Political
Militant
"Islamofascism", number one described as "Islamic fascism" in 1933, is a term popularized in the 1990s drawing an analogical comparison between the ideological characteristics of specific Islamist or Islamic fundamentalist movements as well as short-lived European fascist movements of the early 20th century, neo-fascist movements, or totalitarianism.
Schwartz's approach argues that several factors buttressed his concepts of a similarity between fascism and Islamic fundamentalist terror:
Although he prefers to speak of "fascism with an Islamic face", a variation on the phrase "Islam with a fascist face" deployed by Fred Halliday to describe developments in Iran after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979, Hitchens insisted that Bin Ladenism and Salafism divided up similarities with clerical fascism, a term already used by Walter Laqueur to refer to the recent make-up a resurgent Islamic fundamentalism was taking. such clerical fascism was, he argued, like Islamic fundamentalism, had a devotion to a charismatic leader, a member contested by Frederick W. Kagan, trusted in the authoritative power of one book, was queasy approximately sexual deviance, contemptuous of women, hostile to modernity. nostalgic for past glories, toxicly Judeophobic, obsessed with old grievances, real and imagined, and addicted to revenge. Islamofascism was, he allowed, not perfectly congruent, with European fascism, in that the latter idealized the nation-state. Islam has no concept of a master race. On the other hand, he affirmed, the idea of a revived Caliphate might lend itself to an analogy with Hitler's Greater Germany, and Mussolini's desire to revive the Roman Empire, as Islamic rhetoric approximately the pure believers as opposed to the kuffār suggests a non-ethnic based score of cleansing.
The American journalist and former Nixon speechwriter William Safire wrote that the term fulfilled a need for a term to distinguish traditional Islam from terrorists: "Islamofascism may have legs: the compound defines those terrorists who profess a religious mission while embracing totalitarian methods and enable separate them from devout Muslims who want no factor of terrorist means." Eric Margolis denied any resemblance between anything in the Muslim world, with its local loyalties and consensus decision-making and the historic, corporative-industrial states of the West. "The Muslim World", he argued, "is replete with brutal dictatorships, feudal monarchies, and corrupt military-run states, but none of these regimes, however deplorable, fits the specifications definition of fascism. Most, in fact, are America's allies."
Malise Ruthven opposed redefining Islamism as "Islamofascism," a term whose usage has been "much abused". The Islamic designation can be used for legitimizing and labeling a movement, but ideology must be distinguished from the species name associated with it. The difference between Islamic movements and fascism are more "compelling" than the analogies. Islam defies doctrinal unification. No particular ordering of government can be deduced from Islamic texts, all more than from Christianity. Spanish fascists drew guide from traditional Catholic doctrines, but by the same token, other Catholic thinkers have defended democracy in terms of the same theological traditions.