Definitions are tremendously important, and obfuscating language can lead to real-world disaster.

Often Western politicians, commentators, or media heads will try to differentiate between "Islamism" and "Islam." Sometimes they pretend all the evils inherent to Muslim teaching are "Islamism," and sometimes by "Islamism" they mean a growing Muslim influence in Western nations. A former Muslim warns against a false definition of Islamism.

"Islamism is simply Islam practiced in freedom," best-selling author Dan Burmawi wrote on X October 3.

He continued, "Under Muslim dictatorships, Islam is reduced to its social and cultural consequences, backward customs, restrictions, and religious conservatism, while its political content, which is central to Islam, is suppressed because the regime will not tolerate a rival source of authority." Muslim sacred texts command jihad and subjugation of infidels, but many Muslim nations now have cleansed all or nearly all members of other religions, especially Jews and Christians. That means many a Muslim will never personally encounter an "infidel." 

And whatever brand of Islam the regime in question practices, that is the brand of Islam its subjects must obey. Thus in Iran, any Persian who is not a jihad-focused Shia Muslim faces state-sponsored persecution.

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That is not true in countries Muslims have yet to conquer fully. "In the West, however, Islam is practiced in freedom," Burmawi pointed out. "Muslims can openly pursue the political implications of Islam, and that is precisely why the West is now struggling to maintain a clear distinction between Islam and Islamism."

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"This made-up distinction was much easier to sustain when it was applied to Muslims and Islamic practice inside Muslim-majority countries, where political expression is constrained by the state," Burmawi went on. "Islamism is not a corruption of Islam. It is Islam without any restrictions imposed on it by authoritarian Muslim regimes." And unfortunately, Islamism — whether it refers to Muslims specifically or includes their deluded non-Muslim allies — ends up bringing about Islamic dictatorship.

Just as the American and French Revolutionaries used many of the same words, but had radically different meanings and results, people can use a word such as Islamism in many different ways. And modern Westerners have become lazy about understanding the definitions of words as different politicians and academics use them. We cannot afford to misunderstand anything relative to Islam, which is a political institution of ever-shifting borders.