An excellent summary of Political Islam
Compare the following with the conventional, cultural arrogance of the gladiators of the international "liberal order" (i.e. Western imperialism) and the media pundits.
"Political Islam or Islamism is the consequence of the social frustrations, articulated around the social divisions of class and generation that followed from the economic crises of the global neo-liberal experiments of the 1970s and 1980s. The demographic revolution produced large cohorts of young Muslims, who, while often well educated to college level, could not easily find opportunities to satisfy the aspirations that had been inflamed by nationalist governments. Although these diverse studies of Islam are primarily concerned with the modern period, in order to understand such contemporary social movements as Islamism, we need to start in the nineteenth century. Broadly speaking we can identify four periods of Islamic political action in response to the social and cultural crises resulting from foreign domination and internal haemorrhaging. These movements have critically attacked contemporary political and military weakness in the name of the pristine Islam of the early community of the Prophet, and hence they have been labelled ‘fundamentalist’. In the nineteenth century, these reformist movements which were hostile to both traditional folk religion such as the Sufi lodges and external western threat included Wahhabism in Arabia, the Sudanese Mahdi, the Sanusi in North Africa, and Egyptian Islamic reform movements. The second wave of activism occurred in the 1940s with the development of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the third movement began in the aftermath of the Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel and reached a crescendo with the Iranian Revolution in 1978–9 and with opposition to the Russian incursion into Afghanistan. The contemporary fourth wave of resistance opened with the Gulf War in 1990, when the entry of American troops into Saudi Arabia created the resentment that eventually resulted in the Al Qaeda networks, September 11 and the war on terrorism.
Kepel’s study [Kepel 2002] remains the cornerstone of the debate about the social conditions that produced Islamism. What Kepel’s thesis lacks however is a clear articulation of how the neo-liberal phase of the global economy shaped the social conditions under which secular states were able to respond to the growth of Islamism. It is clear that neo-liberal policies intensified the internal conflicts between social classes as economic inequalities deepened, producing the social frustrations and dilemmas that propelled generations of university students towards fundamentalism. Because those global pressures are still in place, Kepel’s argument that radical Islamism is in decline may prove to be premature."
—Bryan S. Turner, Class, Generation and Islamism: towards a global sociology of political Islam, the London School of Economics, 2003.
I should add that the fifth "movement" sprung from the Russian slaughter in Chechnya, the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 and the defeat of the Syrian uprising of 2011, and that the "the large cohorts of young Muslims" were led by mainly middle-class militants.
Compare the following with the conventional, cultural arrogance of the gladiators of the international "liberal order" (i.e. Western imperialism) and the media pundits.
"Political Islam or Islamism is the consequence of the social frustrations, articulated around the social divisions of class and generation that followed from the economic crises of the global neo-liberal experiments of the 1970s and 1980s. The demographic revolution produced large cohorts of young Muslims, who, while often well educated to college level, could not easily find opportunities to satisfy the aspirations that had been inflamed by nationalist governments. Although these diverse studies of Islam are primarily concerned with the modern period, in order to understand such contemporary social movements as Islamism, we need to start in the nineteenth century. Broadly speaking we can identify four periods of Islamic political action in response to the social and cultural crises resulting from foreign domination and internal haemorrhaging. These movements have critically attacked contemporary political and military weakness in the name of the pristine Islam of the early community of the Prophet, and hence they have been labelled ‘fundamentalist’. In the nineteenth century, these reformist movements which were hostile to both traditional folk religion such as the Sufi lodges and external western threat included Wahhabism in Arabia, the Sudanese Mahdi, the Sanusi in North Africa, and Egyptian Islamic reform movements. The second wave of activism occurred in the 1940s with the development of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the third movement began in the aftermath of the Arab defeat in the 1967 war with Israel and reached a crescendo with the Iranian Revolution in 1978–9 and with opposition to the Russian incursion into Afghanistan. The contemporary fourth wave of resistance opened with the Gulf War in 1990, when the entry of American troops into Saudi Arabia created the resentment that eventually resulted in the Al Qaeda networks, September 11 and the war on terrorism.
Kepel’s study [Kepel 2002] remains the cornerstone of the debate about the social conditions that produced Islamism. What Kepel’s thesis lacks however is a clear articulation of how the neo-liberal phase of the global economy shaped the social conditions under which secular states were able to respond to the growth of Islamism. It is clear that neo-liberal policies intensified the internal conflicts between social classes as economic inequalities deepened, producing the social frustrations and dilemmas that propelled generations of university students towards fundamentalism. Because those global pressures are still in place, Kepel’s argument that radical Islamism is in decline may prove to be premature."
I should add that the fifth "movement" sprung from the Russian slaughter in Chechnya, the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 and the defeat of the Syrian uprising of 2011, and that the "the large cohorts of young Muslims" were led by mainly middle-class militants.
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