Islamofascism? Hitler, Muhammad, and Islam

Cliff May deserves credit for his recent National Review Online column “The New True Believers.” May dares to associate – however indirectly, and in the end,  I am afraid, inadequately – those he terms, using layers of prophylactic rhetorical separation from orthodox Islam, either “militant jihadists,” or “Islamists,” and their movement as “militant Islamism,” – with Hitler, and his “movement,” i.e., Nazism.  

May’s inchoate effort should be applauded for its attempted illustration of any possible ideological nexus between Hitler’s Nazism and Islam. But ultimately, the associations he makes – the “ability to nurse grievances and stoke ambitions,” Germans/Aryans as a master race, and the concordant supremacism of  “militant Islamism,” and, invoking Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer,” generic “fanaticism” – ignore much more intimate, if uncomfortable to acknowledge, doctrinal and historical connections between ancient Islam and modern Nazism, upon which I will elaborate. 

Diana West has summarized how the prevailing usage of the term “Islamofascism” obfuscates critically relevant truths:

“Islamofascism” is a made-up word that draws a politically correct curtain over mainstream, traditional Islam, in effect shielding the religion and its tenets from scrutiny when considering what drives our jihadist enemies – as they are the first to declare.

My discussion introduces a doctrinally and historically relevant context if the currently much abused term “Islamofascism” is to be understood and employed appropriately, acknowledging the direct nexus between Islam, pre-modern despotism, and modern totalitarian ideologies.

Islam, Nazism, and Totalitarianism 

During an interview conducted in the late 1930s (published in 1939), Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychiatry, was asked “…had he any views on what was likely to be the next step in religious development?” Jung replied, in reference to the Nazi fervor that had gripped Germany, 

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Muhammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future. 

Albert Speer, who was Hitler’s Minister of Armaments and War Production, wrote a contrite memoir of his World War II experiences while serving a 20-year prison sentence imposed by the Nuremberg tribunal. Speer’s narrative includes this discussion, which captures Hitler’s racist views of Arabs on the one hand, and his effusive praise for Islam on the other:  

Hitler had been much impressed by a scrap of history he had learned from a delegation of distinguished Arabs. When the Mohammedans attempted to penetrate beyond France into Central Europe during the eighth century, his visitors had told him, they had been driven back at the Battle of Tours. Had the Arabs won this battle, the world would be Mohammedan today. For theirs was a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith. Such a creed was perfectly suited to the Germanic temperament. Hitler said that the conquering Arabs, because of their racial inferiority, would in the long run have been unable to contend with the harsher climate and conditions of the country. They could not have kept down the more vigorous natives, so that ultimately not Arabs but Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of this Mohammedan Empire. Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking, “You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness?”