Nature of Current Islamist Movements
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An individual's primary group allegiance can shift in the event of a perceived threat against another group with which s/he identifies. This accounts to a great extent for the changing fortunes of Islamism and various kinds of nationalist and ethnic identifications throughout the dar-al-Islam (or, territory of Islam) since the middle of the nineteenth century. Religious factionalism, ethnic conflict, and secular nationalism have all been set aside in favor of Islamism at various times. Yet it is difficult to define this term, which refers to a variety of movements all of which are based in religious reformism but can have differing protest or emancipatory goals. As Voll (1991) defined it, Islamism is "a distinctive mode of response to major social and cultural change introduced either by exogenous or indigenous forces and perceived as threatening to dilute or dissolve the clear lines of Islamic identity, or to overwhelm that identity in a synthesis of many different elements" (quoted in Ali, 2000, p. 11). Islamism is a force that must be understood in order to comprehend the challenges that are mounted today to many Islamic regimes, and are supported by millions of people--partly in defiance of the West, and, to the confusion of the West, in defiance of the seeming 'logic' of the popular demand for democracy and economic liberalism that 'should' arise among any struggling people. In this essay a brief review of the history of Islamism will be followed by a discussion o
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f the European powers in the region. But the elites of the Arab world, who had consistently failed "to represent the political and social aspirations of the masses," also ignored the political hopes of Arabists who "fervently sought to create an Arab national state in the Middle East" (Abu-Rabi, p. 95).
This commitment of the ruling elites to the artificial national boundaries drawn by the Europeans was not surprising since they had either been placed in power by the foreigners or had their regimes approved by them. The power of the Saudi royal family, for example, originated in its promulgation of the Wahabi sect's radically unitarian beliefs. By the twentieth century the family's fortunes had waned but Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud revived them with his campaign--based on the military strength of the fully committed Wahabist warriors whom he had indoctrinated--to retake all of the Arabian peninsula. He accomplished most of this reconquest by 1902 and his army was "poised to take their holy war to the rest of the Muslim world" (Masoud, 1999, p. 131). But Abdul Aziz knew that while the British and French might have allowed him to retake the inconsequential deserts and oases of the peninsula they were unlikely to "be so lax in defendi
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, Samuel Huntington, Western European, Islamic Nationalism, Indonesia Malaysia, Western Europe, East Nationalist, Sudan Afghanistan, Muslim Brotherhood, Islamism Huntington, islamist movements, authoritarian regimes, ali 2000, arab world, world war, islamic identity, middle east, hovsepian 1995, wiktorowicz 1999, european powers, arab studies quarterly, authoritarian regimes region, studies quarterly 22, world economic system, ali 2000 15,
Approximate Word count = 4607
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)
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