Mick Hartley

1. Islam is a religion founded in 610 by the Prophet Muhammad.
2. Islamism is an ideological and political movement which arose upon the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 ("Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in…

— Alan Johnson (@Fathom_Editor) February 26, 2024

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1. Islam is a religion founded in 610 by the Prophet Muhammad.
2. Islamism is an ideological and political movement which arose upon the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 ("Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."), and among urban professionals in India in 1920 and 1930s, before spreading globally. Key ideologists include Hassan al-Banna, Mawlana Sayyid Abul A’la Mawdudi, Al-Nabhani, and Sayyid Qutb.
3. It is a hugely diverse movement which encompasses reformists, radicals and Jihadists and can take ‘right’ (Taliban) and ‘left’ forms (Shariati in Iran absorbed the anti-imperialist ideas of the European far left just as the Brotherhood / Salafist Reformism had earlier drawn on the ideas, slogans, and models of organisation of the inter-war left-totalitarian tradition).
4. All wings are anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-democratic, antisemitic and – implicitly or explicitly – totalitarian.
5. The claim that the two – Islam and Islamism, the religion and the ideology / movement – are identical is untrue.
6. The claim that there is just no relationship whatsoever between Islam and Islamism is – just as a brute empirical fact – also untrue.
7. To understand the complex, historically evolving relationship between Islam and Islamism you have to be willing to read, think, and discuss: you have to *know stuff*.
8. To treat any criticism of the ideology and movement of Islamism as a ‘phobia’ towards the religion of Islam would be wrong and a disaster for Western liberal democracies, leaving us defenceless.
9. To treat any criticism of the canonical texts of the religion, the Koran and Hadith, as an expression of hatred towards all Muslims would be wrong and would abandon those on the receiving end of some of those canonical texts: women, gays, Jews, and Muslim reformers, for a start.