Abstract

Obscurantism, return of the Middle Ages, fascism, clericalism …. Utter nonsense has been written on the return of religion in the Muslem world, reflecting the old Western phantasm about Islam. In fact, the phenomena grouped under the rubric of “fundamentalism” are quite heterogenous and belong to different catagories, of which only one — Islamicism — is really new. Islamic revivalism must be understood not in terms of recent Western history, emphasizing the emergence of the modern state from the secularization of society, but in the historical and social context of the Muslem world. We shall call “traditional” the will to freeze society according to the memory of a past one: the society of which grandfathers speak