My good friend, Barry Rubin, has written over at Pyjamas about whether “Moderate Islamism” exists.
Suddenly, a new term is foisted on us without serious debate or proof and we are supposed to rejoice at the triumphs of those now called “moderate Islamists.” The problem here is not just that I don’t believe such a thing exists but that no case can be made that it does. The tactics of some Islamists (participate in elections, advance slowly) are being confused with principles (impose Sharia law, overthrow all non-Islamist governments, defeat the infidels).
I’d contend that “Islamism” doesn’t exist.
Muslims, like the PM of Turkey, know that Islam is inherently political, so Islamism is an artificial construct by post Christian westerners who are the product of a thousand years of increasing separation of Church and state. It’s an intellectual crutch to avoid facing the awful truth about the nature of Islam (a truth that, thank God, the vast majority of Muslims never learn).
Islam has never successfully separated it’s personal religious observances from it’s political desire to (eventually) conquer and rule the world. And the one place it made any progress in this somewhat recently, Turkey, has just been bungeed back 400 years while the press and the pundits were looking at Libya, Kimberly Noel “Kim” Kardashian or Occupy Some Street.
There can no more be a moderate Islamism than there can be a moderate world conquest. Get over it. And of course, who can forget the “radical wing” of the Nazi Party that Hitler had to work to keep on board from his position in the “moderate” centre!
