Adam Curtis, who previously gave us the thesis that politicians were falsely exploiting popular fear - falsely in that what we were going to be attacked by wasn't an organization but an idea, is today concerned to argue that we shouldn't get the wrong idea about what that idea is: it isn't Islamism, only a minority, terrorist, variant of it.
Coincidentally, on the same day in the International Herald Tribune, Professor Bassam Tibi traces links between jihadism, Islamism and Islam in a way that appears (to my inexpert eye, at least) to be less compartmentalized:
The jihadists are followers of the ideas of Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, who laid the foundations of Islamism as a political and military interpretation of Islam. Islamism aims not only to purify Islam but also to establish the "Nizam Islami," or Islamic order.(Thanks GW for the IHT link.)
... The intellectual father of jihadist Islamism, Sayyid Qutb, who was executed in Cairo in 1966, made the message crystal clear: Jihadism is a "permanent Islamic world revolution" aimed at decentering the West in order to establish "Hakimiyyat Allah," or God's rule, on a global scale.
Early Islamists honored Qutb's distinction between two steps, the local and the global, in the jihadist strategy: First topple secular regimes at home, and then move on to global jihad. What Al Qaeda has done is... to confuse the two steps in the jihadist strategy. This confusion continued to manifest itself in the terrorist attacks in Madrid and in London, because of the existence of a Muslim diaspora in Europe that has its own problems.
What can be done to counter jihadism? As a Muslim immigrant living in Europe, I wholeheartedly reject the idea of a "clash of civilizations." But it would be naïve to overlook the reality of an ongoing "war of ideas" - a struggle between global jihad and democratic peace as competing directions for the 21st century.
Instead of giving in to talk of a "clash of civilizations," what is needed is an alliance between Western supporters of democracy and enlightened Muslims against jihadist Islamists.