TERROR AS WEAKNESS :

The trail of political Islam (Gilles Kepel, 03 July 2002, openDemocracy)

In the mid 1990s, when I was Visiting Professor at Columbia University, a rather simple question arose which, in spite of its simplicity, was still unanswered at the time: "Why did Islamist movements succeed in seizing power in places, such as Iran, whereas in the majority of cases, such as Algeria, they failed?" [...]

Islamist movements are in fact clusters of different social groups with different social agendas. They are strong when they manage to mobilise or coalesce these different components, until they actually seize power. Wha thas interested me is their capacity to mobilise different social groups with different social agendas, to keep them united, to reconcile them. There might be violence or even the "semi-Islamicisation" of a society, but the Islamist groups will never seize power if they cannot unite these social groups.

Interesting look at what terrorism tells us about the weakness of the Islamists. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 24, 2002 7:45 AM