The term “Islamism” has achieved near-universal adoption in Western policy, media, and academic discourse without achieving anything close to universal agreement on what it means. This paper traces the word’s history, from its eighteenth-century origin as a straightforward synonym for Islam, through its long disappearance from scholarly use, to its deliberate reinvention after the Iranian Revolution as a conceptual instrument serving specific geopolitical needs. “Islamism” was designed to do classificatory work, to separate Islam-as-religion from Islam-as-politics, insulating the former from scrutiny while localizing all difficult questions in the latter. The paper demolishes the historical, etymological, and definitional foundations of this separation and concludes that the category should be abandoned.
