Understanding Islamism

I read a lot. Too much. One of the reasons I blog less frequently than I should is that my brain noise levels are too high and I can't distill my thoughts down to a few hundred word units. In the past I have taken measures to mitigate this issue. The information diet is an example. But it hasn't helped.

And so I recently decided to cull my "areas of interest". I am interested in conflict, and there happens to be a lot of conflict in the world at any given time. It's like an element of nature. When you try to keep abreast of every conflict you end up with more information than you can process, a dash of depression, a paroxysm of helplessness, and way too much brain noise.

Anyway, having reduced my list of conflict situations, I identified a few common elements between these conflicts. One was ethno-nationalism, another was underdevelopment and exclusion. These I am conversant with. I got stuck on a third: Islamism. And I decided that it was time I got to the heart of the issue.

If you ever have the desire to understand political Islam, there's no better place to start than the International Crisis Group's 2005 paper, 'Understanding Islamism'. As you'd expect from the ICG, it deconstructs the issue thoroughly, considers historical context, and critically unpacks the dominant discourses (on either side of the political spectrum). I wish I'd read it years ago.