As historian Faisal Devji has recently shown, the meaning of the term Islam began to change during the 19th century. In the colonial context of South Asia and the Middle East, the likes of ‘pan-Islamic’, anti-colonial activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897) began to turn it into something rather more modern, in opposition to European imperialism and the West more broadly.
Sayyid Qutb: the godfather of Islamism
How an Egyptian intellectual helped birth a totalitarian, terroristic ideology.
