ALGERIAN PATRIOTS - ENGLISH

Youssef Hindi’s reflection on political Islam hinges on a governing idea: that Islam is, by its very nature, a continuous political project oriented toward the production of a specific historical order, and that contemporary Islamisms are merely late expressions of an original matrix. Persuasive as this proposition may be in its internal coherence and historical sweep, it nonetheless runs up against major conceptual aporias. It essentialises Islam, flattens the complexity of the political in Muslim societies, and retroactively projects modern ideological categories onto heterogeneous historical configurations. This article offers an analytical refutation of that thesis. We show that it rests on: an essentialist, unitary conception of Islam; a methodological conflation of the normative and the descriptive; a structural anachronism in reading premodern periods; a failure to recognise the fundamentally contextual character of modern Islamisms; an ideological narrative logic rather than a ...