كثيرة جدآ هي المقالات والتحليلات -بغثها وسمينها سيء النية أو حسنها أو ساذجها !-التي ظهرت في أخر عقدين مرسخة لمفاهيم ومصطلحات لم تكن مألوفة قبلآ_ الإسلام السياسي, الإسلاموية,إسلامو فوبيا أو رهاب الإسلام


ومن بينها لدي هذه المقالة التي أصدرتها جامعة كامبردج العام الماضي..
[CENTER]
Class, generation and Islamism: towards a global
sociology of political Islam[/CENTER]
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.
In political terms, Palestine has been the single most important issue
sustaining political Islam, or as Edward Said (Rogan and Shlaim 2001: 207)
in his ‘Afterword’ to The War for Palestine notes for Palestinians ‘a vast collective
feeling of injustice continues to hang over our lives]

2003

Very glad by your return, and much more by
your astonishing article


skeptic (f)