ABSTRACT
Recent unsettling events have directed unprecedented foci on the social and psychological worlds of Islam; their constitutive affinity to politics and violence; unspoken pathologies of Islamic culture and collective psyche; and strategies to civilize populations mesmerized by that religion's vast and seemingly irrational appeal. This chapter maps out the principal trajectories and content of new challenges to human security in the Islamic cultural zones (ICZs), a term suggesting both the putative unity of geographical spaces impacted by Islamic culture as well as the diversity within the Islamic world. Discourses of human security offer productive avenues to capture dimensions of insecurity beyond statist conceit. Estranged from theological disputation with other monotheistic religions, notably Christianity, the theme of Islamic exceptionalism receives its lay enunciation in theories of modernity and modernization, given especially their 'secular bias'. The colonial model offers an unimpeded view of the fault lines within Western liberalism, but also the nexus between Islamic exceptionalism and the global exception.
