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Islamism is not Islam in arms, it is a political creed which perverts Islam, just as fascism degraded nationalism and Communism betrayed socialism. Its animating spirit is not the pious devotion of the believer who finds in contemplation, charity and prayer both fulfilment and inspiration. Islamism appeals to that part of the human soul which has always been capable of being drawn to revolution, violence and the exaltation of the self through membership of the elect. There are aspects to Islamism which lend it the same appeal which seduced young men into the Red Guards or the Waffen SS, but there are also specific aspects to the ideology which attune it to the discontents and yearnings of young men in our time.

Rather than thinking of Islamism as a variant of a great and ancient faith it is better to view it in the terms defined by the Italian historian of fascism, Emilio Gentile, who explained that totalitarianism is "an experiment in political domination undertaken by a revolutionary movement that aspires towards a monopoly of power. It seeks the subordination, integration and homogenisation of the governed on the basis of the politicisation of existence interpreted according to the myths and the values of a political religion. (It) aims to shape the individual and the masses through a revolution in order to regenerate the human being and create the new man. The ultimate goal is to create a new civilisation along expansionist lines beyond the nation state."

Islamists believe in the re-ordering of society to secure total submission to a narrow, puritan and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. They are conducting a civil war within the Islamic world designed to overthrow existing regimes, which they consider to be unforgiveably apostate, and replace them with a single and unified Muslim state, the restored Caliphate. Islamists believe that the sanctity and culture of Muslim lands are menaced and defiled by Western influences, from capitalism to feminism, which have to be eradicated.

That cleansing process must be accomplished by suicidal violence, because, in the words of Islamism's most influential thinker, Sayyid Qutb, "the death of those who are killed for the cause of God gives more impetus to the cause, which continues to thrive on their blood."

The bloodshed should not stop at Islam's current borders. Not just because those nations which are unIslamic constitute dar-al Harb, the House of War, which constantly threatens the security of the Muslim world. But also because Islamists are driven by a divine mission to ensure the whole earth, in due course, learns to submit to Islamist rule.

The belief that Islam's sovereignty over the whole globe is necessary and total was powerfully displayed on BBC TV's Newsnight in February 2006. Anjem Choudray, one of the leaders of the UK Islamist group al-Ghurabaa, rejected the suggestion that he might be happier pursuing his fundamentalist approach to religion and politics outside the secular and liberal political culture of the UK. England, he informed the viewers, "belongs to Allah". And just in case we didn't appreciate just how far short of Allah's, and his, standards, we fell, Choudray utterly rejected any notion of accommodating his beliefs and practices to the norms of our democratic society, arguing, "if you put me in the jungle, should I behave like an animal? Of course, not"

Choudray's openness in claiming England for Allah and condemning current Western mores as bestial may be shocking, but it should not be surprising. For there is nothing hidden or esoteric about the Islamist approach.()

The scale, scope and ambition of Islamist thinking is not hidden in any secret protocol or encoded in obscure scripture. It is proclaimed, freely and fully, in the speeches and broadcasts of Islamist ideologues from Osama bin Laden to Anjem Choudray and it is outlined in the extensive texts of the founding ideologues of Islamism.

But there is a wilful blindness among many in the West who refuse to acknowledge the totalitarian nature of the ideology which drives jihadi warriors. Even though the shelves of every Western bookshop sag under the weight of texts which record the cruelties and barbarism inflicted by totalitarianism in the twentieth century, there seems to be a remarkable reluctance to accept that totalitarian thinking could be behind contemporary cruelty and barbarism.

Instead Western commentators attribute Islamist violence to specific, discrete, grievances such as the presence of American troops on Saudi soil, the failure to establish an Arab Palestinian state or the material poverty of Arab peoples. In every case the blame for Islamist violence is laid at the door of the West, for failing to deliver "justice".

It is a remarkable commentary on the state of analytical thinking in the West that when faced with mass-murderers, who loudly proclaim the ideological basis of their actions and prophesy victory on the basis of Western weakness, Western thinkers respond by denying the ideological motivation of their attackers and instead blame the West for stoking grievances.

The belief that Islamist violence can be explained by these factors is as flawed as the belief in the 1930s that Nazi-ism could be understood as simply a response to the perceived injustices of the Versailles settlement which could be assuaged by re-uniting Sudeten Germans with their Bavarian cousins.

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