Islamism

Europe and the Muslims: Debating the Foundations of State Policy

This article discusses theoretical issues behind the current shift in the policy of European states towards Islamic communities. The shift is driven by the idea that the values of political Islam are incompatible with Western values; that the main driver behind radicalization is ideology and that even non‑violent Islamists gradually prepare the Muslim youth to embracing violence. Based on current academic discussions as well as the results of the author’s own research, the author concludes that the opponents of these ideas have serious counter‑ arguments.

Islamic Revival as a Search for New Forms of Political Representation

The main idea that Orkhun Jamal expresses in his interview is that the current stage of Islamic revival is not the desire to move back to the past or denial of progress. But as a result of social progress leading to the marginalization of a huge portion of the Islamic religious community due to the loss of political representation after the Islamic caliphate was destroyed, the search for the new forms of such representation is in progress. This search takes place in different forms, and it is accompanied by violence as it presupposes radical political shifts.

Round-table: "What Is Happening in the Islamic World? An Attempt at a Conceptualization"

The roundtable addressed the question of research methodologies for those trends now observable in the Islamic world, as well as conceptual approaches for understanding current developments there. Such frameworks as Islamic reformation, a neo-modern age, and the search for a political Islamic identity were proposed. Participants did not agree about the relationship between Islamic fundamentalism and modernity. Some of them considered fundamentalism as potentially a modernist movement, and others saw it only as antimodernist and archaic.

Islamism and the New Disintegration of Empires

In this interview, Georgi Derluguian discusses the reasons of Islamism’s popularity in the context of collapse of two great projects of the West — liberalism and communism. He pays special attention to organizational peculiarity of Islam, which allows this religion to lead successful wars against powerful empires. People who find this ideology attractive are not “new barbarians”; on the contrary, we are dealing with modern socially active people, whose access to social lifts has been blocked.