ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how African peoples live and flourish while trying to shape their political and religious surroundings outside the formal structures of the state, through an established religion like Islam. The infectious Islamic jihad against 'infidels' carried out by returning veterans from the war in Afghanistan spread particularly rapidly in Algeria, Egypt and the Sudan. Religious militancy and terrorism pose a major problem to the contemporary world. The wave of Islamic militancy is sweeping the world and which is variedly referred to as radical Islamic Fundamentalism, Islamism, Islamic Resurgence and the world-wide Jihad movement has its remote origins in the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt in the late 1920s. The contradiction between the idealized pacifism of Islam, Arab Unity and the harsh realities of inter-Arab competition and rivalry, decline of Arabism as a functional ideology and the growing 'stateness' of most Arab states sounded the clarion call for the re-examination of Arabism and Islamism.
