Let us pray

I’ve always had a problem with the word Islamist. We don’t speak of Christianists, or Judaists. People who believe in Islam are called Muslims. But it's rude to make sweepingly hostile remarks about Muslims, so we invented the word Islamist (which really just means Muslim) as a veil for anti-Muslim insults. After all, when’s the last time you heard the word Islamist deployed in a favourable context?

Here are sentences you'll never hear:

1. The President paid a visit to leaders of the local Islamist community.
2. Moderate Islamists called for restraint.
3. In a special address, His Holiness the Pope called for improved relations between Christians and Islamists.
4. Controversy followed proposals to open an Islamist preschool near Ground Zero.
5. In a day of fierce clashes, innocent Islamist civilians were set upon by Zionist settlers.

Wikipedia quotes a 2003 article in Middle East Quarterly:

In summation, the term Islamism enjoyed its first run, lasting from Voltaire to the First World War, as a synonym for Islam. Enlightened scholars and writers generally preferred it to Mohammedanism. Eventually both terms yielded to Islam, the Arabic name of the faith, and a word free of either pejorative or comparative associations. There was no need for any other term, until the rise of an ideological and political interpretation of Islam challenged scholars and commentators to come up with an alternative, to distinguish Islam as modern ideology from Islam as a faith

Sweet as it is, that rationale just begs the question as to why ideologues like George Bush and P.W Botha should not be called Christianists. Check Jy!?