Yet if southern Mali is heading toward Islamism, it is an Islamism based on persuasion, not violence and repression, as in the north.
Palestinian suicide bombing, the school siege at Beslan and beheadings in Iraq all fuel the image of an Islamism that shows no mercy.
The outcome was always ambiguous (as is now clear in Turkey's own turn to a moderate Islamism after decades of a secular dictatorship and the recent embrace by Chinese communists of a worldview they previously scorned: Confucianism).
His argument was that there is a phenomenon called "Islamism", a totalitarian movement in the mould of fascism or communism, and which should be fought with the weapons of war.
Nor would it corroborate the notion that the person is a proponent of "Islamism," a deeply complicated theology of modernity obsessed with the nation-state.
Whereas membership of the EDL or an inner-city gang can foster a type of lifestyle or, at worst, a livelihood, radical Islamism imposes a warped moral code and a polluted understanding of their purpose on earth.
The process by which committed jihadis prey on impressionable people, guiding them first to a virulent Islamism, then to violence, can take years.
