Politicised political Islam and 'The New Spirit of Islamism'

In this book, I do not claim to have fully overcome the epistemological crisis of studying ideology or Islamism. However, I attempt to de-exceptionalise the lines of inquiry

Writing about political Islam is political, which brings us to my book’s broader crisis – the nature of knowledge production on Islamism. Karl Manheim, in a letter to Kurt H. Wolff in 1946, wrote that ‘in the marginal field of human knowledge we should not conceal inconsistencies’, covering up the wounds, as it were, ‘but our duty is to show the sore points in human thinking at its present stage.’^[1] This is what I will try to do in the following paragraphs – not to dispel all errors but to present sore points that undergird the malaise in studying Islamism.

Firstly, the terminology around groups that seek to Islamise their societies – groups ‘who are committed to political action to implement what they regard as an Islamic agenda’^[2] – is contested. In the book, I use ‘Islamism/Islamist’ and ‘political Islam’ interchangeably to refer to the AKP, Ennahda, and the MB in Egypt through…