'Islamism' once simply meant Islam, then vanished from English for decades
English borrowed the word as Islamismus in 1696 and settled on Islamism by 1712, using it plainly as the name of the religion. The US Supreme Court still wrote it in 1891. By 1938 it had all but disappeared, displaced by the shorter Arabic word Islam, until an Iranian revolution revived it.
The comeback came with the Iranian revolution of 1978 and 1979, which put Ruhollah Khomeini's idea of Islamic government into practice. From then on Islamism meant something new: movements holding that Islam is inherently political, that it should shape laws and institutions, and that it offers a better route to a just society than liberal democracy, capitalism or communism. Common goals include applying sharia, pan-Islamic unity and founding Islamic states.
Arabic scholarship had long used a related word differently. In al-Ash'ari's classic survey of theological opinions, an Islamist was simply anyone who claimed to be Muslim, a deliberately neutral label that neither confirmed nor denied the claim. To avoid confusing that theological sense with the Western political one, Arab journalists coined Islamawi for the political movement, although some grammarians object to the form.
Among the movement's twentieth-century thinkers, the Syrian cleric Muhammad Rashid Rida argued for restoring a caliphate to unite Muslims politically, and his ideas shaped Hassan al-Banna, the Egyptian schoolteacher who founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Strategies diverged. Al-Banna and Abul A'la Maududi favoured gradual re-Islamisation through grassroots social and political work, Hassan al-Turabi preferred to use state power, and Sayyid Qutb joined grassroots activism to armed revolution.
The label itself remains contested. Many adherents reject it, preferring phrases such as Islamic movement or Islamic activism and insisting they are simply reviving their faith, while others regard the ideology as a modern deviation from Islam. Critics of the term warn that Western media usage can feed stereotyping, and one scholar noted that popular discourse tends to reserve Islamism for whatever is viewed negatively and Islam for the neutral or positive. The writer Tarek Osman described a movement stretched so broad that it offered social services to the poor, identity to the searching and a moderate platform to the affluent.
Source: Islamism
