Framing Islamism: Understanding the Dynamics of Globalized Violence and Politics

Abstract

The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics. By Devji Faisal. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 224 pp., $24.95 hardback (ISBN-13: 978-0-231-70060-3). Islamic Radicalism and Global Jihad. By R. Springer Devin, L. Regens James, David N. Edger. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009. 336 pp., $26.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-589-01253-0). Islam's Predicament with Modernity: Religious Reform and Cultural Change. By Tibi Bassam. New York: Routledge, 2009. 400 pp., $42.95 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-48472-5). Pariah Politics: Understanding Western Radical Islamism and What Should be Done. By Saggar Shamit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 352 pp., $49.95 hardback (ISBN-13: 978-0-199-55813-1). How to make sense of the globalized forms of violent militancy and of politics that have been generated by Islamism in recent years? The books reviewed here all seek to uncover the general trends underpinning this phenomenon and to explain its implications for Muslim communities, the Muslim world, and the international system. Approaching this issue from different angles—security studies, sociology, religious studies, postcolonial studies—they all seek to dispel some of the misunderstandings regarding the contemporary dynamics of Islamism. These efforts are in themselves worthy of praise in a policy and academic environment where crude over-generalizations about political Islam remain a common occurrence. However it must be said that some of these books only very partially succeed in this task. Clearly, one problem that is particularly acute in the field of security studies is the overreliance on overambitious explanatory schemes. In religious studies, by contrast the problems are caused by dogmatic debates about the “true” meaning of the faith and its implications for related issues of reformation and secularization. Overall, the limitations shown by some of the books reviewed here are not induced by the choice of the discipline from which Islamism is being analyzed. As specialists of political Islam have already indicated, Islamism can be usefully examined using multiple disciplinary lenses (Mandaville 2007; Volpi 2010). Here, the difficulties encountered are mainly self-imposed: caused either by a less than optimal choice of conceptual arguments on which to build explanations of new forms of Islamism, or by a too narrow analytical focus. Explanations relying on well-known tropes such as the “radicalizing” role of religious ideology, the socio-economic and political exclusion of specific social groups, the “misinterpreting” of religious texts, and so on, have already been criticized for failing to account for the novelty of global Islamism (Roy 2004). Two of the …