ABSTRACT
The rise of Islamic activism worldwide, including the appearance of illiberal politics in Islamic cultural zones (ICZs), is usually seen as a reaction to globalizing modernization. The enduring otherness of Islam has long ensured recurrent mockery of its culture and people in Western scholarship and the popular media, with orientalist truisms of inherent Muslim abnormality and excess regularly colouring examinations of the faith, including understandings of the seemingly tortured career of democracy in the ICZs. This chapter explores the current phase of Islamism as both an articulation of internal processes in ICZs and as a constitutive element of c, not simply a reaction to its predatory instincts. Neoliberals see the movement toward global democratization as both cause and consequence of globalization. Despite ritualistic and polite qualification, the pervasive scholarly sentiment suggests a basic divergence between democracy and Islam. Democracy is ultimately a Western ideal-type; spatial and cultural distance weaken its resemblance to the original.
