ABSTRACT
The contemporary resurgence of Islam, which in turn led to the genesis and rise of Islamism as a political expression of the Muslim faith, highlights a new era of political struggle to change the status quo in many authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world and challenge Western liberal democracy as a blueprint for governance of the modern nation-state. The priority for such Islamist ideologues and movements in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been to bring about, through revolution if necessary, the establishment of Islamic states or Muslimruled states and governance founded on the principal tenets of Islam and shaped by shari’a law. Today the phenomenon of Islamism is thus widely perceived in many non-Muslim discourses and policy-shaping debates as a direct threat to the modern nation-state and political systems of the Arab world, as well as other domains such as Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hence political Islam or Islamism has become essential to current analyses of global politics, international relations, the Middle East and relations between Islam and the West.
