Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

H i s to r i cal Introduction and Overv i e w 3 3logues who posit Islam as the antithesis, in every way, to the “barbaric ignorance”( j a h i l i y y a ) of non-Islam. Most readers of this book will probably be familiarwith the former through their exposition in the U.S. media, and there islittle need to extensively elaborate them here. However, something does needto be said of the latter in relation to the Islamic resurgence that has manifesteditself in societies around the world since the 1970s. In such developments, onecan see something of the complexity of relations between political and culturalaspects of Islamization in contemporary societies and the difficulty ofcompletely separating them.For example, the modern history of Libya illustrates one of the ways Islamcame to be understood as a culturally authentic source of authority. As DirkVandewalle notes, Mu‘ammar Qadhafi’s early policies of radical cultural decolonization—suchas “[the] prohibition of alcohol, attempts to contain theinfluence of the West and its presence within the region, the closing ofnightclubs, the conversion of churches into mosques, the adoption in principleof Islamic punishment—preempted many of the issues that became thefoci of Islamist movements elsewhere” (Vandewalle 1998, 132–133). Nevertheless,Qadhafi himself increasingly grew wary of other Libyan political Islamists,whom he saw as threatening his own hold on power. For the Islamicrevivalism that he promoted in Libya still takes for granted the basic unit ofthe nation-state—a concept of modern, Western, historical lineage. Howev e r, since the late 1980s, such Islamic variants of religious nationalism havehad to confront challenges from more radical movements of a new, globalizedIslamism, whose agendas do not correspond as neatly to the borders ofn a t i o n s .The term “Islamism” was coined by scholars to refer to certain late moderndevelopments and thus should not be confused with, or used as a synonym for,“Islam,” Islam as a whole. The French scholar Olivier Roy defines Islamism as“the perception of Islam more as a political ideology than as a merer e l i g i o n . . . . In this sense Islamism is a modern movement, the last wave of ananti-imperialist mobilization that dates back to the last century” (Roy 2001,199). Islamism’s more immediate origins, however, might be traced back tothe late 1970s, when the experiences of many in the Muslim world reflected asense summed up by Patrick Gaffney’s description of this period in Egyptianh i s t o ry as “a time of growing unrest and uncertainty, with rising social, economicand political expectations on a collision course with limited opportunitiesand resources” (Gaffney 1997, 263).Such conditions led some Muslims to turn toward more “revolutionary ”forms of Islamism in the Middle East and elsewhere. The most dramaticallysuccessful such movement was the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Following thiswatershed event, the 1980s witnessed the rapid spread of new Islamist movements.Often these movements were mobilized under the leadership of charis-