Islam, Islamism and the West

Islamism — political Islam, the movement that wants the state itself to be an instrument of the faith — is a modern invention, and the authors are precise about its birthdate. It belongs to the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it is born in defeat. The Muslim world that had built the empires of chapter one found itself, by 1900, largely colonized, carved up or humiliated by European powers whose ships, factories and armies it could not match. The old order had failed. Something had to explain why.

One answer, which the authors trace through figures like the Egyptian founders of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, was that Muslims had failed because they had strayed from a pure original Islam, and that recovering it — as a total system governing law, economy and state — would restore the strength that had been lost. This is the crucial move. It reads a fourteen-century religion backward through the lens of a nineteenth-century wound, and it turns faith into an ideology of retrieval and grievance. It is, in that sense, a very modern response to a very modern problem, closer in structure to other twentieth-century revolutionary movements than to the medieval world it claims to be restoring.

The third reality is the one the West is most fluent in and least aware of: the geopolitical relationship. Here Islam is neither a faith nor an ideology but a name for a set of interests, borders and confrontations — oil, migration, the map drawn by European powers after the Ottoman collapse, the wars and interventions that followed. And in this arena, the authors argue, the West is not an observer of the Muslim world. It is a participant, often the more powerful one, and it has been for two centuries.

This is where the book turns its attention homeward. The Western fear of Islam, they suggest, is partly a projection — a way of externalizing anxieties about decline, security and identity by locating the threat in a foreign faith. Colonial history, the Cold War's manipulation of religious movements, the arming of some groups and the toppling of some governments: the West has repeatedly shaped the very forces it later describes as alien and menacing. The relationship is a mirror in which each side reads its own dread.

Step back from the three layers and the deeper stake comes into view. The book is finally about what happens when a single word is allowed to carry three incompatible meanings at once — because a word in that state stops describing the world and starts deciding it for us in advance. When faith, movement and geopolitics all answer to Islam, any fact about one automatically implicates the other two. A bombing becomes evidence against a religion; a religious custom becomes evidence of a strategic threat; a diplomatic quarrel becomes proof of civilizational incompatibility. The fusion is not a mistake of vocabulary. It is a machine for producing conclusions no one had to argue for.

Martinez-Gros and Valensi are historians, and their instinct is that this collapse is what history exists to resist. A historian's basic discipline is to notice that things that share a name were not born at the same time, do not do the same work, and answer to different explanations. The medieval empire, the twentieth-century ideology and the contemporary confrontation are three objects with three different histories. The refusal to distinguish them is not a strong opinion about Islam; it is a decision not to think about it.

The whole book turns on an act of separation that ought to be obvious and almost never is. A religion that spread across three continents in the century after 632; a political program invented in the shadow of colonial defeat and consolidated in 1979; and a geopolitical relationship in which the West has been an active hand for two hundred years. Three objects, three timelines, one overloaded syllable. Martinez-Gros and Valensi spend their pages prying them apart, not to soften anything but to make it possible to see anything at all.