Delivered. Contrary to what a certain historiography says, the history of Islamism does not begin in 1967, the day after the defeat of Egypt, Syria and Jordan against Israel, which would have marked the political death of nationalism. Arabic and thus paved the way for a “return to Islam”. The vague concept of Islamism is so tainted with ideological preconceptions and ignorance that political scientist François Burgat and historian Matthieu Rey have decided to devote a long and rich book to it.
As they point out, there are, in France, a number of occasional studies – of high quality – on the Egyptian, Saudi, Syrian or Palestinian cases, etc., a number of globalizing and often polemical topical essays, but no study both historical and “panopticon”.
The postulate of Rey and Burgat is that Islamism is an identity-based, local and detailed response to a context of cultural and political domination most often of colonial origin. Islam thus becomes a means of mobilization, a vernacular register, that of the language of the “losers” and the dominated. the researchers also underline the extraordinary plasticity and adaptability of a concept that is more political than religious, and which has been able to show itself to be alternately legalist, revolutionary, literalist, reformer, conservative, modernizer, democratic or authoritarian, depending on the place , contexts and times.
An instrument of colonial power
Their work is not yet another book of the history of ideas, but rather a political history of social and cultural practices that crossed the entire Muslim world from the beginning of the 19th century.and century, from Africa to Asia, in reaction to the encroaching and colonizing modernity of the West.
The work is divided into five main periods. The first, titled “Les tremors” goes all the way to the First World War: as the historian Henry Laurens notes, “Between 1780 and 1920, Islam will take on the tenor of a counter-discourse” and “will participate in an unprecedented mode of resistance to the West” in the Ottoman Empire and the Indian subcontinent. Pierre-Jean Luizard recounts the emergence, at the same time, of the Iranian Shiite clergy as a major political actor. Oissila Saaidia tells how Islam, before being considered an enemy, was seen as an instrument of power by the French colonizer in the Maghreb.
The second major part of the book, “A l’heure coloniale”, deals with the period following the First World War, which saw the disappearance of the Caliphate, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of partisan Islamism, like the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928. In the Maghreb, dominated by the French colonial yoke, Islam became the bearer of feelings, modes of action and nationalist mobilizations.
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