(Euben, p. 646). Not all pan-Islamic initiatives have, it is true, been motivated by purely religious feeling, nor have all Islamist movements been pan-Islamic in their focus--although they implicitly hold that every Islamic nation would be best off with a purely Islamic state. And various forms of Islamism continue to be used by regimes or other interests to provide themselves with an aura of legitimacy. But genuine Islamist reform movements today hold, as Euben notes,
not only . . . a shared diagnosis of Middle Eastern regimes and modern political sovereignty as morally and politically bankrupt, but a deeply held conviction that the antidote to state corruption, internal disunity, military defeats, and Western dominance requires the rejection of human aspirations to know fully and thus rule the world and the establishment of Shari'ah (Islamic law) as an expression of the supremacy of divine authority (p. 646).
In the Islamic view the state and religion are not separate entities. The truly Islamic state is ruled by shari'ah alone and adheres firmly to the faith in all matters. This has come to have a significant impact in the last few decades because Islam "has served as the basis for political legitimacy in the Arab world ever since the death of the prophet" and challengers of the current state of affairs hold that most of the present regimes in the dar-al-Islam are illegitimate by this standard (Masoud, 1999, p. 129). Thus, in fighting off these challenges, even the many authoritarian states of the Middle East--from the Baathist secularists of Iraq to the supposedly Wahabist fundamentalists of Saudi Arabia--"seek Islamic cover for their policies" and struggle against the encroachments of Islamist movements which, while they are sometimes tied to specific ethnic or national groups, almost always extend the scope of their criticism across all of the dar-al-Islam and the umma (or, community of believers) regardless of ethnic...