The Struggle for Unity and Legitimacy in the Imperial Age

Abstract

A long view into the historical processes of the Islamic, particularly Arab, world is required to conceptualise the current tensions between the Salafi Jihadists and the West. There has been a consistent struggle to unify the various parts of the Islamic lands using religion as a legitimising agent, and a struggle for who should control that realm since Islamic empires began to expand rapidly after the time of the Prophet. From the Islamic imperial caliphates to the contemporary jihadists, there has been a struggle for dominance in the Islamic world by actors that seek to fuse politics and religion together in the corpus of a governing elite. Even the ‘secular’ Pan-Arabists made appeals to religious faith, symbols and rhetoric. In this, there has been a cyclical process where one aspirant to power challenges the legitimacy of another seeking to replace it.