Political Islam: Background, New Islamism and Future Prospects

Scientific Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - Miscellaneous, Saint Mary's University (Saint Mary's University), course: Politics of the Middle East, language: English, abstract: Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, countries in the Muslim world had roughly two options on which policy to adopt in order to defend themselves against the Western imperial powers. The first option was to revive the Caliphate which Ottoman Empire abolished as institution and embrace a new way of Islamic Political Universalism. This seemed rather a hard task during early 20th century and it still seems does in contemporary context. Second one was to create nationalist secular states in which language, territory and shared history was the determinant of defining identities.