Lauren Langman
From the Caliphate to the Shaheedim:
Toward a Critical Theory of Islam
Allah is Great-and the Caliphate Preferable to
Modernity
A specter is haunting the Islamic world, the specter
of fundamentalism. In the face of the Great Powers
of the world, and even greater powers of trans-
national capital, the relative economic stagnation,
political weakness and intellectual stagnation of
contemporary Muslim societies becomes more and
more evident to those both within and without.^1
Buffeted by larger economic forces, powerless in face
of Western hegemony, throughout the Islamic world,
fundamentalism, as political Islam, has become the
typical response and a growing force. Following the
failure of modernist, often secular political move-
ments to establish strong democratic States with
robust economies, various Islamisms from Salafism
to the Khomeini theocracy promise that moral renewal
can and will lead to political empowerment. From
the Islamic Brotherhood to Hamas to Jamaat Islamiya
and a resurgent Taliban, political Islam has garnered
a great deal of popular support. In the Western world,
the promise of nationalism was to control the polit-
ical in order to realize the cultural (cf. Gellner 1983).(^1) As will be evident, there are vast differences within Islamic societies; Algeria is
not Yemen is not Indonesia is not Pakistan. Turkey has embraced modernity; Yemen
remains feudal. The various Islamisms are not part of a unified movement. This paper
is a more abstract, “ideal typical” analysis of Islam.