ABSTRACT
Islamic fundamentalism remains an enigma precisely because it has confounded all attempts to divide it into tidy categories. "Revivalist" becomes "extremist" with such rapidity and frequency that the actual classification of any movement or leader has little predictive power. They will not stay put. This is because Muslim fundamentalists, for all their "diversity", orbit around one dense idea. From any outside vantage point, each orbit will have its apogee and perigee. The pursuit of power for Islam first gained some intellectual coherence in the mind and career of Sayyid Jamal al-Din "al-Afghani", a thinker and activist who worked to transform Islam into a lever against Western imperialism. His was an age of European expansion into the heartlands of Islam, and of a frenzied search by Muslims for ways to ward off foreign conquest. In the middle of this century of ideologies, the fundamentalists set out to transform Islam into the most complete and seamless ideology of them all.
