Berikutan Perang Dunia I, kekalahan dan pembubaran Empayar Osmaniah dan pelupusan Khalifah Osmaniah oleh Mustafa Kamal Ataturk yang menjadi pengasa Republik Turki, ramai sekali Muslim memandang bahawa kuasa politik 'agama' mereka mulai malap. Timbul kebimbangan mengenai penyebaran idea Barat dan pengaruh mereka yang menyusup masuk ke dalam masyarakat Muslim. Hal ini membawa kepada kebencian terhadap pengaruh kuasa Eropah. Ikhwanul Muslimin dibentuk di Mesir sebagai pergerakan yang menentang dan menggugat kedudukan British.
Pada tahun 1960an, ideologi yang utama sekali dalam dunia Arab ketika itu adalah pan-Arabism. Pan-Arabism tidak menekankan agama sebaliknya menggalakkan pengasasan negara sosialis atau sekular berdasarkan kepada nasionalisme Arab berbanding dengan Islam. Sebagai contoh, parti Ba'ath di Iraq dan Syria. Walau bagaimanapun, kerajaan-kerajaan yang didasarkan kepada nasionalisme Arab kemudian mendapati bahawa mereka mengalami kelembapan ekonomi. Di samping itu, sempadan-sempadan yang memisahkan negara-negara Arab ini pun semakin dipandang sebagai ciptaan dan cetusan dari penjajahan. Pada hakikatnya pun sempadan tersebut dilukiskan di dalam peta oleh kuasa penjajah Eropah.
Contemporary movements
Some common political currents in Islam include:
- Sunni Traditionalism, which accepts traditional commentaries on the Quran, Hadith literature, and sunnah, and "takes as its basic principle imitation (taqlid), that is, refusal to innovate", follows one of the four legal schools or Madh'hab (Shafiʽi, Maliki, Hanafi, Hanbali), and may include Sufism. An example of Sufi traditionalism is the Barelvi school in Pakistan.[54]
- Fundamentalist reformism or revivalism, which criticizes the Islamic scholastic tradition, the commentaries, popular religious practices such as visitation to and veneration of the shrines and tombs of Muslim saints, perceived deviations and superstitions; it aims to return to the founding scriptures of Islam. This fundamentalist reformism generally developed in response to a perceived external threat (for example, the influence of Hinduism on Islam). 18th-century examples of fundamentalist Muslim reformers are Shah Waliullah Dehlawi in British India and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the Arabian peninsula,[55][56][57][58] founder of the Islamic doctrine and movement known as Wahhabism.[55][56][57][58][59] Salafism and Wahhabism worldwide, the Deobandi school in South Asia (mainly Pakistan and Afghanistan), Ahl-i Hadith and Tablighi Jamaat in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Pakistan are modern examples of fundamentalist reformism and revivalism.
- Islamism or political Islam, embracing a return to the sharia or Islamic law but adopting Western terminology such as revolution, ideology, politics, and democracy, and taking a more liberal attitude towards issues like jihad and women's rights.[60] Contemporary examples include the Jamaat-e-Islami, Muslim Brotherhood, Iranian Islamic Revolution, Masyumi party, United Malays National Organisation, Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party and Justice and Development Party (Turkey).
- Liberal movements within Islam generally define themselves in opposition to Islamic political movements, but often embrace many of its anti-imperialist and Islam-inspired liberal reformist elements.
Sunni and Shia differences
According to scholar Vali Nasr, political tendencies of Sunni and Shia Islamic ideology differ, with Sunni Islamic revivalism "in Pakistan and much of the Arab world" being "far from politically revolutionary", while Shia political Islam is strongly influenced by Ruhollah Khomeini and his talk of the oppression of the poor and class war. Sunni revivalism "is rooted in conservative religious impulses and the bazaars, mixing mercantile interests with religious values." ... Khomeini's version of Islamism engaged the poor and spoke of class war.
This Cleavage between fundamentalism as revivalism and fundamentalism as revolution was deep and for a long while coincided closely with the sectarian divide between the Sunnis - the Muslim world's traditional `haves`, concerned more with conservative religiosity - and the Shia - the longtime outsiders,` more drawn to radical dreaming and scheming."[61]
Graham Fuller has also noted that he found "no mainstream Islamist organization (with the exception of [shia] Iran) with radical social views or a revolutionary approach to the social order apart from the imposition of legal justice."[62]
