ABSTRACT
In the first decade of the twenty-first century one significant issue that has featured in global politics, discourse and international relations is the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism and the characterisation of the phenomenon as militant and radical. Contemporary accounts of the phenomenon, however, often overlook and pay little attention to the political history of Islamic fundamentalism. Such accounts are concerned with the ‘here and now’ threat that Islamic fundamentalism is understood as posing to particular conceptions of political and economic order. There is a concern to equip policy-makers with the ways and means to combat Islamic fundamentalists and their supporters. Much analysis simply contends that to look at the historical contexts in which this phenomenon is manifest is a diversion and irrelevance in terms of determining a response to the terrorism that the Islamic fundamentalists have wrought on modern Western societies. Yet contemporary history is important to an understanding of this very modern phenomenon. It is important because it alerts us to the changes and upheavals apparent in so many of the societies that Muslims inhabit and its should alert us to the powerful myths that leaders construct around these experiences as a way of mobilising for change; to break with the past and take control of the future. This book sets out to address this debate by examining a number of issues that account for and explain the present-day phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism.
