Publisher's Synopsis
This book suggests a genealogical perspective for understanding the modern politics of the so-called Islamic revival . It attempts to break the methodological deadlock resulting from the compartmentalization of all the categories in question, in particular Islam, politics and modernity.;Western publications on political Islam are analysed in their multiple relations with the literature produced by Muslim authors, including Islamic revivalists, which the West purports to study. The book investigates the distinction between the Western observer and the phenomenon of Islamic politics to be explained. The study shows significant relations among different types of discourse on Islam and modernity which the conventional subject object dichotomy is only partly able to capture. The analysed discourses of the interpretive circles used to make sense of the modern politicization of Islam are rather based on shifting and interweaving subjective concerns and strategic goals.;The work finally demonstrates that the popular category of political Islam obscures the historical, social and intellectual complexity of the relationship between Islam and the political discourse of modernity. The author argues that there is no political Islam, but rather there exists a political discourse of modernity that claims universal validity and affects all interpretations of Islam. He shows the path through which the contemporary hermeneutics of Is lam is able to enrich, pluralize and consolidate the ethics of personal responsibility and public deliberation embodied by the political discourse of modernity.
