I think it’s fair to call the Iranian Revolution Islamist in character. Why wouldn’t you think it applies?
Nitpick: he’s a Representative, and out of the Presidential race. In addition to that, he’s not running for reelection this November, so I’m betting his influence will be much diminished.
I think he is referring to Islamist as being descended from Arab movements like Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Wahabbism. It is distinguished from the Shi’ite movement in Iran that was of a different nature. I think he’s trying to distinguish between the religious answer to the Pan-Arab Nationalism of Nasser.
Of course, he’s one of the only people who draws that distinction. Islamism is used by most people as a catch-all term.
I don’t think it’s a useful distinction to make, because there was a good deal of crossfertilization between Qutb and the Brotherhood on the one hand, and Iranian clerical radicalism on the other. If you remember, the Egyptian Brotherhood celebrated and praised the Iranian revolution (until Iran started getting close to Syria). Safavi was influenced by the Brotherhood, at least, and Qutb influenced Khomeini.
I actually didn’t know all that. I’m not surprised, it makes sense that related ideologies would influence each other though. I started reading ‘The Middle East’ by Bernard Lewis because of these threads this morning. In the introduction he talks a lot about hats and how they represent the dramatic changes in the Middle-East.
I tend to agree with you that Islamist is a catch-all term, I just didn’t want to get into the fight with tomndebb about it. One of the problems with these debates is that the dominant side of the debate within the venue’s context will pick nits regarding semantics, and will even attempt to veto the use of the common usage of the term as used by the opposition. If I went to a more right wing message board, calling the Iranians Islamist wouldn’t even cause the bat of an eyelash.
I tend to have some multiculturalist sympathies pretty ingrained in me, but I’ve been leaning toward reading the conservative viewpoint a lot more lately, and I realized that I’ve seen this debate pretty common on a radical philosophical right wing board I frequent, one that embraces theological underpinnings of foreign policy concerns, but that I was kind of moving out of touch with the other side of the debate. So it’s interesting to see it here on the Dope which tends to be a more moderate left leaning board, though with a heavy multiculturalist bias IMO. So it’s interesting to see the dichotomy.
I make no bogeyman of Sullivan and I do not oppose him for being “distateful.” I would oppose any effort to prevent a college course from studying him. I would oppose any effort to prevent him from giving speeches. I would oppose any effort to censor him. He is not a bogeyman to be feared.
However, the guy has presented an enormous amount of punditry that has shaped the opinions of too many people, given that nearly every point he makes about the Middle East or Islam is wrong and wrong-headed. He’s not a bogeyman, just one more ignorant xenophobe.
As to Islamist, the subsequent discussion was correct: I find it odd to use the word that originated specifically to identify an extreme Sunni movement when describing Shi’ites. It is rather like using the words Nazi or Fascist to describe Stalin’s Soviet Union. It is not a matter of nitpicking so much as attempying to avoid the sort of idiotic confusion we occasionally see when some clown says “Well, the Nazis were socialists so Fascism and Naziism are Left wing movements.”
If folks around here insist on using “Islamist” for the Iranian theocracy, I can’t stop them. Of course, “Islamofascist” remains a meaningless word employed simply to group all the various Muslim people we don’t like under one scary name–even when it says notyhing about their motivations and ignores the fact that many of them are in opposition to each other.