Political Modernity 79observance and moral conduct. They share the desire to censor intellectual and
cultural products that are judged contrary to religious teaching. They are both,
for instance, opposed to the teaching of Darwinian evolutionism in schools. We
see here an instance of affi nities across supposed civilisational boundaries: it is a
clash within, not between, civilisations.
The second type of orientation is radical and militant, typically pursued by
young students and other sectors of alienated youth. It differs from the con-
servatives not so much in objectives, but in methods. While the conservatives
seek Islamisation through infl uencing the government and controlling levers
of power and communication, the radicals tend towards direct, often violent,
action. They take the religious injunction to enjoin the good and forbid evil
doing as a mandate to every Muslim to intervene forcefully in implementing
religious precepts. This direct action applies especially to government and
authority, which are seen as culpable in the neglect of the law and in corrup-
tion and laxity. The leading ideological infl uence on this trend is the thought of
Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian militant executed in 1966, accused of armed sedition.
He argued that any state that is ruled by man-made law and not by what God
had decreed is an infi del authority, however much it might pretend to follow
Islam. A society governed by laws other than those of God is equally errant. As
such, the governments and societies of the Muslim world were not truly Muslim,
but lived in a jahiliyya: a term used to describe the state of ignorance and bar-
barism that preceded Islam. It was the duty of true Muslims, then, to insulate
themselves from this barbarism, to recruit followers, to entrench their strength
in faith and in military training, and, in time, to come out to wage jihad against
the infi del government and the non-believers, in order to reconquer the world
for Islam, in imitation of the Prophet and his generation. Since then this has
been the dominant creed of the militants throughout the region (Qutb 1990;
Moussalli 1992).
The third type of orientation is reformist and modernist, typical of some
intellectuals, professionals and modern businessmen. It seeks to Islamise govern-
ment and society, but in the context of economic development, social reform
and political democratisation. That is to say, it espouses a politics that goes
beyond the moral and ritual agenda of the others. In some respects its cadres
seek to continue the national projects of the previous nationalists and leftists,
with an emphasis on economic and social programmes. This is the trend that
is most concerned with questions of rights and democracy, and it comes to the
fore wherever Islamism becomes part of a genuine pluralist electoral politics,
primarily in Turkey, and in another form in Iran.^20
The violent militants dominated the headlines in the 1980s in Egypt and in
the 1990s in Algeria, with their outrages and massacres. In Egypt, a wide- ranging
and intense repressive campaign by the authorities decimated the militants,
killing, imprisoning and torturing many of them alongside members of their