ABSTRACT
As Emanuel Sivan has pointed out: Islamic Sunni radicalism was born out of the anti-accommodative attitude towards political power which had always existed within the tradition as a vigilante-type, legitimate, albeit secondary strand. Max Weber’s analysis of Islam—fragmentary as it is—evinces the same basic problems that can be found in his analysis of those civilizations to which he devoted full treatises—the Jewish and all the Chinese and Indian ones. The pristine vision of the umma, probably only implicit in the very formative period of Islam, assumed complete convergence between the sociopolitical and religious communities. The contemporary scene in the Muslim societies can be seen as moving between the poles of attempts to establish territorial states with some elements of pluralism that binds on their earlier historical sequence; and strong anti-pluralistic tendencies in the form of either extreme secular oppressive, often military regimes or extreme Jacobin fundamentalist ones.
