The Problem Is Islam—Not Islamism
23rd August 2024
I first heard the word “Islamism” in a video of a 2010 debate between Maajid Nawaz, Zeba Khan, Douglas Murray, and Ayan Hirsi Ali. Nawaz explained that he used the term “Islamism” to denote an ideology that advocates establishing Islamic supremacy and “Islamist” to describe anyone who wants to further that aim. This terminology allowed him, he argued, to distinguish between moderate and fundamentalist Muslims. But it is telling that we do not make this distinction with regard to any other religion. In his choice of lexicon, Nawaz was applying a double standard. He wanted to avoid tarring all Muslims with the same brush, but this could have been done by using qualifiers such as “fundamentalist,” “extremist,” or “radical.”