User:Germen/Islamism and Fascism

The term fascism has come to mean any system of government that in various combinations:
 * 1) exalts the nation, (and in some cases the race, culture, or religion) above the individual, with the state apparatus being supreme.
 * 2) stresses absolute loyalty to a single leader.
 * 3) uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition.
 * 4) engages in severe economic and social regimentation.
 * 5) engages in syndicalist corporatism.
 * 6) implements totalitarian systems.

It must be stressed that there are various brands of islamism, which share characteristics only up to a certain degree. Several islamists, like ayatollah Sistani advocate a more pluralistic and democratic agenda. Qur'an only islamism promotes a pluralistic and democratic state in which the rights of the individual, regardless of sex or faith, are protected as well as they are in secular democracies. Quranic Muslims claim that this is the logical implementation of Quranic ethics. Mainstream islamism, however: To equate islamism with fascism, therefore, is not accurate. However, there are several resemblances between those two political systems.
 * 1) exalts the ummah above the individual and regards the islamic Caliphate as the supreme manifestation from the Ummah. Some groups of islamists, especially those which belong to islamic ethnic minorities in a Muslim minority country, have a more local agenda.
 * 2) It stresses loyalty to a single leader, the Caliph. Some nationalist activists do not, see above.
 * 3) It approves violence, such as political murder, in which it draws its inspiration from the example of Muhammad as given in several hadith    , as well as censorship laws     to forcibly suppress political (and religious) opposition, see Historical persecution by Muslims.
 * 4) It engages in severe economic and social regimentation based on groups of coreligionists, e.g. Jews, Christians, Hindus and Muslims, for which different civil laws apply, e.g. a Muslim cannot inherit from a Christian and, of course, vise versa. See: dhimmi. In theory, however, there is no restriction on social mobility within the Muslim community, although many Islamists maintain that only men should have a position of authority and that the Caliph should be a direct descendant from Muhammad or belong to the Arab Quraish clan.
 * 5) Islamism differs from fascism because it does not engage in corporatism.
 * 6) The rigid Shariah law system and the absolute rule of the Caliph is considered by some as authoritarian. Islamists state that the process of choosing a Caliph is democratic and therefore cannot be equalised with authoritarian rule. A modern state did not exist at the first centuries of islam, so islamists have a certain freedom to adapt existing non-islamic political structures. Those structures, of course, must be compliant with Shari'ah law, but can be of a pluralistic or authoritarian nature. A good example is Iran, where there exists representative government to some limited degree and the equally islamist Saudi Arabia and the former Taliban regime, which until recently did not have representative governing bodies.