The victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran on 11 February 1979 was as surprising as the establishment of the first modern theocracy in world history by the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran that followed it in the same year. On 6 October 1981, Khālid al-Islāmbūlī, a member of al-Jihad organisation, stopped the truck under his command during a military parade in Cairo to assassinate President Anwar Sadat (pres. 1970–81) in the reviewing stand, and then shouted, ‘I have killed Pharaoh!’ With these stunning events, an undetected religious revival in the Islamic world, ongoing for some two decades, suddenly became conspicuous by its sharp political edge. It was most commonly referred to as ‘the resurgence of Islam’, although other similar terms were also used to describe it. In December 1991, the overwhelming victory of the Islamic Salvation Front in the Algerian national elections provoked a military takeover and a decade of savage civil strife in Algeria that marks the hazy end of the period surveyed in this chapter.

The Islamic resurgence thus noted for its dramatic manifestations at its mid-point around 1980 can be viewed as a continuation of the earlier trends surveyed in preceding chapters. But it was also rooted in major contemporary processes of social and political change in the second half of the twentieth century. Socially, Islamic resurgence had deep roots in the processes of urbanisation, spread of literacy and higher education and expansion of the public sphere by the media of mass communication.