Recommended reading: the meat

The second begins with a David Briggs piece in Huffington Post, Is It Time to Reconsider the Term Islamist?, which leads Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Lauren Morgan to respond at Gunpowder & Lead with Islamism in the Popular Imagination — which in turn generated Bernard Finel‘s post On Islamists and Rick Santorum. Daveed then comes back with Islamists and Rick Santorum: A Response to Bernard Finel.

I’m not going to quote Briggs, whose piece strikes me as light-weight, except to note that he introduces the question of comparisons between Obama and Rick Santorum (potential “Christianists”) with “Islamists”:

At this year’s National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama said his policies were grounded in his Christian beliefs. In a 2008 speech, former GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum said America was in the middle of a spiritual war in which “Satan has his sights on the United States of America.”

Are Obama and/or Santorum Christianists?

The answers to those questions would depend on how the term is defined. But it is unlikely you will hear any Christian politician or activist referred to in that way.

What American and western audiences are increasingly hearing, however, since the political and social upheaval that accompanied the Arab spring, is the term Islamist.

Daveed and Lauren:

You would be hard pressed to find anything beyond a few fringe commentators who are worried about Islamism because politicians representing this movement refer to Islamic principles in their rhetoric. Rather, it is the specific relationship between religion and state that worries observers. (I mean, really, does Briggs think that Obama will make canon law the law of the land if given a second term?)

Briggs bolsters his case by quoting Mansoor Moaddel, an Eastern Michigan University sociologist, as saying that in his interviews, he found that “‘in some respects, Mr. Santorum is more extremist’ than leading figures of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.” Nor is Briggs the only Western commentator to fatuously compare Santorum to Islamic extremists. To actually approach the claim being made by Briggs and others — that Islamist politicians possess an agenda that is less extreme than that of Rick Santorum — a better approach is to look at the practice in Middle Eastern states, as well as the policies advocated by Islamist politicians with significant audiences (as opposed to mere fringe players). That is what we do in this entry.

And do they indeed do — detailing with bullet points and commentary the practical behaviors of a variety of Islamic nations in respect to apostasy, blasphemy, the rights of women, and gay rights in the rest of their lengthy and instructive piece.

Enter Bernard Finel, who draws a fine distinction:

GR argues convincingly that policies put in place by Islamist parties throughout the Middle East are more extreme than Santorum. And indeed, on issues like religious freedom, women’s rights, and gay rights, GR is quite correct. Islamist regimes are worse than anything Santorum has proposed.

But I’d argue this is an apples to oranges comparison. Santorum’s limits are defined, I think, more by the limits imposed by American institutions rather his ideology per se. In other words, GR is comparing institutionally unconstrained ideological positions with those heavy constrained by institutions. It actually is not at all difficult to find actors on the right who would like to see religious freedom severely curtailed. Indeed, there is even a “Constitutional theory” out there among right wingers than Muslims should not receive First Amendment protections because either Islam is a “cult” or because it was not extant in any significant way in the United States when the Bill of Rights was ratified.

I’ll get into the issue of “actors on the right who would like to see religious freedom severely curtailed” in an follow up to this post — and touch on the usage “Christianist” there also — here, I’ll just say that Finel is articulating something I’ve “felt but not thought” or perhaps “thought but not articulated” myself quite a few times, and while I’m not entirely satisfied with his phrasing about “constraint by institutions” I think there’s a serious point in there, and I’m glad to see it surfaced.

Back to Daveed:

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