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Paper short abstract:

This paper critically assesses representations of a singular Islamism in recent literature, constructed by either presenting it as a transnational homogenous reaction to 'Western' colonialism, or by discerning its continuity with Muslim political practices from the originary years of Islam.

Paper long abstract:

The shooting of the Charlie Hebdo humorists by Muslim radicals sparked a massive debate over the democratic credentials of Islam and the morality of Islamist movements. Does anthropology as a discipline have anything to add to these accounts? Many of the responses to the killings echoed a larger literature that over the last two decades has sought to analyse the emergence of what it presumes to be a singular Islamism. Much of that work has sought to identify or generate a transnational, cross-cultural and universal model to explain the origins of Islamism, constructing its object of analysis by transcending its origins in the particular historical concerns of different societies.

Building on the identification by Trevor Wilson of two types of explanatory ideal-type models, described as the immanent (endogenous), and the external (exogenous), this paper describes and critically analyses their main arguments, including their shared assumptions. Wilson argues that their differences revolve around two central contested points: whether the West has created Islamism through the effects of recent Western colonial and postcolonial aggression, sometimes glossed as its forcing of modernity upon Muslim societies; or whether Islamism was in and within Islam before the periods of oppressive Western influence over the Islamic world. The paper concludes by making a number of objections to both the immanent and the external models.