ABSTRACT
The forward march of Muslim militancy – from Iran to Lebanon, from
Algeria and Palestine, and North Africa to South Asia, extending to the
immigrant communities in Europe, and not to mention the transnational Al-
Qaida – seems to confirm the view that the world is on the verge of Islamist
revolutions. It is as though the late twentieth century has impregnated history
to give birth to Islamic revolutions with the same intensity and vigor that
the early twentieth century had produced socialist rebellions. Is globaliza-
tion pushing religion, Islam, into the center stage of world radical politics? This essay attempts to show that ours may be an age of widespread socio-
religious movements and of remarkable social changes, but these may not
necessarily translate into the classical (rapid, violent, class-based, and over-
arching) revolutions. What most accounts of Islamism refer to do not sig-
nify Islamic revolutions, rather they point to heightened but diffused
sentiments and movements associated, in one way or another, with the lan-
guage of religiosity. Perhaps we need to rethink our understanding of
‘‘revolutions’’ in general and the Islamic version in particular. In the Muslim Middle East, the future is likely to belong to a kind of socio-political change
that might be termed ‘‘post-Islamist revolution.’’
