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Religion and Politics: The Complex Relationship between Islamism and the State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Malika Zeghal*
Affiliation:
Princeton University

Extract

Since The Early 1980s, a vast literature has developed on Islamism, a phenomenon that can be defined as “the recourse to the vocabulary of Islam, used in the postcolonial period to express within the state, or more often against it, an alternative political program that uses the heritage of the West as a foil, but allows nevertheless the re-appropriation of its principal references”. Its intellectual roots and the socio-economic reasons for its emergence are now examined in detail by scholars. Those studies have also illuminated the diversity of Islamism across the Middle East, thereby de-homogenizing an object too often thought of as monolithic.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 1998

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References

Endnotes:

1. Burgat, François, The Islamic Movement in North Africa (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), p. 41Google Scholar.