When a Phrase Takes On New Meaning: ‘Radical Islam,’ Explained - The New York Times
6/17/16, 3:08 PM
When a Phrase Takes On New Meaning: ‘Radical Islam,’ Explained - The New York Times
6/17/16, 3:08 PM
“Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away.”
What does “radical Islam” even mean and why has it become so controversial?
Is this argument just semantics, or does it go deeper?
What does the phrase mean?
Let’s start with the words. “Islam” is a 1,500-year-old religion whose 1.6 billion
http://nyti.ms/1YvpQup
followers worldwide observe a spectrum of customs and traditions. “Radical” can
mean something very different or against tradition, or be defined as extreme views,
MIDDLE EAST
practices and policies.
When a Phrase Takes On New Meaning:
‘Radical Islam,’ Explained
The Interpreter
By MAX FISHER
The words, absent political context, could be read as trying to distinguish
fringe interpretations of Islam, including justifications for violence, from the
mainstream majority view, which is peaceful. But that context — including who
shouts the phrase and who studiously avoids uttering it — has ladened it with
pernicious meaning in particular quarters.
JUNE 16, 2016
Shadi Hamid, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said that
It was nearly 18 months ago, shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, when
before the controversy began, he did not use the phrase “radical Islam” much, but
a reporter for National Public Radio, Mara Liasson, observed at a White House
neither did he find it overly objectionable. After two years of politicization, though,
press briefing that President Obama and his aides had “bent over backwards” to
Mr. Hamid and other analysts say the phrase has worrisome connotations,
avoid using the phrase “radical Islam.” The press secretary, Josh Earnest, said this
potentially maligning all Muslims or Islam itself.
was because “these terrorists are individuals who would like to cloak themselves in
“Why would you feel such a need to use this particular combination of words,
the veil of a particular religion,” opening a debate over the phrase that has taken on
when the vast majority of us agree that this is terrorism and that it should be
new rancor amid the massacre in Orlando.
stopped or countered?” he asked. “These terms are being used as dog whistles.”
“In his remarks today, President Obama disgracefully refused to even say the
words ‘Radical Islam,’ ” Donald J. Trump said in a statement within hours of when
Will McCants, another Brookings scholar, told The Washington Post in
Omar Mateen killed 49 people at a gay nightclub and invoked the Islamic State in a
December 2015 that “every bit of that phrase is analytically unhelpful” because of
911 call. “For that reason alone, he should step down.”
its lack of specificity. “Is this the wine-drinking Islam of the poets?” he asked. “The
court Islam of the caliph? What kind of Islam are you even talking about?”
The next day, Mr. Obama called the focus on phrasing “a political distraction.”
Republicans who invoke “radical Islam” seem to be trying to telegraph certain
“What exactly would using this label accomplish?” the president asked.
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arguments about Muslims, political correctness, and the United States’ failure to
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When a Phrase Takes On New Meaning: ‘Radical Islam,’ Explained - The New York Times
6/17/16, 3:08 PM
When a Phrase Takes On New Meaning: ‘Radical Islam,’ Explained - The New York Times
6/17/16, 3:08 PM
stop the march of extremist groups across the Middle East. At the same time,
candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said after the attacks in
Democrats who reject it are also making a political statement, one touching on
Paris last November. He likened Mr. Obama’s avoidance of the phrase to “saying
Islamophobia and inclusiveness.
we weren’t at war with Nazis, because we were afraid to offend some Germans who
may have been members of the Nazi Party but weren’t violent themselves.”
If it seems unlikely that a single phrase with no fixed definition could contain
Over time, the phrase morphed into a way for critics to explain why the Obama
all that information, the fight over “radical Islam” becomes easier to understand
administration had failed to anticipate or stop the rise of the Islamic State.
when examined in its initial context: as a way to make sense of the rise of the
Islamic State.
“You cannot fight and win a war on radical Islamic terrorism if you’re unwilling to
utter the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’ ” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, said in
What is the controversy about?
January, back when he, too, was clamoring for the White House.
Throughout late 2014, as the group, also known as ISIS and ISIL, conquered
Why do some consider it offensive?
much of Iraq in a campaign of shocking violence, Americans struggled to discern
what role, if any, religion played in its ideology. Because only 38 percent of
Over time, “radical Islam” has taken on darker connotations. Mr. Trump,
Americans personally know someone who is Muslim, according to a 2014 Pew poll,
according to Mr. Hamid of Brookings, “invested these words with new meaning.”
most have little firsthand knowledge to go on.
As his campaign of anti-Muslim policy proposals and speech gained traction,
Mr. Obama, then and now, has tried to separate the terrorists from Islam,
Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals sought to match him. Mr. Cruz, for example, urged
urging tolerance of Muslims in the United States and abroad.
refusing Syrian refugees if they are Muslim. Ben Carson suggested Muslims should
be barred from the presidency. They often invoked “radical Islam” at the same
“And all of us have a responsibility to refute the notion that groups like ISIL
time.
somehow represent Islam, because that is a falsehood that embraces the terrorist
narrative,” he said in February 2015.
The phrase does not explicitly say there is an intrinsic link between terrorism
and Islam. But it suggests religion is the core issue, and by using the vague
Republicans slammed him for either ignorance or a misplaced sense of
political correctness. In part because the president refused to use it, the phrase
modifier “radical,” there is an implication that any adherent can be suspect on
“radical Islam” became a shorthand for everything he would not say about ISIS,
grounds that are unclear and open to interpretation.
and therefore, a way to accuse him of privileging sensitivity over forthrightness
“To term something ‘radical Islamic violence’ condemns a religion,” Steven
when discussing the threat the group posed.
Cook, a Middle East scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in
December, “and leaves one with the erroneous impression that the competing
In its simplicity, the phrase reframes the daunting, confusing litany of
problems that contribute to terrorism — faraway failed states, complex ideologies,
modern interpretations of Islam that specifically refute violent Islamism’s
a prevalence of guns — as something much easier to understand.
worldview do not exist.”
“We are at war with radical Islam,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, then a
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When a Phrase Takes On New Meaning: ‘Radical Islam,’ Explained - The New York Times
6/17/16, 3:08 PM
Why do some leaders refuse to say it?
When a Phrase Takes On New Meaning: ‘Radical Islam,’ Explained - The New York Times
week tried to take a middle path. She described the Orlando attack as “radical
Islamism” — a small but meaningful distinction; Islam is a religion, whereas
Mr. Obama and others say that condemning “radical Islam” does not make
Islamism a political ideology calling for Islamic government. She also declared, “It
clear who is being condemned. That, they argue, risks exacerbating anti-Muslim
matters what we do, not what we say.”
sentiment in the United States, which has already grown violent.
So is ‘radical Islam’ accurate or not?
It also risks alienating Muslims abroad. Washington has long battled a
perception in the Muslim world that it is at war with Islam, a perception that can
When I asked Mr. Hamid this, he countered with a different question. Given
feed anti-American sentiment and politics.
how many labels already exist to describe terrorists that draw on Islam, why insist
on this one?
At the same time, labeling ISIS “radical Islam,” in some eyes, legitimizes the
group’s claims to represent an entire religion, when in fact most of its victims and
He listed several — “radical jihadists, Salafis, Islamist extremists, jihadis,
enemies are themselves Muslim.
jihadi-Salafists” — none of which, he said, carry the baggage of “radical Islam.”
“If we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with the broad brush, and
imply that we’re at war with an entire religion, then we’re doing the terrorists’ work
for them,” Mr. Obama said on Tuesday.
But if it’s that baggage that repels scholars, it may also be what draws others.
“Radical Islam” has come to imply certain things about issues that are closer to
home than abstract terrorist ideology: political correctness, migration, and the
question of who belongs.
Even before Mr. Trump took up the phrase as a mantra, Mr. Obama and
others resisted it as part of a larger hesitation to discuss the Islamic State’s use of
Those same issues have animated debates over terrorism and terminology in
religion as anything but false and cynical.
other societies. In Germany, “multiculturalism” has become shorthand for larger
questions of how to absorb migrants and whether there is a degree of minimum
But it is impossible to understand the Islamic State’s ideology and recruiting
power without acknowledging the role of religious beliefs that, while rejected by
assimilation. There is endless sparring over “British values,” and what sort of
the overwhelming majority of Muslims, are often earnestly held.
burden this puts on migrants before they will be welcomed into society.
France has had its own parsing of “radical Islam,” though the fight over
“I’ve always been of the view that ISIS does have something to do with Islam,”
“secularism” is even fiercer.
Mr. Hamid said. “We just have to talk about what that something is and do so in a
nuanced, constructive way.”
Even majority Muslim societies have had versions of this same argument, Mr.
Hamid pointed out. In Egypt, he said, the struggle over terms is, in part, a way of
He called it “problematic” that many Americans, including the president, do
not seem “comfortable speaking about religion as a motivating force or how it
litigating whether parties like the Muslim Brotherhood are ideologically akin to
inspires violence or extremism, or that religion has a certain kind of power in
terror groups — and therefore whether they should be allowed to participate in
everyday life in the Middle East.”
society.
What these debates have in common is that arguing about how to define
Hillary Clinton, perhaps in tacit acknowledgment of these concerns, has this
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When a Phrase Takes On New Meaning: ‘Radical Islam,’ Explained - The New York Times
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terrorism becomes a way to push and pull the contours of national identity,
determining who is invited in to that identity and who is kept out.
In every case, the debate is framed as one of pluralism versus security. Pinning
terrorism on “multiculturalism” or non-secularism or foreign values or “radical
Islam” all portray inclusiveness as somehow threatening and exclusiveness as
safer.
The question of whether pluralism and security are indeed in tension, or
whether pluralism in fact enhances security, is one that people around the world
have long grappled with. But it’s hard to discuss because it is so core to national
identity. Debating semantics is much easier.
Follow @Max_Fisher on Twitter.
A version of this article appears in print on June 17, 2016, on page A17 of the New York edition with the
headline: When a Phrase Takes On New Meaning: ‘Radical Islam,’ Explained.
© 2016 The New York Times Company
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