ABSTRACT
The many facets of globalization – capitalism, Internet, mass media, the techno-scientific revolution, the ecological crisis, global governance, and the transnational social movements – have had a deep transformative impact on religion and have changed the “conditions of belief” (Taylor 2007a). Already in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels pointed out that in the globalizing capitalist society “(a)ll that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned” (Marx and Engels 1998: 38). By compressing space and accelerating time, globalization has strained particular religious beliefs by uprooting community life and tradition. A series of displacements puts traditional forms of adherence and transmission of faith under pressure, thus generating counter-globalizing defensive and sectarian reactions: the upsurge of religious fundamentalism, nationalist populism, and the resentful rejection of the “fact of pluralism”. At its most extreme, this reaction takes the shape of the wave of global terror driven by Al-Qaeda and Daesh. The result of this radicalization is that while “Islam is a world religion, Islamism has become a globalized ideology and movement” (Moghadam 2009: 61). Paradoxically, Islamism is at once globalizing (it has universalist ambitions and it relies heavily on Internet and capitalist mechanisms) and a reaction to globalization and its alternative universalist messages (e.g. capitalism and its rhetoric of universal growth and progress; universal human rights; the idea of democratic rule).
