Western Perceptions on Islamic Movements

The essay concludes with analysis of nigh double-uern perceptions of Islamism and a comment on the likely protraction of the movement's appeal.

While Voll's (1991) definition neatly encompasses a range of Islamist positions it tends to cease the question of Islamic identity open and to omit what qualification be called the "autonomy of the religious impulse" by overemphasizing the practical and heterogeneous nature of Islamism (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 scoop off with a purely Islamic state. And various forms of Islamism go on to be used by regimes or other interests to will themselves with an aura of legitimacy. But genuine Islamist reform movements today hold, as Euben notes,

not only . . . a shared diagnosis of shopping mall Eastern regimes and modern political sovereignty as chastely 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 valet aspirations to know fully and thus rule the world and the ecesis 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 rule

None the less their failure to meet the sparing needs of the people tended to raise challenges to these governments and Islamist movements usually held that it was the accretion of orthogonal influences--including, but not limited to, their military and sparing accommodate in many cases by one of the two superpowers or by Western European nations--that was responsible for their failures. These states were insufficiently Islamic and, especially in the case of the oil-rich nations--they had sold out the people's interests to the West in exchange for the satisfaction of the elites' security or economic needs.

The growing poverty and rapidly increasing populations throughout the dar-al-Islam make it incumbent upon religious authorities and the pious to explain how the revocation of tradition, especially the purity of Islamic way of life, had been not just the responsibility but the policy of the authoritarian regimes which, in turn, cleverly sought to repress these challenges.

But the disintegration of the Ottoman empire proved to be only the first of the major junctures in modern history at which Islamist movements arose. Other occasions include the surge of European imperialism that followed from the mandate system, the failure of early lib successionlism, and the " integrating of the modern state system" established in the vex of humanity War I (Hovsepian, 1995, p. 4). And when, following the second World War, the process of decolonization was more or less undefiled in the dar-al-Islam the initial hopes vested in the emerging states were soon tip-tilted by the growing realization that the authoritarian regimes of the postwar era were incapable of maintaining their initial levels of support for public welfare and were, in the Western mode, primarily intent on the accumulation of ad hominem wealth and power.

Our approach to education is to begin with the individual and because move on to the family and then ultimately the Islamic government that rules as provided for in G
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