Alaa Alkhatib
Originally published in Arabic on 12/12/2025
An analytical critique of terminology, stereotyping, power, and the sectarian reading of the Syrian crisis
In recent months, the expression “Sunni fascism” has gained unusual currency in Syrian political debate, particularly amid the sharp sectarian polarization that followed the fall of the Assad regime. The term has been associated with writer Maurice Ayek, including his article “The Syrian Civil War in Its Second Phase,” published by Al-Jumhuriya on 22 August 2025. Rather than treating Ayek’s article as the sole object of this paper, I use it as a case study within a broader question: what happens when a highly charged concept travels from one historical and analytical context into another?
For the article discussed here, see Maurice Ayek, “The Syrian Civil War in Its Second Phase”.
The comparison belongs to a wider family of attempts to read Islamist or Islamic phenomena through the conceptual vocabulary of fascism. A prominent example is Hamed Abdel-Samad’s The Islamic Fascism (Der islamische Faschismus), first published in German in 2014 and later translated into several languages. The popular spread of concepts carrying such heavy cultural and moral weight is not new in Arab public debate. Yet the expansion of mass and social media has made their circulation faster and their political effects more immediate. This raises the central question of this paper: did the term impose itself because the phenomenon genuinely requires it, or was the phenomenon reshaped so that it could fit the term?
The paper therefore examines terminology at the intersection of knowledge and power. Ayek’s argument serves as a case study of how a concept may cease to clarify reality and begin, instead, to organize reality around its own assumptions.
1. The Subjection of Terms
When Sadiq Jalal al-Azm introduced the expression “political Alawism” in 2013, it caused a major shock in Syrian and regional debate. In the atmosphere of an increasingly sectarian media war, the term was welcomed by actors on opposing sides: anti-Assad media that promoted the narrative of an “Alawite regime,” and pro-Assad media that insisted that Syria was not experiencing a popular revolution but a sectarian rebellion. Even some Sunni Islamist elites embraced the expression despite their long intellectual hostility toward al-Azm as a symbol of Arab secularism and rationalism. The point here is not to reopen the full debate over “political Alawism,” which has already been criticized by many writers, including the author of this paper.
After Ahmed al-Sharaa and the commanders of the Deterrence of Aggression offensive took power in Syria, the expression “political Sunnism” emerged by analogy with al-Azm’s “political Alawism.” It spread in arguments about the visibly sectarian composition of the new authority. Like its predecessor, however, “political Sunnism” can become an elastic label that serves culturally essentialist readings as well as populist sectarian polemics.
This paper focuses on “Sunni fascism” because its negative moral burden is even greater. Ayek was not the first person to connect fascism with Islam, but “Sunni fascism” is constructed within the conceptual lineage of the broader expression “Islamic fascism.” The latter gained currency in the late twentieth century, although earlier analogies are sometimes traced to movements such as Young Egypt, founded in 1933 under the influence of European fascist currents.
Hamed Abdel-Samad helped move “Islamic fascism” beyond a narrow comparative framework and into a much wider public controversy. His book attracted attention because it intersected with debates over Islam and terrorism, Islam and modernity, and the growth of Islamophobia. Critics in Germany and Europe frequently objected to its generalization and essentialism: the reduction of a diverse human community or historical tradition to a fixed essence presumed to explain its behavior.
In practice, “Sunni fascism” narrows the “Islamic fascism” thesis into a sectarian register while retaining much of the same method. This matters especially in Syria, where a political conflict with powerful internal and external actors has repeatedly been dressed in sectarian and ethnic language.
2. The Term–Stereotype Dilemma
A term is a word or expression that acquires a specific meaning within a defined field or context. Terminology as a discipline seeks to classify concepts and stabilize their use within scientific and social fields. Arabic-Islamic intellectual traditions themselves long distinguished between ordinary linguistic meaning and technical or terminological meaning. The concern here is with terminology in the social sciences, psychology, and political analysis.
Stereotyping in social psychology refers to a fixed and excessively generalized belief about a category of people. It reduces cognitive effort: instead of processing every new person or group in all its complexity, the mind relies on a pre-existing pattern. That efficiency has a cost. Stereotypes make us ignore differences among individuals and attribute characteristics to people who may not possess them. They also reinforce social categorization, the distinction between “us” and “them,” and can become especially dangerous when categorization turns into marginalization or hostility.
Research on cognition and crisis suggests that severe economic and social pressures can intensify reliance on coarse negative stereotypes. Large crises consume cognitive and emotional resources; simplifying the world by assigning fixed traits to an out-group can therefore become more attractive precisely when societies are most unstable.
The dilemma is that a social or political term does not necessarily create a stereotype, and a stereotype does not require a formal term. The analytical challenge is to weigh the scientific need for a new concept against the danger that the concept itself will become a vehicle for negative generalization.
“Antisemitism” illustrates the ambiguity. The concept developed as a necessary way of naming persecution of Jews and defending them against discrimination. Yet in geopolitical conflict it can also be stretched into indiscriminate accusation, including claims that Arabs or Muslims are inherently antisemitic. A concept created to identify prejudice can itself be used to produce another stereotype.
Returning to Ayek’s article, it is extremely difficult to reach the end without being left with a negative pattern that extends beyond jihadist organizations to Sunni Muslims generally, or at least to Syrian and Iraqi Arab Sunnis. Ayek initially attempts to limit his claim, describing “Sunni fascism” as a small current within political Islam and an even smaller current within the Arab Sunni community. Yet elsewhere he speaks of a “fascist mood” dominating Arab Sunni societies and of the need to dismantle that mood. The qualification therefore struggles to survive the argument that follows it.
The term “Sunni fascism” does not automatically produce stereotyping. But in an international and regional environment already structured by geopolitical rivalry and sectarian mobilization, a label whose very wording contains a generalization can move quickly from analysis to collective stigma. Since 2001, global debate has lived under the pressure of expressions such as “Islamic terrorism” and “war on terror.” The Middle East has simultaneously endured decades of Sunni–Shia polarization, sometimes media-driven and sometimes violently embodied in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon.
The central question is therefore unavoidable: is there a scientific, analytical, or philosophical necessity that requires the study of religious and sectarian extremism—including Sunni extremism—to coin the terms “Islamic fascism” or “Sunni fascism”?
3. The Term Between Knowledge and Power
Every production of knowledge contains an impulse to stabilize meaning and influence collective understanding. Michel Foucault famously connected knowledge with power, not simply as power’s opposite but as one of the ways power is produced. Historical experience, however, also shows the reverse: knowledge can arise against power. When decision-making closes upon itself and “truth” is monopolized in the name of stability or identity, critical knowledge may emerge as resistance.
In Syria, this tension appears as a broader conflict between understanding and interest, between language as an instrument of explanation and language as an instrument of mobilization. Al-Azm’s “political Alawism” was not a repetition of official discourse; it was an attempt to dismantle it. Yet it also risked generating a concept that moved away from empirical complexity and toward the easier popular explanation that the Assad system was simply an Alawite regime and that Alawites ruled the country.
Today the same structure reappears on the other side of the conflict. “Political Sunnism” and “Sunni fascism” are deployed against a new authority with a different sectarian coloration. The battle over terminology becomes a battle over the monopoly of truth: one side interprets the new authority as “Sunni fascism,” while another justifies it as the rule of the Sunni majority.
Between these poles, an independent analytical discourse is needed—one that treats terms neither as ideological weapons nor as ends in themselves, but as tools for understanding complex social and political formations such as violence and sectarianism in a society exhausted by authoritarian rule and repeated transformations of power.
Terms such as “Sunni fascism” and “Islamic fascism” therefore do more than describe. They redraw the boundaries of discourse: who is “moderate,” who is “modern,” and who is “fascist.” In moments of crisis, terminology participates in the redistribution of symbolic legitimacy. Language grants legitimacy to some, withdraws it from others, and can create what might be called a “ruling linguistic class”: those who claim the authority to define phenomena and determine their essence.
The deeper question is thus: who has the right to name in a world fractured by identities? Can a researcher use a critical concept without becoming—intentionally or otherwise—a participant in the struggle for symbolic domination? And does the phenomenon under study truly require a new term that existing concepts cannot adequately express?
4. The “Sunni Fascism” Thesis
The purpose here is not to defend any religious or political current. It is to identify a methodological problem in applying the label of fascism to a broad religious community—a problem that can produce the opposite of analytical knowledge when inquiry becomes mixed with prior judgment and generalization.
4.1 A Problem in the Premise
Ayek begins with a premise on which much of the subsequent argument rests: that what happened in Syria from 2011 onward was a civil war, ultimately won by Jabhat al-Nusra, and that the “rise of Sunni fascism” and the complete disintegration of Syrian nationalism constitute a later phase of that civil war.
This paper does not need to settle the entire “popular revolution or civil war” debate. It is enough to recognize two facts. First, what began in Syria was widely understood, inside and outside the country, as a popular uprising against a corrupt authoritarian security state that had driven society toward explosion. Second, the war was never only a conflict among Syrian domestic forces. Iran, Russia, the United States, Israel, and Turkey intervened directly, while tens of thousands of foreign fighters joined both pro-Assad Shia Islamist formations and anti-regime Sunni Islamist militias. Even if “civil war” describes part of the Syrian catastrophe, it cannot serve as an exhaustive premise for the whole case. The distinction matters because large conclusions built on an incomplete premise inherit its distortion.
4.2 Projecting Fascism onto Sunnis
Ayek does not provide a stable distinction between jihadist Islam, Salafism, and Sunni Islam. A question framed around whether jihadist Islam can be considered fascist gradually becomes a discussion of Sunni Islam as a collective identity, while Salafism repeatedly appears as if it were interchangeable with Sunnism. Such slippage is difficult to accept in an analysis that seeks to establish a conclusion as sweeping as “Sunni fascism” or “Islamic fascism.”
4.3 The Problem of “Jihadist Islam”
“Jihadist Islam” is a modern and analytically unstable label when measured against the traditional schools of Islamic law. Jihad is not a uniquely Sunni doctrine; different Islamic schools recognize it while disagreeing over its jurisprudential rules. Classical and contemporary Islamic jurisprudence therefore does not present a single sect or school simply called “jihadist Islam.”
A rapid historical survey also shows why the category must be handled carefully. Some Salafi currents embraced armed jihad, but anti-colonial movements in North Africa also combined Islamic jihad with resistance to occupation, including the struggles associated with Omar al-Mukhtar in Libya and Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri in Algeria. In the modern period, the Taliban—one of the world’s most consequential jihadist movements—arose from a Hanafi-Deobandi milieu rather than from the Salafi tradition. The Iranian regime likewise mobilizes the doctrine of jihad under the authority of the Supreme Leader, and in Syria the language of jihad was used not only by Sunni factions but also by Shia militias fighting for the Assad regime.
There is also a persistent misunderstanding of Salafism and of the modern category “Salafi-jihadism.” Moving within the same paragraph from Salafism to Salafi-jihadism without a clear distinction is not a minor terminological problem; it changes the object being analyzed.
4.4 The Muslim Brotherhood and Jihad
Political opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood does not eliminate the need for accuracy. The movement’s history and principal theories do not make armed jihad the ordinary means of reaching government. In Syria, even when the Fighting Vanguard took up arms against Hafez al-Assad in the late 1970s, its central political slogan was the overthrow of what it called the “Alawite regime”; this was not equivalent to the explicit transnational jihadist programs that appeared in Syria during the following decades. The argument under review again fails to maintain a clear line between the Brotherhood and jihadist Islam.
4.5 Fascism, the State, and the “New Man”
Even setting these distinctions aside, the evidence offered for the fascism of Sunnis—or even for the fascism of contemporary Syrian jihadism—is insufficient. The claim that Salafism regulates minute aspects of life and offers a comprehensive vision in which “Islam governs everything” is broadly applicable to many Islamic schools and, in different forms, to many religions. Yet fascism historically elevates the state to an extraordinary, sometimes quasi-sacral status: statism is one of its central political tendencies.
Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany also spoke explicitly of creating a “new man”: the uomo nuovo fascista in Italy and der neue Mensch in Germany. Religious traditions may seek to guide believers toward moral or spiritual ideals, but that is not equivalent to the fascist project of manufacturing a new political human being absorbed into a mobilized national collective.
Some Islamist currents do pursue systematic formation. The Muslim Brotherhood speaks of tarbiya, the education and formation of Muslims; quietist or scholarly Salafism emphasizes religious instruction and doctrinal correctness. Jihadist movements seek to form the militant or fighter. These projects may be criticized on their own terms, but collapsing them into the fascist “new man” erases important differences in purpose, political structure, and the relationship between individual, community, and state.
4.6 Can Islamic Collective Identity Be Equated with Fascist National or Racial Purity?
Fascism does not always rely on biological race, but redefining fascist “purity” as merely doctrinal neglects the organic and exclusionary character of fascist nationhood. Roger Griffin’s influential model defines fascism around a myth of national rebirth—palingenesis—within populist ultranationalism. The nation is imagined as an organic community threatened by decadence and contamination, not simply as a community anyone can enter by adopting a creed.
There are disagreements among scholars over how far fascism can travel across national and ethnic boundaries, especially in postwar forms. But accepting that fascist movements can cooperate across nations does not transform fascism into an open confessional community. If Sunni Islam is said to be fascist precisely because it can encompass multiple ethnicities while demanding ideological conformity, the concept has been stretched away from the historical and comparative definitions that made it analytically useful.
The invocation of the Umayyads as an “origin myth” also requires much more evidence than a slogan. Salafi reverence for the Companions may include defense of Mu‘awiya, but the broad Ash‘ari Sunni tradition ranges from silence about the Umayyad political conflict to criticism of Mu‘awiya without anathematization. The Umayyads do not function across Sunni traditions as a single foundational myth. Once again, the failure to distinguish among Islamic currents becomes decisive.
4.7 Can Fascism Be Religious?
The relationship between fascism and religion is genuinely debated. Griffin and Robert Paxton treat fascism as a modern revolutionary phenomenon centered on political mobilization, national community, leadership, and the transformation of public life. Historical fascist regimes could instrumentalize religion, but they resisted independent sources of authority that might limit the total claims of state, movement, or leader.
Other scholars use fascism-adjacent frameworks to analyze movements such as Hindu nationalism, strands of American Christian nationalism, religious ultranationalism in Israel, or Islamist movements such as ISIS. In these cases religion can function as part of a closed collective identity, a myth of threatened purity, and a structure of charismatic loyalty. Yet scholars often qualify such comparisons with terms such as “theocratic fascism,” “religious ultranationalism,” or “exclusionary religious populism” rather than simply identifying an entire religion as fascist.
The distinction is crucial. In many cases the debate concerns parties, movements, organizations, or ideological currents—not the religion itself. A religion may be used as the sacred vocabulary of an exclusionary nationalist project without becoming identical to fascism. Applying the label to Sunni Islam as a whole therefore requires a far heavier burden of proof than applying a comparative framework to a specific political organization.
4.8 Are the Other Characteristics of Fascism Really Present?
One of the most widely accepted characteristics of fascism is mass mobilization under a commanding political leadership. Ayek points to mobilization during the violence on the Syrian coast and in Suwayda as evidence. But selecting episodes from a society in a period of post-regime upheaval and treating them as proof of a durable fascist social structure is methodologically weak.
Post-Assad Syria is an exceptional and unstable environment: an interim authority with major institutional problems; fourteen years of sectarian and ethnic incitement; conflicting emotions of relief, revenge, and fear; severe poverty; widespread weapons; institutional collapse; and simultaneous fundamentalist, sectarian, ethnic, regional, and political backlashes. A claim that Sunni Islam—or even jihadist Islam—is structurally fascist requires analysis of a sustained political formation, not only behavior produced during a seismic transition.
There is another contradiction. The definition of fascism adopted in the argument treats fascism as hostile to conservatism and its institutions. Islamist currents, however, are generally deeply attached to conservative norms, inherited religious institutions, and older symbolic authorities. Even radical Salafi currents often justify themselves through a return to earlier models rather than a revolutionary cult of a wholly new national future. Calling the modern bureaucratic institutions built by twentieth-century Arab dictatorships “traditional institutions” does not resolve this conceptual problem.
5. Is Fascism a Social Condition or an Elite Political-Ideological Movement?
In political and social studies, fascism is not normally treated as the total essence of an entire society. It is an ideological and mobilizational project that feeds on particular conditions: defeat, humiliation, economic crisis, social fear, and political vacuum. Robert Paxton’s work is especially important here because it studies how fascist movements take root, acquire allies, mobilize constituencies, and sometimes capture the state. The analytical object is a movement and a political process—not a claim that an entire people is fascist by nature.
Emilio Gentile likewise emphasized fascism’s effort to create a political religion: a civic-sacral system that transformed ideas of nation, sacrifice, loyalty, and political belonging. That observation points away from treating inherited religion itself as fascism. Fascism seeks to sacralize politics and produce a new political faith.
Against this background, statements about a generalized “fascist mood” in Arab Sunni societies require much stronger empirical foundations. If the category expands from a specific political current to the psychological essence of a vast religious community, it ceases to perform the classificatory work for which the concept of fascism was developed.
6. When the Goal Becomes the Term Rather Than Knowledge
Maurice Ayek is not the first writer to connect fascism with Islam, but his argument applies the connection specifically to Sunni Islam through selective events and broad judgments. The structure of both Ayek’s argument and Abdel-Samad’s earlier thesis risks giving the impression that the desired endpoint is the powerful negative label itself, rather than an open inquiry into how religion interacts with political reality.
The warning against conceptual inflation comes from within fascism studies. Roger Griffin has repeatedly argued that “fascism” remains useful only when it retains classificatory value as a distinct category rather than becoming a generic insult for every form of illiberalism, radicalism, racism, conservatism, populism, or religious fundamentalism. Once semantic boundaries collapse, the term generalizes more than it illuminates.
Using “Sunni fascism” in the present Syrian context therefore carries an unusually high analytical and social cost. It sacrifices precision for rhetorical shock and risks feeding the same cycle of stereotyping and identity conflict that it claims to explain.
6.1 Contradiction and Bias Weaken the Analysis
Ayek writes that “Sunni fascism” is a small current within political Islam and an even smaller current within the Arab Sunni community: Islamically politicized people are a minority, and only a minority of that minority embraces the tendency he describes. The obvious question is: how does an argument move from a minority of a minority to a term whose wording names the larger community?
The article offers no convincing answer. Instead, it repeatedly returns to broader formulations about the rise of Sunni fascism, its domination of Arab Sunni societies, the need to dismantle the “fascist mood” of those societies, and the alleged dominance of that mood over the Arab Sunni bloc. The narrow qualification and the broad diagnosis cannot both carry the same analytical weight.
The asymmetry becomes more troubling when analogous labels are categorically rejected for other sectarian or ethnic components in Syria, Iraq, or Lebanon. That raises a legitimate question about the neutrality of the conceptual method itself.
7. The Claim That Syrian Nationalism Has Ended: A Shallow Sectarian Reading
The initial premise that Syria’s post-2011 history is best understood as a civil war leads into another sweeping claim: that Syrian nationalism has ended. Here again, analytical tools appear to be subordinated to a predetermined conclusion.
7.1 The Methodological Problem: No Definition of Nationalism
The claim that “Syrian nationalism has ended” is made without first defining what Syrian nationalism means. Is it civic loyalty grounded in citizenship and a constitution? A collective feeling of social solidarity? A political project for a common state? Without a conceptual definition, “the end” of nationalism becomes an impression rather than an analytical judgment. How can we declare the death of something that has not first been defined?
7.2 National Belonging as a Practice of Resistance
National belonging does not necessarily disappear when the state collapses or sub-identities become stronger. It can become a daily practice of resistance: preserving a shared identity, rejecting sectarian partition, and maintaining a collective memory that crosses communal boundaries. The collapse of the official public sphere does not eliminate alternative public spheres in which Syrians continue to defend the idea of Syria as a political community larger than its sects.
7.3 Syria Before 2011: National Belonging Survived Repression
Even under Assad’s authoritarian rule, Syrian national belonging persisted through cultural salons, student activism, civil initiatives, and other forms of social and intellectual resistance. This alone suggests that national identity is deeper than the political regime that claims to represent it.
7.4 Nationalism as a Future Project, Not a Dead Past
To declare nationalism dead is to surrender to the present moment and ignore the possibility of reconstruction. History offers many cases in which national identities were rebuilt after devastating wars and political collapse: postwar Europe, Rwanda, Vietnam, Turkey after the First World War, and societies transformed after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Even in Lebanon and Iraq, where the state remains contested, national belonging remains an object of struggle rather than a finished corpse.
Crises can weaken national identity, but they can also force societies to redefine it on fairer and more inclusive foundations. In the Arab world, the decline of ideological pan-Arab nationalism and the continuing conflict over political Islam have made the redefinition of citizenship and national belonging one of the region’s central questions. Questions of this scale are not answered in a few years.
7.5 The Real Danger: Adopting a “Post-National” Discourse
The claim that nationalism has ended may express the understandable emotional pain produced by Syria’s catastrophe, but it does not by itself constitute objective analysis. The challenge is not to certify the death of Syrian national belonging, but to reconstruct it around equal citizenship, recognition of pluralism, transitional justice, and institutions capable of protecting all Syrians.
7.6 Surrendering to the Sectarian Interpretation
The article also reduces Syria’s political, economic, geopolitical, and social complexity to a shallow sectarian explanation, as though Syrian history were only a sequence of communal divisions. Such a reading neglects the security state, structural corruption, neoliberal economic policies, foreign intervention, and the collapse of the social contract. It turns a multilayered conflict into a ready-made story of “sectarian civil war.”
This simplification can become politically and morally disabling. If national unity was always an illusion and the conflict is merely the natural expression of sectarian essences, resignation becomes easy. Yet even in the darkest years of war, everyday practices of solidarity, civil networks, and civic discourse—especially among young people, women, and civil-society organizations—continued to resist fragmentation. Syrian national belonging, as a political and ethical possibility, has not disappeared.
Conclusion
This paper does not deny the deep entanglement of religion, Islamism, sectarian identity, and political power in the Syrian crisis. Nor does it minimize the danger of religious, sectarian, or ethnic extremism, all of which have accumulated violence and widened social division. Its purpose is instead to return analysis to a sound methodological track: to use precise concepts that do not automatically produce collective stereotypes, and to distinguish among movements, organizations, doctrines, and communities rather than pouring them into a single mold.
The greatest danger lies in turning these phenomena into a single cause and a final explanation through ready-made concepts imported from different historical contexts. Labels such as “Sunni fascism” do not necessarily explain reality; they can reproduce its stereotypes, reducing a complex conflict to a simplified story of warring sects while obscuring the deeper roots of Syria’s crisis in state failure, the destruction of the social contract, structural corruption, regional and international intervention, and the major humanitarian crises of the past two decades.
The objective is neither exoneration nor denial. It is to place research and analysis on the correct path. That path begins by dismantling the real causes of crisis rather than reducing them to narrow essences. Only such analysis can support realistic and just solutions grounded in pluralism and recognition rather than in terminology that intensifies conflict.
Highly charged labels—“Sunni fascism,” “Islamic fascism,” “political Alawism,” or “political Sunnism”—offer the seductive force of rhetorical shock, but they impose a high analytical and social price. They blur distinctions, reproduce stereotypes, and close doors to settlement. What Syria needs is not an expanding vocabulary of stigmatizing labels but a more rigorous conceptual toolkit capable of diagnosing the security state and its legacies, the political economy of destruction, the internationalization and militarization of Syrian territory, the media war across large and small platforms, and the mechanisms of stereotyping and hatred that intensify during crisis. Only then can language move from sorting and mobilizing people to understanding, rebuilding, and reform—and toward a new social contract and a Syrian national identity capable of being lived.
References and Further Reading
- Maurice Ayek, “The Syrian Civil War in Its Second Phase: On the End of Syria and the Future Options of the ‘Others’ Outside It,” Al-Jumhuriya, 22 Aug 2025. Link
- Hamed Abdel-Samad, Islamic Fascism (Der islamische Faschismus), first published in German in 2014; English edition, Prometheus Books, 2016. Link
- Avner Falk, Islamic Terror: Conscious and Unconscious Motives, Bloomsbury Academic, 2008. Link
- Alaa Al-Khatib, “Islamophobia, Anti-Islam, and Islamic Extremism,” video, 3 Sep 2024. Link
- Alaa Al-Khatib, “Was It a Revolution or a Civil War in Syria?”, video. Link
- Alaa Al-Khatib, “Syria Until 2011: Between the Son and His Father,” 29 Dec 2022. Link
- Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 1991; see also his work on the palingenetic core of fascist ideology. Link
- Roger Griffin & Olof Bortz, “Fascism: Historical Phenomenon and Political Concept,” 25 Oct 2022. Link
- Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, Knopf, 2004. Link
- Emilio Gentile, studies on fascism as political religion and the sacralization of politics. Link
- Alaa Al-Khatib, “Errors of Sectarian Interpretation: An Introduction to Sectarianism,” 3 Jun 2022. Link
- Alaa Al-Khatib, critique of “Political Alawism.” Link
- Social psychology background on stereotyping (Katz–Braly tradition and later summaries). Link
