This article aims to demonstrate that the origins of Islamism correlate geographically and temporally to the historical conditions in which the three most successful European totalitarian movements, Bolshevism, fascism and Nazism, were able to establish themselves. A comparative analysis of general reactions to World War I shows remarkably similar experiences of anomie, with some Europeans and Muslims giving rise to attempts to reconstruct the lost glory of the past or to create an alternative politico - cultural order to existing modernity.

Als Totalismus soll ein übergeordnetes, allumfassendes System der Interpretation und Beurteilung der Welt gelten, das keine anderen Wahrheitsansprüche akzeptiert. Totalismus wird in diesem Beitrag als analytisches Werkzeug für das Verständnis militanter Heterodoxien wie des Islamismus verwendet. Dessen Antriebskraft entsteht aus der Verpflichtung, eine totalistische Weltanschauung umzusetzen. Um die Art und Bedeutung des Grundsatzes der Totalität zu verstehen, erscheint es erforderlich, die Verbindung zwischen Zeitlichkeit, Telos und universeller Freiheit als wiederkehrende Themen in der Entwicklung der totalistischen Heterodoxien ausführlich zu analysieren. Dies geschieht am Beispiel des Mahdismus und der Ideologie von Sayyid Qutb.

Sometimes Islamism or Salafism is called a third or new kind of totalitarianism. But how appropriate is such an estimation which, after all, originally refers not to political movements but to political systems ? If we limit ourselves to an analysis of published thought, we may very well identify formal common grounds for which we find evidence in the writings of “classical” authors such as Sayyid Abu A’la Maududi and Sayyid Qutb. They consist of the following typical features : exclusive claim to knowledge, dogmatic claim to absoluteness, essentialist monopoly of interpretation, holistic steering intentions, deterministic idea of history, identitary concept of society, dualistic rigorism and fundamental condemnation. These features come along with a claim to absolute power as well as the legitimation of violence.

The history of interdependencies between Islamism and right - wing extremism shows two outstanding interfaces: anti - Semitism and, more recently, Islamophobia. From the Islamic point of view, in both cases the Muslims are the victims, in the first case victims of “the Jews”, who in this context are supposed to sweepingly represent both a worldwide conspiracy and the Israelis, in the second case victims of people who are as sweepingly – and sometimes rightly so – called enemies of Islam. By looking at the history of the Muslim Brother - hood, Salafism and Shia Islamism the respective appropriation of anti - Semitism as well as the perception of Islamophobia are sketched. Punctual cooperations result from ideological overlappings, particularly anti-Semitism. In the future we may expect confrontations between Islamists and Islamophobic groups to dominate the public debate on both kinds of extremism.

Just a few years ago, Salafism was a phenomenon completely unknown in Germany. Today it is “the” paradigm of security research, most of all when it comes to jihad in Germany. The essay points out why a differentiated concept of “Salafism” may make an analytically fruitful contribution to our understanding of this complex phenomenon of violence. However, also part of the prospect of danger is the fact that overstraining the concept is rather part of that problem which must be prioritised and contained : that is, the growth of a twilight area of potential jihadists.

In 2009 at the latest there appeared a new type of Islamist militants originating from the Federal Republic : increasingly, young men and women with or without a migration background, who had been born and raised in Germany, decided to join foreign terrorist organisations to, by their orders, carry out militant actions or terrorist attacks against the West and Germany. From Hamburg, Berlin, Bonn and other German cities and regions the “Jihad Caravan” went to Waziristan or Syria where a number of German converts, Turks, Afghans and Arabs, had joined groups such as Al Qaida ( AQ ), “Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan” (IBU ) and “Islamic Jihad Union” ( IJU ). The contribution sketches the lines of development of German jihad against the background of conflicts both in Germany and in foreign countries.