Dexter Van Zile

Focus on Islamism (FWI) was founded in February 2022.

FWI has three paramount goals:

(1) to provide a setting where authors can find an audience and readers can find serious and literate analysis;

(2) to give voice to anti-Islamist Muslims;

(3) and to investigate Islamism’s inner workings, with a special attention to such topics as intramural Islamist fighting, Islamist sources of funding, Islamist spending, and what gets whispered behind closed doors.

We hope and plan to become a forum to combat the scourge of Islamism by convincing the skeptical, motivating the convinced, and guiding the motivated.

To take one index, U.S. television news mentioned Islam two thousand-plus times in the years 2010-13, three thousand-plus times in 2014, and peaked with five thousand-plus times in 2015. It then went down to three thousand-plus times in 2016, two thousand-plus in 2017, one thousand-plus in 2018, six hundred-plus in 2019-20, and a mere two hundred-plus in 2021. In other words, Islam was mentioned 19 times more often in 2015 than six years later. That ratio would seem to hold for much else as well, and not just in the United States. Islam and related topics have reverted to their pre-9/11 semi-obscurity.

In the face of this, we at the Middle East Forum soldier on, warning of disasters to come.

Our guiding philosophy is the one I articulated in the aftermath of 9/11: “Radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution.” To be very clear: we fight Islamism the ideology, not Islam the religion. That said, Islamic supremacism, jihad, slavery, the oppression of women, and other problematic features are indelible hallmarks of traditional Islam that Muslims must acknowledge before they can adapt their religion to modernity. These features cannot be apologized away but must be confronted before true reform can begin. Then, Muslims can interpret the Koran and Hadith allegorically, abrogated, or dealt with in other creative ways, as they see fit.

Western for us expansively includes not just Europe, North America, and Australia but also, and to a lesser degree, Latin America, Japan, and South Korea; all areas where Islam is a recent phenomenon. Our coverage excludes peoples and territories, especially of southeastern Europe, where Islam is centuries old.