Is there a future for Islamist revolutions? Religion, revolt, and Middle Eastern modernity

The forward march of Muslim militancy from Iran to Lebanon, from Algeria and Palestine, and North Africa to South Asia, extending to the immigrant communities in Europe, and not to mention the transnational Al-Qaida-seems to confirm the view that the world is on the verge of Islamist evolutions. It is as though the late twentieth century has impregnated history to give birth to Islamic revolutions with the same intensity and vigor that the early twentieth century had produced socialist rebellions. Is globalization pushing religion,Islam, into the center stage of world radical politics? This essay attempts to show that ours may be an age of widespread socio religious movements and of remarkable social changes,butthese may not ecessarily translate into the classical (rapid, violent, class-based, and over-arching) revolutions. What most accounts of Islamism refer to do not signify Islamic revolutions, rather they point to heightened but diffused sentiments and movements associated,in one way or another, with the language of religiosity. Perhaps we need to rethink our understanding of "revolutions" in general and the Islamic version in particular. In the Muslim Middle East, the future is likely to belong to a kind of socio-political changethatmight be termed "post-Islamist revolution.".