If in fact, these three words do not share much in common beyond their etymological root and concomitant popularization, they regularly cause the same effect: that of controversy. Where do they come from and are they so relevant?
The concept of Islamophobia, let’s be honest, is no longer really debated across the Channel and across the Atlantic. And for good reason, it has obviously been well integrated into the Anglo-Saxon culture, whether it is militant rhetoric, political, or academic work. The concept does not win such unanimity in France, and the semantic antagonisms there largely transcend the traditional left-right divide. “Islamo-fascism” and “Islamo-leftism”, less fortunate in terms of their popularity, have not been given the same reception and for the moment only fuel the often heated debates on the relationship between Islamism and political radicalities. Thus, Islamophobia made its entry into the Larousse and Robert dictionaries at the beginning of the 21st century, defined as “distrust of Islam and Muslims” when the other two barely qualify for a Wikipedia entry. However, it mentions “Islamofascism” in the New Oxford American Dictionary, as a “term equating some Islamic movements in European fascist movements of the early 21th century”.
ISLAMO-FASCISM, A CONCEPT WITHOUT SUBSTANCE
Christian Estrosi, Bruno Retailleauor Patrick Pelloux recently put this word forward. A word that seems to burst into the public debate during every crisis linked to Islamism. In 2015, Manuel Valls was the first major French politician to use this term in reaction to the Copenhagen attacks, already giving rise to numerous debates at the time. Note however that “Islamo-fascism” is not only used by the right. Many revolutionary militants (Kurds, Marxists, anarchists), in the West as in the so-called countries of Muslim culture, have been able to speak of “fascism” to designate Islamism, adopting an extensive definition of the word. Thus, the Marxist historian specializing in Islam Maxime Rodinson, faced with the enthusiasm of certain extreme left vanguards with regard to the Iranian revolution, warned in 1978 against the appearance of Islamic fundamentalism inspired by nationalism and socialism – emptied of their “progressive” content. Speaking of the Brotherhood of the Muslim Brotherhood, he said in the columns of the World that it was “difficult to judge the different tendencies which must run through the executives of this organization. But the one which dominates is certainly a sort of archaic fascism”.
“The idea of an ‘Islamo-fascism’ is criticized by most specialists”
Several sources trace the origin of the concept to the 90s, attributing it to the Scottish historian Malise Ruthven – although historically its first appearance in a text would rather date from the 1930s. The latter would have used it in the newspaper The Independent to compare Mussolini’s authoritarianism to that of the Arab dictators of the time. Helped in this by the journalist Christopher Hitchens, famous for his anti-religious diatribes as for his belated rapprochement of the neoconservatives (he will support in particular the war in Iraq), the concept becomes little by little one of the key concepts of the republicans close to the George Bush Jr’s camp after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Daniel Pipes will say that”radical Islam is a utopian movement closer in spirit to movements such as communism and fascism than to a traditional religion” and Francis Fukuyama will outbid: “The Islamo-fascist sea in which terrorists swim constitutes, in some ways, a more fundamental ideological challenge than that posed by communism. ” In France, this word did not have the same repercussion, although it found its supporters especially among certain intellectuals like Pierre-André Taguieff (for whom the concept is lame although it is relevant to establish analogies between fascism and Islamic totalitarianism), BHL (who speaks rather of “fascislamism”) and Michel Onfray, or certain editorialists like Ivan Rioufol.
But more generally, the idea of an “Islamo-fascism” is criticized by most specialists for its ignorance of the realities of the Muslim world as of those of fascism. A more elaborate criticism can be found in particular in the Le Monde diplomatique written by Stefan Durand. Jean-Yves Camus tells us that it is a “concept [inoperative] for essayists, journalists and lazy people of all kinds”. According to him, no definition of fascism developed by competent historians and political scientists overlaps that of Islamism: “In particular, there is no desire among the Islamists to create a ‘new man.’ On the contrary, Islamism is an ideology of invariance, of a-historicity, of a return to the age of origins of Islam. ” He adds: “The major problem is that the Western mind, and particularly the European mind, is obsessed with fascism, moreover confused with National Socialism. Everything, in our time, is fascism when it is not liberal. This is a gigantic mistake because what matters is to define Islamism as totalitarianism. “
IS THERE AN ISLAMO-LEFTISM?
If for some Islamism is the communism of the 21th century – “the Umma is Huma” (Zemmour) – not surprising that there may, in often the same, the links between extreme left and Islamism. It is according to this logic that Islamo-leftism appeared in French political debates, aided in this by real criticism of collusion between a fringe of the left and political Islam. From there to make it a national cause, there was therefore only one step, taken recently by the Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer, who lambasted the hold of Islamo-leftism on the academic world. . If the origins of the concept are multiple, it would seem that the first to have used it was Pierre-André Taguieff, in 2002, in his bookThe new Judeophobia (Although it has already been used in the past for a completely different purpose – Olivier Roy will also speak in turn of Islamo-leftism, but in order to designate the anti-imperialist discourse carried by the Islamists). The latter thus recalls that “the expression” Islamo-leftism “had under my pen a strictly descriptive value, designating a militant de facto alliance between Islamist circles and extreme left circles, in the name of the Palestinian cause, erected in the new universal cause. I used the expression in various lectures given in 2002, as well as in articles dealing with what I called the “new Judeophobia”,
However, it is in a particular context that this concept has taken more and more importance, on the left as on the right. Indeed, it was in those years that we began to observe “dangerous links” everywhere in the West, between fringes of the left and political Islam. It all started, according to some, with the “original sin” of the extreme left, namely the blind and naive support of the Iranian revolution of 1979. At the time, many extreme left vanguards like certain intellectuals – Foucault at the bridgehead – had believed to see in Khomeini, as well as in Islamism, a new political radicalism able to prolong or even replace Marxism-Leninism. “Some then believed, explains Jean-Yves Camus, and still believe, that the anti-Westernism of Sayed Qutb, or anti-imperialism, even when limited to the rejection of the United States, Israel, and the West, is enough to make an Islamist a man of the left or an ally of the left. It is obviously a gross error. ” It is however good to recall that at the same time, others, like communist or libertarian collectives and Maxime Rodinson, did not wait for Manuel Valls to criticize this attitude complacently.
“These facts, real and undeniable, do not, however, allow to speak of” Islamo-leftism “”
A few decades later, it was the British who were the first to practice alliances with political Islam. Indeed, after the attacks of 2001, and in reaction to growing racism, Trotskyists of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) allied themselves with the Islamists of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) in an electoral coalition called Respect Party ( “For a brief history of Islamo-leftism”, C. Bourseiller, in La Revue des Deux Mondes, October 2018). In the same movement, we will then see in several French-speaking countries strange bridges forming between the radical left and political Islam, whether on the occasion of demonstrations against the 2004 law on religious symbols in schools, marches against Israel’s colonization policy, or anti-racism conferences. The landmark event at the time was Tariq Ramadan’s participation in the 2004 European Social Forum – an event however carried by alter-globalists.
These facts, real and undeniable, however, do not allow us to speak of “Islamo-leftism”. “The problem of Islamo-leftism is first of all that it is applied to people who are neither Islamists nor leftists. Even if we take” leftism “in its broadest, most common sense possible, in the ordinary French language it refers to the formations to the left of the PCF, they were the Trotskyists, the Maoists, in short people questioning both the republican form of government and the right to property. of the term Islamo-leftists do not even question representative democracy, in general, do not discuss economic issues preferring societal issues, and overall are not Muslims “, explains Nicolas Lebourg. A brochure of the anarchist journal Neither homeland or border s edge beside the finger at the “reformism” of “Islamo-leftists” – the NPA, often referred to by this term, appearing also regularly in the presidential elections. “There is a graduated petty bourgeoisie,” Nicolas Lebourg tells us, ” which has identity obsessions that it expresses, with much ado to find social capital there, in the form of a cultural asset that its enemies call” Islamo- leftism “, but it is, therefore, a compound word where the two items do not correspond to the produced object.”
ISLAMOPHOBIA: A GIGANTIC FRACTURE WITHIN THE LEFT
Let’s start by saying one thing: not everyone who denounces the use of the term “Islamophobia” is necessarily hostile to Muslims. It would thus be difficult to qualify as racist personalities as diverse as Régis Debray, Jocelyn Bézecourt of the site atheisme.org, Caroline Fourest, Gilles Kepel, or the Trotskyists of Lutte Ouvrière. However, the history of the word has often been misunderstood in French-speaking countries, and it is only recently that certain studies have been able to trace its origins. For a while, following an article in the journal Prochoix, many secularists may have thought that it was a word created by the Iranian mullahs. However, several studies have shown the opposite. Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, the author of an article on the history of the word, explains: “It is indeed a neologism, but it dates back to 1910 when it was used for the first time by Alain Quellen in his doctoral thesis in law, and by Maurice Delafosse, the colonial administrator who opposes him to “Islamophilia” to recommend to the administration and politicians of the time “absolute neutrality vis-à-vis all religions.”The definition given by Quellen is very clear since he makes this word to designate “a prejudice against Islam widespread among peoples of Western and Christian civilization”. However, we must not confuse the word and the thing, and historian Jean-Louis Triaud has shown that Islamophobia existed long before the term was invented. In any case, it is perfectly false to assert that it would be an invention of the Islamists: this word was created by French authors, in a colonial context. “
If its origins tend to no longer be debated, it is its use which, for its part, causes considerable tears within the left. The participation of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the march against Islamophobia had, in fact, provoked enormous turmoil within his political camp, just like the proclamation of the philosopher Henri Peña-Ruiz to the “right to be Islamophobic”. As La Croix raises it, this debate goes beyond the purely semantic question, putting in opposition visions of the world and antagonistic definitions of secularism as of anti-racism. On the one hand, behind this term some denounce a dangerous confusion between criticism of racism and criticism of blasphemy which would favor Islamist discourse; on the other, we oppose the idea that Islamophobia is real racism, and that denouncing it would only serve to make it invisible.
Researcher Nedjib Sidi Moussa thus affirms that “the term resurfaced, first in English, at the beginning of the 1990s following the Salman Rushdie affair, to designate” anti-Muslim sentiment “, then it spread after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Danish cartoons. But this popularization does not take place without ambiguities among some of its promoters, like the OIC, an intergovernmental organization that presents itself as “the collective voice of the Muslim world” and which addresses this question. by worrying both about discrimination, while affirming its refusal of criticism of religions. It is precisely this amalgamation carried out by these institutions – but also by racists and other xenophobes – which encourage me not to use the term “Islamophobia”, without denying the existence of anti-Muslim racism. “But according to Le Quellec, “one cannot reduce the meaning of a word to its partisan use by such or such a particular group, or else entire sections of our vocabulary should be banned. It is true that other terms have been proposed in place of Islamophobia, such as “misislamism”, constructed on the model of misogyny or misanthropy, to specifically denounce the detestation of Islamism and not that of Islam or Muslims, but the usage did not hold them back. “
TOO VAGUE CONCEPTS
Ultimately, it is clear that these three terms cast an opaque veil over the real issues which are now faced by secularists, revolutionaries, and ordinary citizens who are little aware of these intellectual-militant quibbles. Weapons of massive rhetorical destruction, the few deep reflections they could arouse is immediately drowned in the interminable identity conflicts of which they reveal the significance. Of course, it is interesting to draw analogies between fascist totalitarianism and Islamist totalitarianism, it is relevant to observe – and denounce if necessary – the tolerance of a certain left towards Islamic clericalism, and it is necessary to denounce anti-racism. -Muslim where it is. But do these concepts effectively allow it? We are entitled to doubt it.
On the other hand, they allow the left-right opposition to be reactivated from time to time on societal bases, and to play the tireless centrist struggle against “the extremes”. In a context of decaying public space and identity tension, the political debate often boils down to a confrontation between “Islamophobes” and “Islamo-leftists”, accused of supporting the “Islamo-fascists”. In addition, they obstruct the realization of the fact that the entire traditional political horizon shares responsibility in the legitimization of political Islam: the center-left, for example, has never ceased, everywhere in Europe, to flatter communitarianism and religious identities in order to glean the voices of vulnerable populations,, Caroline Fourest). The right was not left out either: its frantic pursuit of profit led it to conclude numerous agreements with certain theocracies such as Saudi Arabia, leaving wealthy petro-monarchs to invest in entire sections of French society. while supporting states that have financed international terrorism. Let us also recall that, probably out of conservatism and electoral, Sarkozy, as early as 2004, had pleaded for religious supervision in the suburbs and working-class neighborhoods in the name of a “positive” conception of secularism, and it is as a Minister of the Interior that he introduced the Muslim Brotherhood within the CFCM, through the participation of the UOIF.
