'Islamo-Fascism': an Exchange

In his essay "Hate Radio," Jeffrey Herf, a professor of modern European and German history at the University of Maryland at College Park and author of Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale University Press, 2009), argues that collaboration between Arab political leaders and Nazi officials during World War II decisively influenced the development of radical Islam. "The toxic mixture of religious and secular themes forged in Nazi-era Berlin, and disseminated to the Middle East, continues to shape the extreme politics of that region," Herf writes. In a response, Richard Wolin, a professor of history and political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, described the connection Herf draws between European fascism and contemporary political Islam as "both needlessly inflammatory and historically inaccurate."

The Chronicle Review asked Herf and Wolin to continue their debate online.

Jeffrey Herf: In my new book, I do not claim, as Richard Wolin writes, that "the World War II alliance between Nazi propagandists and Arab nationalists" is "the key to understanding contemporary political Islam." I do claim that a very important chapter in the latter's history was written and spoken in Berlin during the war. I did write that "the issue of the impact of fascism and Nazism on the Middle East and its aftereffects has become inseparable from contemporary political controversies about anti-Semitism, radical Islam, 'Islamo-fascism' and international terrorism since the attacks of September 11, 2001." I placed quotation marks around the term "Islamo-fascism" to indicate to the reader that I was referring to a term of contemporary political discourse. I am not using it as a core analytical concept. I did not, as Wolin alleges, suggest that "the term 'Islamo-fascism' best describes the combination of political authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism that suffuses the Arab world." I do offer abundant evidence that one key episode in the history of political Islam lay in its connections to fascist and Nazi ideology.

In addition, Wolin wrongly asserts that I use "the epithet Islamo-fascism" at "several pivotal junctures" in my book. I have done a search of the PDF of the manuscript. The above reference to the term's presence as a contemporary political controversy is the only time that it appears. I'm willing to defend my argument, but I am not responsible for arguments that I've not made.

That said, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World offers an unprecedented amount of documentation of the propaganda that resulted from the fusion of Nazi ideology with radical Arab nationalism and militant Islam. This accomplishment is not to be taken for granted. If examining this cultural fusion was easy, it would have been done a long time ago. The new evidence demonstrates a heretofore insufficiently appreciated connection between Nazism and the specifically religious roots of politicized Islam. It entailed a blend of radical European anti-Semitism with a selective reading of the traditions of Islam. Of particular importance was how a hatred of the Jews was fused with a hatred of Zionism. Nazi Arabic-language propaganda depicted both the Jews and the Zionists as parts of an international conspiracy whose purpose was to destroy Islam and dominate the Arab world. Politicized Islam is the product of indigenous radicalization and crises of modernization, as well as the Middle East's interaction with ideas, institutions, and policies coming from Europe, especially during World War II. Just as a key chapter in the history of Baathism in Iraq and Syria was written in fascist France, so a key chapter of political Islam was written in wartime Berlin.

Wolin draws attention to differences between Nazi Germany and political Islam. Shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, I wrote an essay in Partisan Review titled, "What Is Old and What Is New in the Terrorism of Islamic Fundamentalism." I refer those interested in the issue of similarities and differences between Nazism and political Islam to that essay.

Wolin is not correct when he describes Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World as a work that separates ideas from their political context. Yes, I do take the view that ideas and ideologies can have an autonomous causal impact in history, no more and no less than political, economic, and social factors do. Part of the historian's task is to assess the relative weight that should be given to those multiple factors in explaining why events take place. My book explores in considerable detail the intersection of ideas with the political and military strategies of the Axis and Allied powers in the Middle East. Indeed, I hope my intellectual-historian colleagues will read the book precisely as an example of how ideas and political institutions were intertwined.

Wolin suggests that my book is a misuse of history in the service of present-day concern. On the contrary, like many other works of history that address controversial topics, my research is, at least in part, motivated by my desire to better understand some of the historical origins of contemporary politicized Islam. The question of politicization, however, needs to be turned upside down. The evidence in my book is disturbing and for some unwelcome. For 30 years, many of the most important documents regarding Nazism's efforts to influence the Middle East were readily available to any historian with an interest in reading them and the curiosity and training needed to find and make sense of them.

Why have so few historians of the Middle East and of Islam contributed to this advance in our knowledge? Is this failing a consequence of the politicization of that field? What impact has the authoritarian character of Arab and Islamist regimes, or the threat of terror waged against scholars who ask discomfiting questions, had on the advance of knowledge in this area? I hope that my book will stimulate scholars of North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, and of political Islam in general to explore further this important chapter of transnational history and the diffusion and merging of ideas during World War II.

Richard Wolin: I strongly agree with Jeffrey Herf that he should be held responsible only for arguments he has actually made. We disagree about the scope and implications of those arguments as they appear in his book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, his essay for The Chronicle Review, and in a series of related texts he has authored, such as the American version of the Euston Manifesto, a 2006 British call for a muscular liberalism, in which Herf claims unambiguously that radical Islam is, after fascism and communism, the third major form of totalitarian ideology. In a 2006 draft of the American statement circulated among academics, Herf appeals for "continued American efforts to lead the military, diplomatic, economic, and intellectual offensive against [radical Islam]." I find this statement's self-righteousness, as well as its inattention to the disasters that have accrued from previous instances of European and American meddling in Middle Eastern affairs, deeply troubling. In his Chronicle Review essay, Herf states that "Nazi propaganda during World War II and its dissemination stand as a decisive episode in the development of radical Islamism." Why is he now backing away from this claim?

The red thread running through Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World is that radical Islam—and, by association, anti-Western Islamists in general—are Nazism's direct political heirs in the contemporary world. Herf sets up this interpretive frame unequivocally in his preface, when he contends that "The political and ideological collaboration between officials of the Nazi regime and pro-Nazi Arab exiles in wartime Berlin introduced the ideas of 20th-century European totalitarianism into an Arab and Islamic context." Herf emphatically reiterates this standpoint in his conclusion, where he claims that his study "lends plausibility to the thesis of continuity and lineages between Nazism's Arabic-language propaganda … and radical Islam in the subsequent decades." He continues, "The Third Reich was short-lived. Tragically, traces of the ideological diffusion examined in these pages have had a much longer life."

Herf has few qualms about making such speculative generalizations and linkages despite the fact that, as he himself readily acknowledges, such claims have historically been made irresponsibly: as with the left's practice of labeling conservative opponents "fascists"; or, even more germane in the context at hand, as with the case of anti-Zionists who consistently accuse Israelis of being or behaving like "Nazis."

Herf insists on making these associations even though he notes in his book that, according to Allied-intelligence estimates, the success of the Nazi propaganda campaign in the Arab world was contingent on the Axis's military fortunes, and even though, as he shows, that the Axis' initial attempts to influence Middle Eastern affairs met with skepticism among Arab leaders, owing to fascist Italy's colonial ambitions in Libya (parts of which had already been annexed), and Nazism's ideology of the "master race," which effectively viewed Arabs, qua Semites, as racial inferiors. Thus, Rommel's defeat by the Allies at El Alamein, in 1942—a turning point of the North African campaign as well as the war itself—meant that, thereafter, Nazi propaganda in the Middle East (which was directed not only against Jews but also against the British, French, and American presence in the region) most likely had little impact. That fact squares poorly with the voluble claims, cited above, concerning Nazism's purported enduring and "decisive" ideological influence.

One of Herf's crown witnesses is the Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna, whose well-documented anti-Semitic tirades in Herf's view represent the missing link between the Nazis and the leading representatives of contemporary political Islam. But as Matthias Küntzel demonstrates in Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (Telos Press, 2007)—a book for which Herf wrote the foreword—"it would be wrong to characterize the Muslim Brothers as ardent followers of the Nazis." Here there is simply no squaring the circle; too many aspects of Nazi ideology—its paganism, its Aryan racial doctrines, its conception of Germanic geopolitical supremacy—are incompatible with the key tenets of political Islam. As Küntzel rightly concludes, Hassan al-Banna was too devout a Muslim to latch on to someone as impious as Hitler as a political role model. Such facts speak volumes about the tenuous nature of some of Herf's "continuity" claims.

Let me conclude by addressing the elephant in the room. I think that most scholars of the Arab world would readily agree that representatives of contemporary political Islam—Hamas, Iran's dictatorship of mullahs, the Taliban—have no need of World War II-era Nazi propaganda to instruct them in Jew hatred. Sadly, the development of such sentiment has evolved directly out of the history and political experiences of the postwar Middle East. What is disturbing about Herf's explanatory scheme is that it refuses to countenance the notion that repeated and unwelcome Western intrusions into the Arab world have played any role in the growth of quasi-phobic anti-Western and anti-Jewish attitudes. In his quest for the ideological origins of contemporary radical Islam, Herf inexplicably looks everywhere except the place that is the most obvious.

Jeffrey Herf: First, I am not backing away from any claims made in my book or in my essay for The Chronicle Review. I repeat, a decisive and important chapter in the history of radical Islam was written and spoken in Nazi-era Berlin. That might be unpleasant and disconcerting news for anyone who thinks that radical Islam has been primarily a response to, in Richard Wolin's words, "the history and political experiences of the postwar Middle East." On the contrary, the ideological tradition that took shape in the Middle East and in Nazi-era Berlin was more cause than effect of the disasters of post-1945 Middle Eastern history.

Second, radical Islam emerged in a specific time and places, in Europe and the Arab Middle East during the 1930s and 1940s. Its history is indeed inseparable from Western intrusions, including fascism and Nazism. It is political Islam's ideological hybridity, to use a recent fashionable term, that needs to be more closely examined. It cannot be explained only as a result of the indigenous traditions of the religion of Islam, as some have argued, nor was it only a product of the diffusion of totalitarian ideologies from Europe. Rather, it emerged as the result of a conjuncture of fundamentalist currents within Islam and Nazi ideology and policy.

Wolin suggests that Islamism was primarily a response to Western intrusions after 1945. But there is abundant evidence that by the late 1940s, the fundamental postulates of political Islam had been articulated. The flowering of political Islam in subsequent decades amounts to variations on earlier themes. The basic outlines of this anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, and anti-modern ideology were firmly in place before the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. Other influences, such as the Soviet Union's anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, made a contribution to Islamism. Iran's Shiite variation of Islamic fundamentalism also emerged during World War II and in the postwar years. Both of these issues are beyond the scope of my book.

Finally, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World and the work of some of my fellow historians is a challenge to scholars of political Islam. In order to answer the questions I and others have raised, it is essential that the still-closed archives of the Arab governments and of organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Azhar University, in Cairo, be as open to scholars as are those of the American, British, and German governments on which the research for my book rests. Indeed, it is an open question as to whether a reliable history of the Middle East can be written at all as long as those Middle Eastern archives remain closed.

Yet many of the most important documents appeared on the front pages of newspapers. The postwar public statements of Hassan al-Banna, Haj Amin al-Husseini, and Sayyid Qutb indicate clear ideological continuities from the war years. The evidence of recent decades, in Iran as well as in the Arab Middle East, offers still more evidence of those continuities. It is tempting and important to examine the postwar decades. Yet in order to address the issue of continuities and discontinuities, it is important to be able to read the striking and heretofore insufficiently known evidence of ideological collaboration and interaction that took place during World War II.