by GARY LEUPP
Donald Trump declares that the Orlando nightclub massacre shows that he “was right on Islamic terrorism” all along, once again chiding Obama for avoiding that label. Hillary Clinton for the first time uses a similar term in an interview with Savannah Guthrie on NBC New’s Today Show.
She says, “To me, radical jihadism, radical Islamism, I think they mean the same thing. I’d be happy to say either.” The news media has treated this as a major shift; and Trump was quick to take credit.
Actually, there is a subtle difference in terminology. “Islamic” used by Trump is a synonym for “Muslim” when used as an adjective; but it has a somewhat broader application. One is more likely to talk about Islamic rather than Muslim civilization, art, science, etc. But it mainly refers to traditional religion-based activity.
Clinton’s term Islamist, on the other hand, is generally understood to refer to views and activities of modern political movements to reorder society in accordance with some conception of Islamic law (the sharia).
Thus, calling someone an “Islamic terrorist” associates Islam in general (as a religion) with terror, while calling someone an “Islamist terrorist” associates the person with a political movement enjoying limited support in the Islamic world that consists of some 1.6 billion people.
But “Islamism” is a vague concept. There are Islamists who accept multiparty democracy and participate in elections, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt that won seats in parliament in 2000, 2005 (during which it courted Coptic Christians’ support by pledging to work against restrictions on church construction) and 2011-12. (Recall that Brotherhood member Mohamed Morsi became president in 2011, only to be toppled by the U.S.-backed military within a year.)
Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), an ally of the Muslim Brotherhood, began as a self-defined Islamist party in 1983. It has since officially abandoned that term but it was never anything like the Islamist Taliban in Afghanistan.
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