In “Global Jihad”, Andrew McCarthy provides a compelling term which solves all of the above problems and allows us to clearly delineate the focus group of our discussion. This term is “Islamist”—which, according to McCarthy, “is the most apt descriptor for the belief system which holds that Islam is the complete, obligatory guide to human existence, governing all matters political, social, cultural and religious, from cradle to grave, and beyond”. (McCarthy, 38) This term was first used by Muslim Brotherhood Founder Hassan al-Banna and refers “not just to terrorists but to the hundreds of millions of believers who share the terrorist goal of installing sharia societies though they do not actively encourage brutality”. (McCarthy, 39) Those Islamists, who engage in violence to further their goals, are aptly labeled “Terrorist Islamists”.
Here it must be noted that those who would ideally have the secular Western world (and indeed many Arab nations, considered not Islamized enough) converted to a theocentric Islamic doctrine under Sharia law (such as that which forms Saudi Arabia’s constitution), in other words—those we have called Islamists—are not members of a radicalized sect of Islam as much as they are ‘fundamentalists’. Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan spoke well when he said “There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam Is Islam and that’s it”. If Islam is taken to be one entire overarching indivisible doctrine as Erdogan suggests, then it behooves us to categorize those who advocate for a return to the fundamentals (in spite of a changing world) as fundamentalists, as the word itself implies. A Muslim believer who advocates a return to the fundamentals is likely to be classified as an Islamist, seeing as the Koran is believed to contain the divine, immutable, and absolute word of the one and only God, Allah. Verses such as Sura 9:29 “Fight those who believe not, In Allah nor the Last day, Nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and his Messenger, Nor Acknowledge the Religion of truth from among the people of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued”, when taken seriously—as any Fundamentalist might take them, can be seen to feed directly into the Islamist belief system, essentially making these terms one and the same. (Koran, Sura 9:29) This essentially means that an Islamist is synonymous with an Islamic Fundamentalist. But what exactly does it mean to be an Islamic fundamentalist?
Islamic Fundamentalism
According to Charles Strozier, the fundamentalist mindset is oft comprised of “several distinct characteristics including dualistic thinking, paranoia, an apocalyptic orientation that incorporates distinct perspectives on death, time, and violence, and a totalized conversion experience”. (Strozier, 11) Of these categories mentioned, two are especially relevant to our discussion: Dualistic thinking, and Apocalyptic orientation. Dualistic thinking can be seen as the separation of an entity into separate antithetical, irreconcilable warring factions: Us against them, Muslims against ‘Kafirs’ (non-believers), the Muslim East against the Secularized and immoral West. This type of thinking is evident in the verse from the Koran quoted above in the lines “Fight those who believe not, In Allah nor the last Day”. It can be clearly seen that the Koran separates believers from non-believers, commanding those who follow in Allah to fight those who don’t, effectively encouraging dualistic thinking. In fact, if we take a look at the statistics, approximately 64% of the Koran and 81% of the Sira deal with the Kafir and the Prophet Mohammed’s dealings with them. (Political Islam, 4) This suggests two things about the nature of Islamic doctrine. Since all of Islamic doctrine is contained within the trilogy of texts which contain the written word of Allah, and the accounts of Mohammed’s life, these statistics reveal how Islam devotes a great amount of energy to those who have not yet ‘submitted’ to its doctrine (the world Islam indeed means ‘submission’), encouraging all Muslims to engage in personal Jihad in order to further the cause of the Muslim ‘Umma’ (or the Muslim people). This actively and emphatically separates the Umma from the rest of the non-believing world, laying the groundwork for dualistic thinking, and encouraging all devout Muslims to heed the call of Allah and wage war against the non-believers until they have submitted to His will.
