Islamism and Totalitarianism

Bale, Jeffrey M.

doi:10.1080/14690760903371313

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Honoring traditions is not necessarily bad in itself, depending on what the ultimate intentions and aspirations are. During the 19 th and 20 th centuries, political activists in Islamic countries frequently faced challenges under the dictatorial, totalitarian or colonial forms of their governments [21]. Under such circumstances, they often resorted to Islamic concepts as the means of materializing their true demand, which was establishing democracy as their ultimate goal [21].…”

Section: Islamic Resurrection and Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Iranian Constitution: A Compilation of Irreconcilable Articles

Zalzar¹,

Sadegh²

2019

JPSIR

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The current Iranian constitution is the product of two irreconcilable and at times contradictory perspectives, i.e., a merger of the traditional guidelines from Shiite Islam (or Sharia law) with some principles similar in spirit to the French constitution. The purpose of this literature review is to objectively examine the contents of the Iranian constitution and elaborate on the similarities and differences compared with the principles enshrined in the French constitution that made France a major cradle of Western democracy. Despite the limited analytical literature available on the subject, the authors selected the relevant articles and books to critically compare and contrast the language and spirit of the Iranian constitution versus its French counterpart. The Iranian constitution is a reflection of the Islamic theocracy and fundamentalism, combined with democratic-appearing but irreconcilable articles to govern the nation's affairs by three branches of independent yet controlled government. The constitution provides the freedom to obey the absolute and unaccountable Leader, and the 177 articles that are claimed to be sufficient for prosperity in this world and the eternal life after. The outcome of the Iranian constitution, which was never tested in a real society before its ideals were put into practice in Iran, suggest that the Islamic guidelines are not reconcilable for the most part with those of the modern democracies as a method of governance in the 21 st century.

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Section: Islamic Resurrection and Democracymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Iranian Constitution: A Compilation of Irreconcilable Articles

Zalzar¹,

Sadegh²

2019

JPSIR

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“…13). Advocates of the term – who Bale (2009) characterized as Islam-bashers – tend not to differentiate between the negative strains of Islamism or jihadism and Islam in general.…”

Section: The Contested Debate Over Radical Islammentioning

confidence: 99%

Magic words or talking point? The framing of ‘radical Islam’ in news coverage and its effects

Hoewe

Bowe

2018

Journalism

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This study examines the use of the term ‘radical Islam’ as a framing device from two perspectives. First, a content analysis of The New York Times and Washington Post suggested that ‘radical Islam’ is a recent addition to the public lexicon and is rapidly rising in use. The term is more recently associated with negatively charged language and linked to terrorism. Second, an experiment showed that reading about a perpetrator associated with ‘radical Islam’ (as opposed to ‘terrorism’) led to an increase in Islamophobia among all participants – indicated through fear of Muslims and Islam. An interaction effect emerged such that self-identified conservatives did not differentiate between ‘radical Islam’ and ‘terrorism’ when determining culpability, but self-identified liberals did. These results indicate that the US news media has increasingly linked ‘radical Islam’ with terrorism and other negative ideas, while some sectors of the American public struggle to disentangle the two concepts.

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“…75 According to Jeffrey M. Bale, Islamic doctrines are "intrinsically anti-democratic and totalitarian ideologies," insofar as they reproduce in a religious form all typical features of secular Western totalitarianism: Manicheism, monism (notably utopian collectivism), and paranoia, systematically aiming at dehumanizing and destroying their enemies. 76 Curiously, Saudi Arabia, the Islamic regime that is the closest to the totalitarian model, is rarely mentioned by the new Western crusaders. But different from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saudi Arabia is an ally of the West, occupying an economic and geopolitical position that automatically excludes it from the axis of evil.…”

Section: Islamic Ghostsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Totalitarianism Between History and Theory

Traverso

2017

History and Theory

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Born in Italy at the beginning of the 1920s, the concept of totalitarianism experienced an uninterrupted succession of metamorphoses and changes throughout the twentieth century, until its last rebirth after September 11, 2001, when it was remobilized in the struggle against Islamic terrorism. It is an astonishingly plastic, resilient, and inevitably ambiguous concept, insofar as it merges both politics and scholarship, and belongs, with a different meaning, to almost all currents of thought. Born in the political struggle, it shifted successfully to political theory in which, beyond their discrepancies, most of its interpreters defined it as a new form of power that exceeds the classical categories of political theory running from Aristotle to Max Weber—despotism, tyranny, dictatorship—and grounded in a combination of ideology and terror. The migration of this concept to the field of historical studies, however, was much more controversial. Useful in defining the nature and forms of political regimes, and eventually to establish their typology, “totalitarianism” becomes a problematic, limited, not to say useless concept for analyzing their origins, developments, and fall. On the one hand, it favors a selective historical comparison between different political regimes; on the other hand, it simply juxtaposes them, stressing some analogies but neglecting other fundamental dimensions of historical investigation (origins, duration, ideologies, and social basis). This article is a plea for critical use of this category, which implies both a rejection of its recurrent ideological uses and its integration with the achievements of social and cultural history.

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Islamism and Totalitarianism

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

The Iranian Constitution: A Compilation of Irreconcilable Articles

The Iranian Constitution: A Compilation of Irreconcilable Articles

Magic words or talking point? The framing of ‘radical Islam’ in news coverage and its effects

Totalitarianism Between History and Theory

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