ABSTRACT
In The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961), Frantz Fanon warned that nationalist movements risked producing one-party states ruled by comprador elites.1 He was less insightful about ways in which a thwarted revolutionary impulse might get channelled into pan-national modes of resistance articulated in a non-secular register. As R. S. Sugirtharajah argues, ‘One of the incongruities of postcolonial discourse is that its proponents hailed from a number of Islamic societies but barely took account of the potency of religion in these regions’.2 Writing half a century later, Anders Strindberg and Mats Wärn observe that, through interconnected local challenges to an overarching context of ‘failed third worldism’ and accelerating globalization, ‘Islam has come to frame a powerful counter-hegemonic challenge to the very structures of global politics in which it has emerged, to the interests those structures serve, and to the normative assumptions that sustain them’. It is in such local and global terms that they understand the political challenge, expressed through Islam, which they – and I – term Islamism.3
