. Rubin’s remark seem all the more facile and, yes, silly, unless he is prepared to start calling them Islamocommies as well.  Islamocommie does roll off the tongue more easily, but it would be just as stupid.

More basically, this is a very strange argument for Mr. Rubin to be making.  He seems to think that if he can find a few secular Muslims, Muslims in exile from their native lands or ex-Muslims who already share the ideology of liberal modernity and who also happen to agree that Islamism is totalitarian that he has somehow proved the point.  Of course, if finding Muslims to back your position on something was the key to success in argument, opponents of the terms Islamofascist and “Islamic fascist” have even more Muslim witnesses–on the order of one billion.  Rubin’s is a preposterous argument on every level, which is understandable, since defending such a preposterous term as Islamofascist should require equally preposterous arguments.