Googling--the word search for the enemy

Timothy Garton Ash:

What should we call the people who want to kill us? Islamofascists? Islamists? Jihadists? Or just plain murderers? You might say it doesn't matter that much; the point is to stop them. But finding the right words is part of stopping them. It means we've correctly identified our real enemies. It also means we don't unnecessarily create new enemies by making all Muslims feel that they're being treated as terrorists.

Take, for comparison, the last major terrorist threat we faced in Britain. Clearly it made a huge difference whether we described the people bent on blowing us up as "the Irish", "Catholics", "Irish Republicans", "Catholic terrorists", "nationalist extremists", "the Provos" or simply "the IRA". On the whole, and fortunately, we stuck with "the IRA". That helped us to win, after a long struggle. In this case, it's not so simple. "Al-Qaida" won't do as the functional equivalent of "the IRA" - not on its own anyway. We need a wider term to describe the kind of violent extremists who perpetrated the London and Madrid bombings. Counter-terrorism experts talk carefully of "al-Qaida-inspired" violence, but that's too complicated for everyday use, as are alternative suggestions such as "violent Muslim extremists" or "modern Islamic militancy". We need a simpler shorthand.

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If "Islamofascists" doesn't work, what about "Islamists"? Islamism, unlike Islamofascism, is a term accepted by all serious analysts of the Islamic world and by many Islamists themselves. It refers, broadly speaking, to Islam recast during the decades since the collapse of the Ottoman empire as a political ideology, a proposed organising principle for state and society. In this sense, we talk of Islamist parties - in government in Turkey, contesting elections in Morocco, officially banned yet massively organised as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. But precisely for that reason, to use the label "Islamists" for the people who are plotting to kill us obscures an important distinction.

Most Islamic terrorists are, in some sense, Islamists, but most Islamists are not terrorists. They are reactionaries. They propose a profoundly conservative religious vision of society which, in its attitudes to free speech, apostasy, homosexuality and women, is generally anathema to secular liberal convictions (including, emphatically, my own). But for the most part they do so through peaceful political means, not through violence. At the most moderate end of the broad spectrum of political Islamism, as represented by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development party in the secular state of Turkey, they are closer to the Christian religious right in the US (for many of whom homosexuality is a sin and abortion is murder) than they are to al-Qaida. For us secular liberals, this religious reaction is also a very bad thing, to be combated with all the peaceful means at our disposal, but it is a different thing - and we make a mistake if we blur the distinction.

So what should we call the suicide mass murderers and would-be mass murderers? The best answer I have found so far is "jihadists", especially in the form "jihadist extremists" or "jihadist terrorists". I know that "jihad" can also be construed as peaceful spiritual struggle, but the Muslim opinion-leaders that I have consulted seem ready to accept this usage. It places a clear demarcation line between ordinary Muslims, and even non-violent political Islamists, on the one hand, and the dealers in death on the other - yet it does not obscure the connection to their religion. In fact, it makes it clearer than either of the alternative terms. Jihad, holy war, is precisely what the suicide bombers tell us - in their pre-murder valedictory messages - that they were proudly engaged upon.

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The argument against the term jihadist is that to many Muslims jihad is a good thing. Some have suggested some Arabic terms like Hrabist. My preferred term is "Islamist religious bigots." It is descriptive and does not fall into the semantic traps of some of the other terms. It is also a great counterweight to the religious bigots' attempts to silence opposition by claiming they are Islamophobes. The fact is that the Islamist religious bigots are infidelophobes.