Islamofascism: What exactly does it mean? (Does it matter?)

by Miki Hirama

A couple of days ago I witnessed a brief discussion between one of our College Republican friends (yes, we have some) and John (our valiant president) at a Barnes and Noble. John saw a book with “Islamofascism” in the title. He then objected to the frequency in which conservatives use the word “Fascism”. John claimed that conservatives overuse the term and many times they use the word to refer to people that aren’t fascist at all. Our Republican friend defends the term by saying that many Islamic cultures tend to gravitate toward fascist ideas.

I didn’t feel the need to say anything at the time because I thought that neither of them were completely wrong (nor completely right). But I thought about it a little more and decided that words like “Islamofascism” simply do not belong in an intelligent political discussion.

First, I believe that it is important to make a point about the nature of language itself. Language, like clean air or national parks, is a public good. No one really owns any of these things, but many people have a stake in the public goods and benefit from them (at least anybody who wants to express themselves, breathe, or fish in lakes at the park). But all of these public goods require maintenance or else they degrade. For example, if you neglect the amount of pollution your nation produces you might not have clean air to breathe anymore, or make the lakes so dirty that you can’t eat the fish. The same thing can happen to language. While the degradation of language might not happen due to pollution, it can still occur as a result of neglect or just plain laziness. Here I’m talking about the use of slang in our everyday lives and our overall inability to properly express ourselves. Slang is labeled as slang simply because it makes languages more ambiguous and less clear. For example, the word “gay” just used to be an adjective that meant happy or content, and then the meaning was twisted and is now used to refer to homosexual people. Even more recently the word is now used to describe something that is not cool (on that note what the hell does “cool” mean anyways?) And now sometimes I have no idea what the word means anymore.

The degradation of language can also happen intentionally for sinister reasons. This mostly comes from government officials, interest groups, or members of the media, who have their own agendas. These are people who not really interested in having an open debate on an issue, but instead choose to confuse everybody else into believing that they are wrong. The manipulation of language I’m describing is the same as the it is depicted in George Orwell’s novel, 1984, as newspeak. The vocabulary of “newspeak” consists of “words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them.”

I believe that “Islamofascism” is one of these words (among many, many others) that have been deliberately constructed. Ok, did I lose any of you just now? Well, it doesn’t really matter if you agree with me or not because the use of words like “Islamofascism” comes from both language neglect and manipulation. Think about it. Are you 100% sure on the exact definition of Islamofascism? If you’re not sure, then who do you think is? The fact of the matter is words are simply tools of expression. They only have as much power and meaning as can be understood by other people. And while many people may not actually know the correct definition of “Islamofascism” it’s clear that it has a negative connotation. I mean, just say the word out loud once or twice. Islamofascism. It almost sounds like a racial slur. To many people, it’s just a politically correct word used to insult Muslims.

So can we just look the exact definition of the term up in a dictionary and restore the meaning that it was meant to have? The answer is a resounding “no”. Meanings of words are inherently subjective. There’s no such thing as an exact definition of a word, especially one that was invented by politicians and their pundits. So what’s the purpose of a dictionary? Dictionaries don’t tell you the exact definition of a word, it just tells you what other people think it means. Samuel Hayakawa, a Canadian literary scholar, writes in his essay, “How Dictionaries Are Made”, “The writing of a dictionary is not a task of setting up authoritative statements about the ‘true meanings’ of words, but a task of recording, to the best of one’s ability, what various words have meant to authors in the distant or immediate past. The writer of a dictionary is a historian, not a lawgiver.” In order to put new meaning into a word you have to have a large-scale consensus about a definition of a word.

We put up with this problem in our language system for most words. However, the difference with words like “Islamofascism” is that they are completely unnecessary. It’s the polar opposite of slang (which is just as bad), it’s jargon. You can express yourself more clearly and efficiently by avoiding it. The use of the word just fogs up the issue with ambiguity and, therefore, does not deserve a place in mature political discourse.