ABSTRACT

Over the last 30 years, the rise of Islam or more correctly, the Islamist movement as a political force across the Muslim world is a phenomenon which has been greeted with fear and trepidation by both European governments and academics.1 In fact, the term Islamist movement is itself a misnomer as it tends to suggest that the Islamist movement, according to its interpretation in Europe, is a united entity with an expansionist character which knows no borders and a highly-developed programme of societal transformation which threatens the values, mores and, indeed, the sheer existence of European civilization. On the contrary, the Islamist movement is itself a deeply fragmented body, composed of a kaleidoscopic myriad of deeply divergent and often radically opposed groups, currents and trends whose methods, aims and objectives differ not only from country to country across the Islamic world but indeed within the respective states themselves.