- Until the 1990s experts on the history of political thought in the West had
virtually no interest in “political Islam”. In a book cataloging 8,000 of the
most important scholarly books and articles on political thought in the
West in the fifty years between 1945 and 1995, there is only 1 article
which refers to Islam (see Robert Eccleshall and Michael Kenny (eds.)
Western Political Thought: A Bibliographical Guide to Post-war
Research, Manchester, 1995, p.37). Further evidence comes from the
world’s most comprehensive full-text index of books, which is provided
by Google (at books.google.com). Google provide a tool called “the
ngram viewer” (books.google.com/ngrams) which allows one to search
for specific words across this massive corpus of books and to chart the
frequency with which a word is to be found relative to the date of
publication. When one searches for the word “Islamist”, this tool shows
that between 1900 and 1950 the world “Islamist” occurred in virtually no
books. Between 1950 and 1990 a small number of books use the word.
From 1990 to 2008 there is nearly a 1000% increase in the number of
books using this word. This is proof that the idea of an Islamist was
basically invented after World War Two, and specifically after the 1990s:
writers in English became almost frenzied in their use of this word
following the Rushdie Affair. The worse the problem with Islam gets in
the West, the more the public must be deceived by maintaining that Islam
and Islamism are somehow different things. ↵
dana p.
(Dana P.)
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