Indeed, a debate rages over the very use of “Islamic fascism” to describe the creed of terrorist killers — as if those authoritarians who call for a return of the ancient caliphate, who wish to impose 7^th-century sharia law, promise death to the Western “crusader” and “Jew,” and long to retreat into a mythical alternate universe of religious purity and harsh discipline, untainted by a “decadent” liberal West, are not fascists. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Yes, why would anyone dispute that?  But making a list of negative or objectionable traits is not proof of fascism. 

Never mind that fascism had to do with returning to primordial purity and strength of a nation and not the purity and strength of a religion, except perhaps for the “religion” of loyalty and devotion to the nation and the state.  But palingenesis alone does not a fascism make.   One major feature of fascism that none of these people seems aware of is the role of what Payne called “political liturgy” as part of the political religion: the mass spectacles at which the Leader appeared and conducted the crowd in a huge rally, the processions, the marches, all of them aimed at glorifying the nation and the Leader.  These are by and large almost nonexistent in the Islamic world among those who are expressly Islamists; they are certainly not defining features of Wahhabism, Salafism or any of the rest.  

Hanson’s own language betrays his confusion and muddled thinking: if Islamists are authoritarian, that does not prove that they are fascists; it proves that they are authoritarian.  Desiring the return of the ancient caliphate makes them, if anything, more like Islamic conservative romantics or arguably some kind of reactionaries–like Faisal out of Lawrence of Arabia dreaming of the glories of Cordoba, but without the geniality.  It is true that the Italian Fascists claimed to want to restore the Roman Empire, but precisely because it was the Roman Empire and was part of their national history and “national greatness.”  (Again, I will refrain from dwelling on the obvious connection with people who harp about “national greatness” in this country.)  Had the same people been desiring the restoration of Christendom and the unifying role of the Church (as did, for example, the Romantic Novalis), they would not have been fascists but something else all together different.  

Of course, “sharia law” didn’t exist in the 7th century, even if the purists and purifiers believe that it did in some sense, but a desire for religious purity and discipline makes them very plainly out to be religious fundamentalists or perhaps fanatics, not “religious fascists”–another phrase so daft that it boggles the mind that an historian of of any stature would use it.  The terror of identifying these people as primarily and basically religious in their motivations and ideals is palpable in every neocon defense of the phrase “Islamic fascist.” 

It is imperative that they be made into fascists, so that we can easily compare them to our frame of reference, so that we can dismiss their ravings as a discredited “ideology” that we have already “defeated” and leave it at that.  It saves us the much more troubling work of considering the reality that some religions do disproportionately breed fanatics while others do not, and that this is not some deviation or perversion or departure from the “real” religion but derives directly from the religion’s own authorities and traditions.  For secular people like these prominent neocons, it is horrifying to consider the possibility that some people have motivations that cannot be explained in secular language, because they, lacking in religious imagination of any kind, are at a loss to even begin to really understand what motivates a jihadi.  Even when they acknowledge the supposed goal of Paradise or the religious nature of the duty these people believe themselves to be carrying out, it is always with a certain level of incomprehension, almost as if they cannot really accept that anyone not attached to some intelligible ideology firmly bounded in this world really exists.  Their inability to understand the religious desire for transcendence in some of its most appalling forms stems, I suspect, in no small part from their own depressingly optimistic and immanentist ideology.  Their inability to understand a drive for religious purity and intolerance of other religions as anything other than fascism stems in part from their own reflexive commitments to religious pluralism and a latent or not-so-latent hostility to dogmatic Christianity: everything not on the side of pluralism and “freedom” somehow all gets pushed into a big box called fascism.  

The old neoconservatives were in many ways very good allies in the anticommunist fight, because they (like some of the early conservative figures of the ’50s) were personally familiar with the sort of mentality they were opposing, but the present neocons are possibly worthless allies in fighting jihadis because they have no grasp of this mentality and are forced to push it into the imprecise and misleading terminology of the intra-Western political wars of the last century.  Their inflexibility about using “Islamic fascist” tells us that they cannot work outside of the anachronistic political language of conflicts that are now over 60 years in the past.  Lacking in religious imagination, or imagination of most any kind, they cannot get out of their rut where it is always the 1930s and Freedom is always fighting Fascism.  I submit that people who cannot break out of such stale patterns of thinking cannot tell us much about our current predicament.