THE NEED TO SEE CLEARLY

In an interview with the French daily Le Figaro, the Tunisian philosopher Mezri Haddad corrected his French colleague Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had said that "Jihadism" was a new form of fascism. I found his correction both intriguing and moving, because we often think that not enough Muslims are speaking out against what we now call jihadism, and what Haddad urges us to rethink as something both broader and deeper, and even more dangerous. 

I decided to publish this here in part because Christianity has gone through the same traumatic development in past ages -- think French Wars of Religion, think Calvin's Geneva, think English Civil War -- and because Christianity is occasionally tempted, in the face of what seems like galloping indifference, to call into question its 200-300-year-old pact with the Enlightenment. 

Here, Haddad addresses Lévy:

No, Sir, it is Islamism itself that is by definition, by its nature, by axiology and by etiology a neo-fascist ideology. It is the Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood (1928) that is the mother-cell of jihadism, Khomeinism, Talibanism, Al-Qaida, Hamas, Boko Haram, Ansar-al-Sharia, the AKP, Ennahda, ISF . . . If those terminological metastases, those excrescences and ramifications becloud analysis and trouble Western rationality, they do not prevent the Muslim philosopher from seeing what unites them all and which constitutes their common foundation, i.e. the indissociability of the temporal and the spiritual, of the sacred and the profane, of the religious and the political. The difference between an Erdogan or a Ghannouchi on the one hand and a Ben Laden or Abou Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of ISIS, on the other, therefore, is not a difference of nature but of strategy or more precisely of tactics. In this respect, the Machiavellian difference based on the readjustment of means relative to ends should enlighten us more: in Islamist doctrine, Islam is a religious means in the service of a political goal: power, total power, nothing but power. 

A necrosis of Islamic civilisation, an alteration of the Muslim religion, Islamism is a neo-fascist, theocratic and totalitarian ideology.  It is not the incarnation of Islam but its incarceration. It is a “secular religion”, as Raymond Aron termed Nazism and Communism. And there [Levy] is perfectly correct when he says that “Fascislamism” is the final form of modern totalitarianism to be fought, because it constitutes a danger not only for the Muslim world but also for the Western world. In a recent address to the diplomatic corps in Saudi Arabia, King Abdallah – who knows whereof he speaks! – declared, “If they do not react, Europe and the USA will have jihadists in their own countries within a month”!

And this combat is one of philosophy against sophism, of autonomy against heteronomy, of alterity against identity, of knowledge against ignorance, of hermeneutics against exegetic fundamentalism, of truth against lies, of reason against passion, of pedagogy against demagogy, of the Enlightenment against obscurantism, of secularisation against clericalism, of liberty against totalitarianism.