A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism

This is a brilliant and provocative re-evaluation of political Islam. Theoretically innovative, the book shows how Islamism can only be understood in the context of its relation with Eurocentrism. Using a neopragmatist approach inspired by Richard Rorty, and drawing on political and cultural theorists such as Stuart Hall, Agnes Heller and J.F. Lyotard, the book disrupts the conventional accounts of modernity and postmodernity and presents a radical new reading of Islamism as a response to the de-centring of the West. Breaking with the Arab-centrism of Islamic studies, Bobby Sayyid provides a critical analysis of Kemalism as dominant postcolonial ideology in the Muslim world, an ideology based on a Weberian understanding of the relationship between modernization and the West. Using the metaphor of Kemalism to narrate the political order in the postcolonial world, the author examines the rise of Islamism in the context of the postmodern critique of modernity. The book provides a much-needed conceptual narrative for an understanding of ?political? Islam and its relationship to decolonization and the passing of the Age of Europe. It is also an accessible introductory guide to the resurgence of Islamism, and poststructuralist political theory.