ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to examine some of the varied forms and mixed legacies that have produced particular kinds of state organizations in the Middle East, drawing out specifically the secular logic of the usages of state power. It explains the ways in which governments of a number of Middle Eastern states have used distinctively Islamic themes in their legitimation strategies. The chapter assesses the implications of such strategies for the emergence of more radical or oppositional Islamist movements. It argues that manifestations of self-consciously Islamic political activity are best understood as responses to encounters with particular forms of power, of which the state may be the most public symbolic and actual repository. The goals and methods of the organizations associated with the reassertion of Islamic values in political life are to a large degree shaped by the structures of imagination and power appropriate to the state.
