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International Standard Serial Number (ISSN): 2372-9112 Fair Observer Monthly | 4 CONTENTS About Fair Observer 5 Share Your Perspective 6 Christianism: The Elephant in the Extremism Room 8 Matthew Feldman How China’s Growing Dominance Will Impact Sino-Gulf Relations 12 Nada Aggour The Libyan Government Faces Numerous Challenges 14 Anouar Jamaoui Britain Must Protect Afghanistan’s Chevening Scholars 17 Meetra Qutb Will Women Return to the Office? 19 Kiara Taylor America, the Stumbling Giant 21 Glenn Carle A Contentious Election Deepens Peru’s Crisis 24 Erik Geurts The Elusive Importance of Sleep 28 Jennifer Wider It’s Time to Make India’s Education Good Enough for All 30 Rhea Bhasin The Hazaras of Afghanistan Face a Threat to Survival 33 Naweed Jafari Fair Observer Monthly | 5 ABOUT FAIR OBSERVER Fair Observer is a nonprofit media organization that engages in citizen journalism and civic education. 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Fair Observer Monthly | 7 Christianism: The Elephant in the July 22, 2011, to term himself a “cultural Extremism Room Christian” — not on account of any metaphysical belief, but because he believed it was a useful framework with which to attack Muslims and Matthew Feldman Europe and, using an anti-Semitic dog whistle, July 1, 2021 “cultural Marxists.” Christianism, therefore, is a secular doctrine that is different from, alternatively, Religious extremism is not unfamiliar to other evangelicalism, political Christianity and faiths but has yet to be named as such among fundamentalism. Joas Wagemakers makes a mainstream Christian confessions. similar claim about the distinction of Islamism from types of religious fundamentalism such as contend that my subject matter is something Salafism. This is a political ideology of an elephant in our global room, but I appropriating religion, not the other way around. I should warn that it is equally a thoroughly But I would go further than Wagemakers does in unhappy one: religiously-inspired, revolutionary describing Islamism as “a political application of political violence. For nearly 20 years now, Islam.” Instead, I would suggest that both violent scarcely a day has gone by without reportage on and non-violent forms of Islamism, in their very Islamism. This type of extremism remains nature, reject pluralism and advance a doctrine of present in our global room, and no one can claim supremacy that is the hallmark of extremism — it is unseen. whether ethnic, national or religious. That is of course with good reason: On 9/11, Moreover, it is precisely the political violence nearly 3,000 people were brutally murdered by exemplified by the horrors unleashed by Breivik violent jihadi Islamists in the worst sub-state that Christianism is intended to denote. In short, terrorist attack in history. But there is something this is a distinct, ideological perversion of that has long vexed me, in keeping with the New Christianity that is, at the same time, distinct Testament injunction to take the “log out of your from older and more familiar forms of Christian own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the nationalism and even from the theologically- speck out of your brother’s eye.” I have referred based exclusion or persecution that has marred to this phenomenon for more than a dozen years Christianity no less than other monotheistic but have never had the opportunity to properly faiths. One need not be a Christian to be a delineate what I think is again becoming an Christianist, nor is Christianism driven by the urgent subject matter, namely Christianism. same impulse as the regrettably all too familiar instances of tribalism in Christian history. Perversion of Christianity It scarcely should need saying, but Islamism is As I have written earlier, “Whereas religious an extremist perversion of one of our world’s politics, in a banal sense at least, may be leading faiths. As a revolutionary ideology born observed wherever clerics become directly of the 20th century, it can be directly traced from involved in politics, the term ‘Christianism’ is the interwar Muslim Brotherhood under Hasan intended to denote a more radical, revolutionary al-Banna, for example, and the doctrines of approach to secular politics.” Christianism may Sayyid Qutb in postwar Egypt to the quasi-state have Christian connotations and indeed draw terrorism of the Islamist death cult, Daesh. For all upon Christian language but, like Islamism, it is of its supposed medievalism, then, Islamism is a essentially appropriative. It allows an entirely product, and not merely a rejection, of modernity. secular Anders Behring Breivik (now known as A similar perspective can be taken on Fjotolf Hansen) who murdered 77 in Norway on Christianism. So, first, a banal point: Believers Fair Observer Monthly | 8 have politics, just as do non-believers. For this Yet here too we may be seeing a case of old reason, I am wary of constructions like “political wine in new bottles, whereby reactionary and Christianity” or “political Islam” for the same even tribal expressions of a faith — in this case reason I’m only marginally less wary of Christianity — which seem to belong to a constructions like “apolitical Christianity” or tradition that, in American terms, stretches from “apolitical Islam,” though I accept, of course, that John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” to the different forms of hermeticism stretch across televangelists of our day. Even cast in such most faith traditions. civilizational terms, these forms of Christian Thus, Christianism doesn’t refer to a form of tribalism are of a different stamp than the Christian nationalism that is evident in the tradition I’d like to indicate. It is first and contemporary US (although not only there). One foremost ideological and emerged between the might observe the heart-breaking scenes in early two world wars to afflict all three principal April of Protestant loyalists rioting in Belfast confessions in Europe: Protestantism, with the frightening implications for the Good Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, or indeed To take but one example of from each of these the conflict acting as the midwife for the long confessions, consider first the Romanian struggle over the six counties, the Great War. Orthodox ideologue, Ion Moţa, a key leader of Throughout that conflict, scholars have clearly militant fascist mystics, the Legion of Archangel shown that both Protestant and Catholic Michael. Just before he was killed by confessions anointed or, better, armed their Republicans in what he understood as a holy war nations with justifications of a holy war. in Civil War Spain, Moţa declared: “No force, no Christian churches’ injunctions to fight for God love exists which is higher than that of the race and nation is but one example of Christian (and can only be realized in the race), except for nationalism, and there are countless others like it the force of Christ and love of him. We are in the Christian tradition as there are in other defending Christianity in a foreign land, we are faith traditions. It is far from new. defending a force which wells up from the force of our people, and, spurred on by our love for the Sacrazlied Politics Cross, we are obeying here in Spain our love for This particular sense of Christian nationalism, the Romanian people.” likewise, has been extensively studied in the Underscoring that his views were scarcely American context, with particular focus on white marginal, a mortuary train carried Moţa’s body evangelicalism. In the compelling empirical from the Spanish battlefield across Europe in account, “Taking America Back for God,” winter 1937 into Bucharest, where he was Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry conclude received by hundreds of thousands of devotees, that “those who embrace Christian nationalism helping to nearly triple the mystical fascist party insist that the Christian God formed, favors and — the Romanian Iron Guard — membership to sustains the United States over and above the 272,000 by the end of that year.