ABSTRACT
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism has occasioned many, often contradictory, claims as to its significance for the contemporary world. Within the Islamic countries themselves there are those who argue that a new era of Islamic power is dawning-present in the rhetoric of the Iranian revolution, this theme has acquired apparent confirmation from the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade later, which was interpreted by some Islamists to show that the only contestatory ideology with a global potential is Islam. In the West, the ‘challenge’ of Islamic movements has been construed, variously, as the rise of a new threat equal to communism, or as part of a new pattern of world politics dominated by the ‘clash of civilisations’.1 For others, Islamic movements correspond to some new conceptual and even ethical epoch, one of ‘post-modernity’, in which the claims of rationalist discourse derived from the European enlightenment are no longer valid, as either analytic tools or moral guidelines.
