Modern Political Islam is closely associated with three central figures: Pakistan's Abul Ala Madudi, Egypt's Syed Qutb and Iran's Ayatullah Khomenini.
Political Islam, also called "Islamism," is a collection of ideologies advocating Islam as a political system. It must be noted that there is a difference between Political Islam (whose advocates are also called Islamists), and Islamic Fundamentalism.
Islamists do not shun western science and philosophy like the fundamentalists do. Instead, Islamists have been known to advocate the thorough study of western intellectual, political and cultural trends in an attempt to challenge them through their understanding and interpretation of Islam. This has made the writings of Islamists rather fascinating. However, the discourse between Islam and Western secularism that they present eventually mutates from being an absorbing intellectual event into a somewhat frail ostentation when the Islamists turn the discourse into a suggestive political program.
For example, at the culmination of their otherwise well-informed intellectual discourse, Abul Ala Madudi (who in turn inspired Syed Qutb), ended up suggesting the reinstatement of the traditional caliphate system in place of Western political and economic systems like democracy and socialism. Of course, in spite of the sound intellectuality behind their discourses, it was rather casually forgotten by them that the caliphate system too was riddled with cut-throat intrigues, corruption and violence.
When questioned about this historical actuality, the Islamists suggest that the "true implementation of Islamic Law (the sharia)," will take care of such an eventuality. It's just like saying that had Stalin not distorted Marxism, Communism would have been the finest politico-economic system. It's a vague and Utopian assumption.
The truth is, the founding members of modern Political Islam were first and foremost positioning Islam against Marxism and socialism. This was because at the time of these learned gentlemen, socialism and Marxism were the two ideologies that were influencing Muslim nationalists the most in the 1950s and '60s. For example, Syed Qutb's Muslim Brotherhood were opposed to Gamal Abul Nasser's "Arab Socialism" in Eygpt, and against Ba'ath Socialism that was taking root in Iraq and Syria. The "Islamic Socialism" behind the Algerian independence movement against the French too was looked down upon. On the other end, Maududi's Political Islam became the basis of movements against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's "Islamic Socialism" in Pakistan and against the left-leaning dictatorship of Sukarno in Indonesia in the 1960s.
It was ironic that thanks to the dynamics of the Cold War, Islamists found themselves in the "American camp" due to NATO and the United States' opposition to Muslim leaders who were considered to be anti-West, "socialist" and thus pro-Soviet Union. As a result throughout the Cold War the Islamists' radical anti-West angle largely remained to be nothing more than a literary and an intellectual exercise, whereas the political and active sides of the ideology were mostly reflected through movements against the left (Marxism, socialism, Arab Socialism, Islamic Socialism, etc.).
This is at least one reason why when Political Islam, even in countries where it managed to find some implementation, (such as Pakistan and Sudan in the 1980s and Afghanistan in the 1990s), only managed to generate superficial changes in customs and laws.
What's more, due to the ethnic, tribal and religious pluralism of the societies in which Political Islam aspired to implement itself as a singular concept of "true Islam", caused huge social and political fissures and fractures. It's consequent failure to produce the desired results that its intellectuals had promised, and also its doctrinal involvement in the armed "jihad" in Afghanistan, generated the creation of modern-day Islamic militancy. This militancy too faced the same problems in trying to triumph with a singular concept of Islam and the sharia in the face of the social and religious complications that run across Muslim countries. So much so that by the late 1990s, Political Islam had devolved into what we now call "Islamic fundamentalism," that is, Political Islam stripped clean off its intellectual moorings and reduced to being an ideology of pure terror and having a myopic and narrow understanding of Islam and of the West. Entities like the Al-Qaeda, Tahereek-e-Taleban and the many militant outfits that were active in Kashmir (Harakat ul-Mujahedeen, Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Taiba), are clear examples.
So it was heartening to hear Kashmiri leaders like Bhatt and Yasin distancing themselves from those aspects of the movement that have caused nothing more than bloodshed, pain and chaos, more at the cost of the Kashmiris' rather than their occupiers.
By: Nadeem F. Paracha
http://www.chowk.com/articles/15004