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This chapter explores the modern context in which Egyptians began to introduce the Kharijites into their political discourse. It argues that Muslims in different historical and political circumstances have engaged in rhetorical accusations of Kharijism, with the early rhetorical context considerably obscured by the shadow of the orthodox tradition. The modern context stands more clearly in view; it covers the process of political and economic modernization begun by the Ottoman governor Muhammad ’Ali in the 19th century, the centralized planning and authoritarian style of President Gamal Abdul Nasser's regime, and the development of Egyptian Islamism.

Most studies of Islamism have focused on the role of oppositional forces. Increasingly, states are also important Islamist actors. States pursue Islamization not only in reaction to Islamist challenges but also because in Islamism they see the opportunity to address the inherent weaknesses of the postcolonial state structure, and to significantly increase the power and capacity of the state. This trend is most evident in Pakistan and Malaysia where both the weakness of the postcolonial state and the opportunity inherent in Islamization have been greatest. These cases deviate from other models of state formation in the Muslim world, and provide new insights not only into state formation in the Muslim world but also into the study of the role of religion in state expansion in comparative politics.

The 1970s was a period of Islamic resurgence in Malaysia and Pakistan. In Malaysia, ABIM and dakwah movements, and in Pakistan, the Jama`at‐i Islami spearheaded Islamist challenge to the secular state. These movements grew in popularity, and became the voice of the disgruntled political elements. They also floated new and powerful political concepts and ideas that quickly gained in popularity and framed public debates and influenced political culture.

In the 1980s, Malaysia adopted the policy of state‐led Islamization. The ruling UMNO party co‐opted ABIM, fashioned itself as an Islamically oriented party, and adopted many Islamist ideas. The state created Islamic institutions, and supported Islamic cultural, political, and economic activities. It used Islamization to expand its power and to penetrate the Malay society. The state also embarked on rapid economic growth to address racial tensions. It used its control of Islam to manage Islamic politics and define Islamic values with a view of economic growth and accommodating globalization.

The Zia ul‐Haq regime adopted state‐led Islamization to shore up waning state power. It adopted aspects of Islamist ideology to reshape the country's judicial and political structures. This strategy expanded state power after years of domestic strife and at a time when Pakistan was involved in the Afghan War. The policy was also used to legitimate military rule, providing a justification for its continuation as demands for democratization grew. The Islamization strategy firmly entrenched the postcolonial state in Islamic ideology and allowed the military to ally itself with Islamist forces to achieve its goals.

This chapter examines some of the conceptions of order and justice that are present in the Islamic world. It argues that many Islamic states have been willing to accommodate themselves to an international society based on the idea of sovereign equality. However, one of the impacts of globalization has been to shift the allegiances of some members of these states from territorially based political communities to those based on religious or cultural identity. Some of the radical Islamist groupings that have emerged in recent years and have voiced a range of grievances are seeking nothing less than the overturning of prevailing international and domestic orders. Although the outcome of this complex challenge is impossible to predict, one consequence is that it has created space for the emergence of a new and possibly transformational Islamic civil society, which directs its attention principally to the reform of Muslim societies themselves.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book attempts to unlock the incipient industry of Islamism. This is, at its core, a work of political sociology, informed, most of all, by scholarship in social movement theory, comparative politics, and the sociology of religion. To make the material accessible to a wide variety of readers, the author has aimed to write in a lucid, narrative style. In his nearly four years in Morocco, he witnessed firsthand the development of political Islam in one place. But these experiences also shed light on what is happening in other parts of the Arab world.

This chapter continues the discussion of the lives of young Islamists, focusing on their articulations of their hopes and goals. Analyzing the trove of data that the author uncovered from first-person narratives and life histories, transcripts, and extended participant observation, the author found that young people were looking for nothing less than a new sense of self. Their decisions are multiple, multilayered, and constantly renegotiated, but they can only be understood by making sense of the new identities that are sustained by their collective action. The author argues that Islamism is not simply ideological; it is instrumental—an avenue to a new identity, to new ways of seeing and thinking about themselves. The author dubs this the new politics of personal empowerment, where Islamist movements are reimagined as individual improvement factories: places to go not simply to become better Muslims, but to better their lot in life or the perception of that lot.

The rise of political Islam in the 1970s and 1980s in reaction to secular Western imperial power had consequences at both the domestic and international levels. Islamists sought to institutionalize their religious authority and political power in state constitutions, which in turn had tangible and often grave effects on the practical and legal status of religious freedom in those countries. Concurrently, the growing power of Islamism, coupled with the rise of national and transnational Islamic identity, inspired efforts to develop Islamic alternatives to Western international law. The resulting agreements—such as the Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights and the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam—have raised pressing questions about the compatibility of Islam and human rights; the status of women, non-Muslims, and religious freedom in Islamic declarations; the nature of contemporary Islamic international law; and the implications of differences between Western and Islamic formulations for the universality of human rights. These questions are the subject of this chapter.

This chapter examines leading figures and institutions of the Religious Right in the United States and the distinctive narrative form its public and political activism has taken from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present: namely, the jeremiad. The resurgence of publicly assertive religion has become the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny and the source of much political concern. Social scientists and policymakers have long presumed that as the world modernized it would inevitably secularize. The political ascendancy of the Religious Right in the United States and, more recently, the consequential militancy of radical Islamism confounds conventional wisdom of inevitable secularization. The chapter closes with a cursory comparison of the jeremiad with the jihad, the distinctive narrative form of radical Islamism, which reveals that despite strong rhetorical similarities between them, crucial differences persist in their political effects. Moreover, such a comparison reveals an important irony: just as the specter of resurgent religion has been undermining the longstanding academic confidence in the self‐evident inevitability of secularization, the perceived threat of secularization has been busy mobilizing the faithful both at home and abroad.

This chapter discusses the origin, definitions, and issues associated with the term Islamism. It argues that an understanding or explanation of Islamism requires attending not only to the multiple and various ways Islamist thinkers reinterpret Islam but also to the specific conditions and cultures in which they are embedded and the partisans and audiences they seek to address. These conditions and contexts determine the extent to which an Islamist framework resonates with Muslims who live in a wide range of cultural contexts and geographic locations. Such resonances are, in turn, facilitated by a concatenation of forces that mark this particular moment in history. These include the ways in which contemporary global inequalities compound the legacy of European colonialism to reproduce a sense of Muslim powerlessness relative to the West; ongoing Euro-American political and financial support of corrupt autocrats, many of whom preside over nation-states stitched together by Western fiat; and the persistence of authoritarian regimes eager to control domestic unrest by catalyzing “Muslim rage” toward external targets.

This chapter is concerned with understanding changing modalities of religious expression and modes of belonging among the Muslim youth culture in contemporary Mali. Much recent scholarship about Muslim youth has privileged Islamism, trajectories of political radicalization, as well as ethical modes of self-fashioning associated with so-called piety movements in the Muslim world, particularly in the Arab Middle East and among Muslims living in Europe and North America. Although in many cases such approaches might be perfectly legitimate, the case of young self-styled Sufis—often dubbed Rasta Sufis—in urban Mali helps to illustrate other, rather unconventional ways certain youth have been refashioning how to be young and Muslim. By focusing on so-called Rasta Sufis and their activities in Mali, the cultural politics of youth who are often marginalized in relation to an older generation in the interconnected realms of politics, economics, and religion are explored.

In Muslim societies, youth politics has espoused two contradictory sentiments: youth as a source of fear and hope. On the one hand, youths are seen as the foot soldiers of radical Islamism and violent politics, and on the other, as agents of democratic change and an open society. Through a comparative analysis of youth cultural politics in the Middle East—notably Iran, Egypt, and, somewhat, Saudi Arabia—this chapter first argues that political imaginations about the young—whether as radical Islamists or democratic reformers—are misconstrued. Second, by conceptually distinguishing between “young people” (as an age category) and “youth” (as a social category), this chapter postulates that “youth movements” are not necessarily about political change, but are essentially about “claiming youthfulness.” The political efficacy of youth movements depends to a large extent on the capacity of the adversaries—the political and moral authority—to accommodate the claims of youthfulness.

The introduction presents the conceptual framework for the book and its central arguments. It discusses Islamism as a political ideology, as well as the nexus in the political science literature between Islamists, politics, and the state, exploring examples in various Muslim polities.

The conclusion provides reflections on the idea of pietization and politics after the transition from the Mahathir administration to the Abdullah administration in the government, as well as from the reformist leadership of Fadzil Noor in PAS to the fundamentalist leadership of Abdul Hadi Awang. It discusses the intensification of contested authenticities between UMNO and PAS that these changes heralded. In addition to a careful critical deconstruction of the Islamic discourse and praxis of the main political protagonists, the conclusion draws further attention to the cultural context, meanings, and practices of contemporary Islam in Malaysia, and particularly how these factors interplay with mainstream elite politics encapsulated in the UMNO-PAS “Islamization race.” By listening to the voices of those outside the elite who have responded to the effects of UMNO’s and PAS’s mutually reinforcing Islamist politics, the conclusion further assesses the contributions of society (in contradistinction to the state and the political apparatus, as represented by these dominant political parties) either as an alternative vehicle for or as a buffer against Islamization.

This chapter provides a historical context through which to examine the struggle for democracy in Muslim societies. It re‐examines the relationship between religion and political development through the long view of history. After reviewing the place of religion in liberal‐democratic and modernization theory, an alternative reading of on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is provided. Drawing on key developments in the early modern European history and the scholarship of Fernand Braudel and Michael Walzer, parallels are discovered between the emergence of radical religious protest movements in the 16th/17th century Europe and similar events in the late 20th/early 21st century in the Middle East. The emphasis is on a sociological interpretation of religious fundamentalism. It is argued that historical depth is required to understand the relationship between religion and political development and that some forms of radical religious protest movements have a proto‐modern character to them.