al-tayar al-islami

Submitted by dhimmi no more (United States), Jun 12, 2012 at 06:02

Ianus wrote

First , "al-tayar al-islami" suggests there may be various "Islamisms" (what would be the plural form of "al-tayar al-islami"?)

It would be al-tayarat al-islamiyya which is also used to describe islamism

which seems to be hardly implied in English "Islamism". We are told there are different forms of Islam ,

Yes take the case of Egypt where you will find secular Muslims and they do exist and there is plenty of them and then you have the other extreme the likes of the salafists and then you have just about every thing in between

But when we are speaking of al-tayar al-Islami it is understood in the case of Egypt as those that want to see no separation of state and mosque and the shari3a becomes the law of the land including treating women and non Muslims as second class citizens and there are even more extremes that would want to see arms chopped and women stoned and Copts paying al-jizya so you can see that it is a spectrum and not something well defined

but I have never heard anyone say there are different Islamisms,

The problem here is this is a new expression that is still evolving

say an Islamism that prefers to cut off the heads of kafirs as opposed to an Islamism that makes its followers limit themselves to maiming and terrorizing kafirs.

See above

Of course, the latter Islamism would be called "a moderate Islamism" and the former "a radical Islamism", wouldn't they?

True

Second, judging from the definition you quoted "al-tayar al-Islami" seems nevertheless to have a different meaning from our "Islamism" (=fundamentalist, radical, wrong Islam"). In Arabic "al-tayar al-islami" suggests being too Western while in English 'Islamism' seggests not being Western enough.

I think the difficulty here is that this is not a well defined expresssion and it is still very fluid

So as always while dealing with Moslem semantics

That is the truth

we apparently have a little semantic trap here when we compare English and Arabic.We say words that look the same but turn out to have different meanings for us and for them.

Very true

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