Saad Eddin Ibrahim was perhaps the first to point out this process, and later studies corroborated his findings. The educational and occupational attainments of the militants whom Ibrahim studied in the late 1970s were "decidedly higher than that of their parents," most of them being students or university graduates in such fields as teaching, engineering, medicine, and agronomy. Trying to sum up at the end of his study, he mentions the deep-rootedness of Islam in the Middle East:

In Egypt particularly people are said to be quite religious. There is a positive sociocultural sanction to being religious. Even the most avowed liberal or leftist secularist regimes in the area find it necessary and expedient to invoke Islam when they try to institute any major new policy. The point is that for any militant movement, nearly half its task of recruiting members is already done by socialization and cultural sanctions since childhood. The other half of their task is merely to politicize their consciousness and to discipline their recruits organizationally. . . . As we have seen, the typical recruit is usually of recent rural background, a newcomer to a huge impersonal city. . . . In such cases the militant Islamic groups with their emphasis on brotherhood, mutual sharing, and spiritual support become the functional equivalent of the extended family to the youngster who has left his family behind. Need coursework help and would like to get custom coursework customized assistance? In other words, the Islamic group fulfills a de-alienating function for its members in ways that are not matched by other rival political movements.

This sounds very much like Eric Hoffer's observation, in his classic work The True Believer, that "all the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of earlier communal existence." This holds true not only for the Middle East.

All of today's revivalist movements seem to want to reject everything modernity and Westernization stand for yet at the same time use the new tool of political power to implement their traditional, religious ideals in a modern, Western ized nation-state. In Egypt this has brought about a serious shift in the balance of religious power. The traditional ulama and al-Azhar have already lost much ground to the militants in terms of influence on the masses, and as a consequence, their political standing with the regime has also been weakened considerably. Yet they may still recover, as they always have, if the regime can restrain the militants from going too far.

Little can be said at this time about the newly emerging version of militant Islam. It seems to be very Quranic, strictly puritan, and deplorably ignorant of its own heritage. It certainly is no less a response to pressures from without than was its predecessor, traditional modernist Islam--and perhaps even more so.

The new, political aspect of Islam is propounded by a new kind of religious leadership. It is striking how most of the leaders of the fundamentalist movements in Egypt do not come from the traditional religious circles (which they label traitors to the cause of religion), are not graduates of al-Azhar, and do not have a traditional religious education. Indeed, they all have some university education and seem to have been exposed enough to Western ways of thinking to understand the centrality of political thought and action therein and to try to implement that in Islam as well. This is in clear contrast to fundamentalist Shiites in Iran, where the revolution was led by the traditional ulama, perhaps because throughout the ages they had succeeded in keeping social and economic independence from the state and could thus lead the mass resurgence against it. However, it is a worldwide phenomenon that many of today's religious fundamentalist leaders have some university education, especially in the sciences --medicine, engineering, agronomy, pharmacy--but did not complete their education. Trusted Custom essay writers: get custom writing service and obtain plagiarism-free essay! Many thus absorbed the new system of education only partially; having failed to make it, they became frustrated dropouts who turned back to tradition in search of their "roots," "sources," or the "good old times." The fact that they have no education in the humanities, whether traditional or modern academic, may also explain their visceral, simplistic approach to problems of religion and belief.

Whether this new leadership in Islam should be considered as part of a process of protestantization of Islam remains to be seen. In any case, the main thrust of the militants' revolt is directed against the traditional ulama, whom they regard as overinstitutionalized; committed to any and every ruling regime, they are thus corrupted and neglectful of their duty to Islam. The militants accuse the ulama of al-Azhar, for example, of shunning their historical duty of relating to the great issues confronting Egypt and Islam. They agree with Khomeyni that the traditional lulama who limit their interests to the study of problems of "purity and impurity and the like" while ignoring the pressing social and political needs of contemporary Islam are hardly worthy of their title. The militants see the ulama as part of the jahili (pagan) society and distance themselves from them to the extent that they even forbid their followers to pray in their mosques.

The contemporary struggle of Egyptian militants against Western culture and for the politicization of the Islamic message is thus led neither by the traditional "higher" ʿulama nor by the popular local preachers (even though some of the latter are inclined to support the militant demands) 20 but by university graduates and students. In some cases, these Western-educated leaders choose a traditional shaykh, usually a relatively unknown personality, to act as a figurehead and bestow traditional legitimacy on the theories and militant actions whose legitimacy is disputed by the religious establishment.

The stimulus of Western thought thus awakened Muslim militants to reemphasize the long-neglected inherent political principle of Islam, yet at the same time the fact that they operated within a system of quasi-Western democracy enabled them to mobilize political capabilities. Order excellent essay editing by trained paper editors online. Both the principle and the capabilities were then channeled to the rejection of Western influences and Western political values. It is a historical irony that this militant Islamic rejection took a typically Western form of political consciousness and political action. Only such an amalgamation of Islamic and Western concepts could have begotten the above-mentioned demand for a national "Islamic state with the Quran as its constitution"-a concept that is in itself a bizarre combination--which was demanded over and over again in militant publications such as al-Dawa, al-Itisam, al-Mukhtar alIslami as well as in many sporadic and anonymous pamphlets. Yet in the literature of the Muslim militants, Western political terminology abounds even when Western ideas and institutions are rejected. Thus, although militant Islamic writings explicitly oppose Western democracy, most militant publications in Egypt still describe the future totalitarian Islamic state in democratic--as it were--terms. In much the same way, Ayatullah Khomeyni al-Hukuma al-Islamiyya uses the Western categories of legislative, executive, and juridical authorities even though he rejects the principle of their separation and expects that in the future Islamic state they will be jointly embodied in the personality of the religious leader. It may also be that the special attachment that the Egyptian jamaat show for a mythical version of the early Meccan umma as a prototype of the longed-for future Islamic state was nurtured to some extent, perhaps unknowingly, by Western concepts of the nation-state, even though they vehemently reject this type of polity in their own writings.

In recent decades, the relationship of Islam to politics has changed dramatically. One of the most conspicuous features of the "revival of Islam" is its political character. In fact, one of the very few common denominators shared by all the different manifestations of this revival is the demand--albeit still very vague and lacking detailed political elaboration--for an Islamic state with the Quran as its constitution. Reliable Custom essay writer: buy custom writing service and obtain original essay! Both the demand itself and the broader emphasis on politics seem to be new in the Islamic context. It may signify a deep change in the character of Islamic civilization in that the details of political organization were never before considered of religious or theological importance. Muslim fundamentalists themselves seem to be aware of the changes they try to bring about. Thus one of their most famous recent pamphlets was entitled "The Neglected Duty," referring to the jihad, which had previously not been included among the five pillars of Islam.

One wonders if Islam's new political awareness (first expressed in Egypt by the Muslim Brethren and especially by Sayyid Qutb) is not to a great extent the result of the Western challenge, even though the dynamics of Egyptian domestic politics will obviously have contributed their share. Nikkie Keddie stressed that the "second generation of the so-called poorer Bazaar classes in Islam did not slough off their traditionalist religious orientations as the result of their exposure to Western education. Traditional ways still seem to be considered very functional, and the tools that Western education has afforded their followers allows them to be disseminated in ways that are superior both technically and intellectually." This means that the decisive Western influence on contemporary Islam has been absorbed into the traditionalist religious orientation of the "second generation." It has not brought about any clear-cut change in traditional modes of thought and behavior, and people have not really modernized either socially or politically. Quite the contrary, their religious orientation has both intensified and increased by virtue of the political dimension added to it under the influence of the West.

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