23which 15 to 20 percent of the people vote for
Islamists is a society facing a severe identity crisis,
still struggling to come to terms with the challenges
of globalization.
As for your point about higher percentages of
support when Muslims are asked specifi cally about
issues such as death for apostasy, I believe that
may be rooted in an archaic interpretation of
shari’ah. But for the sake of my defi nitions, I would
not classify such fundamentalists as Islamists.
Their support of death for apostates hails more
from a medieval, tribal desire to punish the “out-
group,” which is justifi ed by religious scripture,
than from a belief in the Islamist ideological
pro ject of codifying shari’ah as law and imposing
it on society. This is not to say that such attitudes
are healthy—on the contrary, they are incredibly
problematic. It’s just that they pose a different and
sometimes overlapping set of problems in addition
to Islamism.
In fact, in many instances these same funda-
mentalists have been known to violently oppose
Islamists, considering them entirely a product of
Western modernity born from Western innova-
tions of codifying law in unitary legal systems. A
case in point is the well- documented conservative
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