Don’t Sell Islamism Short
This chapter considers the first lesson that can be drawn from three historical Western ideological contests concerning political Islam and secularism today: this is no time to short-sell Islamism. The first contest pitted Catholics and Protestants over which form of Christianity should be established or favored by the state. This dispute raged in Western and Central Europe from roughly 1520 until around the 1690s. The second struggle, which emerged in the 1770s and lasted for a century, occurred in Europe and the Americas and dealt with the issue of whether the best regime was a monarchy or a republic. The third struggle, which arose in the 1910s and endured until the late 1980s, involved communism, liberalism, and fascism. The chapter argues that Westerners discount Islamism because of their own secularist bias and that Islamism is in fact a reaction to secularism.