Dr. Michael Saba, Special to Arab News

WASHINGTON, 7 February 2004 — Do we call a follower of political Judaism a “Judaismist”? Can we call an advocate of “political Christianity” a “Christianist”? To put these terms on an equal basis with the term “Islamist”, we must first define political Judaism and political Christianity, or can we? Can we even define political Islam, the standard term used to define an Islamist?

It is very interesting to go back in history to see who first used the term Islamist and why it was first used (try this for yourself). However, it is even more interesting to see how the term Islamist has evolved and is used today. We can note that many, possibly most, Muslims that debate the issue of political activism today use the term “Islamist” themselves. They argue about various types of Islamists and whether their “Islamist” is more correct that another “Islamist”.

Let’s go back for a moment to the term “Judaismist” or possibly “Jewist”. These terms would probably be immediately condemned as anti-Semitic, particularly if one read that Palestinians were being massacred by a “Jewist” or “Judaismist”. How can one use a respected religion or religious term that refers to whole body of a religion to refer to a vile action? What about an act of violence by a “Christianist”? Think about the public outcry if one referred to the killing of an abortion clinic physician by a Christian individual who claimed that he was doing this as a “Christian act” and, therefore, the media called the culprit a “Christianist”? Yet almost everyone including many Muslims use the term Islamist freely and without regard. We have also watched the term “Sunni triangle” evolve in usage during the world’s attention to the Iraq crisis. We could note that the term was used in the media very infrequently (maybe less than a dozen times in all of the world’s major media throughout the 1990s and early 2000s) and was usually applied as an anthropological term to refer to a section of Iraq that had a significant Sunni Muslim population.

The use of the term exploded in 2002 and 2003 and has now been used tens of thousands of times by the media mostly as a negative to refer to acts of violence in Iraq. Does that make this form of usage of “Sunni” a racist term? You decide! The battle of words and terms can be as important if not more important that the battle of guns. In the United States today, one can feel a certain coldness and distancing when you are introduced as an Arab or a Muslim. It has been less than four decades that Americans of Lebanese, Syrian, Palestinian, Iraqi and other Arabic-speaking heritages have been referred to as Arab-Americans. Even today some of these Arabic— speaking ethnics take issue when one refers to them as Arab-Americans.

For many years, US State Department officials and scholars who studied the Arab world and reported Arabs and the Arab world in neutral or even positive terms were referred to as “Arabists” (interestingly an “Arabist” was never an Arab). Books and articles were written about these “Arabists” and how their perspective was warped and unfair, particularly when the topic of Israel was raised. A definitive book was written in 1993 and titled “The Arabist — The Romance of an American Elite” by Robert Kaplan. In his book Kaplan quotes Richard Murphy, a former ambassador to Syria and to Saudi Arabia as saying the term Arabist “became a pejorative for he who intellectually sleeps with Arabs.” Murphy’s wife Anne, goes on to say, “If you call yourself an Arabist, people may think you’re anti-Semitic.”

Kaplan also quotes Francis Fukuyama, a former member of the State Department’s Policy Planning staff and a neoconservative, calling Arabists “a sociological phenomena, an elite within an elite, who have been more systematically wrong than any other specialists in the Diplomatic Corps. This is because Arabists not only take on the cause of the Arabs, but also the Arabs tendency for self-delusion.” Finally, the term Arabist became so loaded that with the exception of a few retired foreign affairs officials, no one wanted to be labeled an Arabist any more. It had gained the status of a “Nazi” or “Communist” in the American lexicon. So when one wonders as to why some Americans of Arab or Muslim heritage sometimes wither in a crowd when referred to as a Muslim-American or an Arab-American, go back and look at the evolution and usage of the terms “Islamist” and “Arabist”. And if you really want to get into words, terms and their derivatives check out the term “terrorist”. Mahathir Mohamed take note!

— Dr. Michael Saba is the author of “The Armageddon Network” and is an international relations consultant.