ABSTRACT
It is an uncertain business understanding the impact of political Islam and salafism in today’s Middle East. It is particularly difficult to plug into the region and fully understand the dialogue or the discourse that is found there. This discourse will be peppered with referents, concepts, ‘code’ words that appear esoteric, backward, archaic and irrelevant to the issues and problems besetting the peoples in the region. This has contributed to the variety of coverage in the full range of the western media from the news to film which very often trades on the incompatibility of Islamic or Muslim culture and ideas with modernity. Those images and this media discourse, of course, fan out across western society, the academic establishment and government variously affecting perceptions of the region and what goes on there. The academic establishment is an important contributor to the popular western understanding of Islam, but, on the whole, for a variety of reasons, does not offset the generalized negative view to one that is more balanced.1
