ABSTRACT
As the outcome of a sustained intellectual engagement with Islam in world affairs, the present text is, unlike many sporadic cuts forced by the tragic events in and after September 2001, an attempt not only to undo the semantics of civilizational categories but to think about the thinking and ponder on the praxis of Islamic state actors. The ideational-material dialectic is, like the spirit-matter divide, an assumption that, in multiple ways, guides both the policy making of the practitioner and the policy analysis of the observer. The present study, too, is no objectivist “view from nowhere,” but if it makes its own assumptions explicit, by way of enunciating its research method and narrative, it is only because it seeks to challenge “conventional wisdom” (sometimes a euphemism for societal ignorance).
