Islamic vocabulary is the most effective symbolic tool for political mobilization

Evidence

And finally, a practical matter, but one of considerable significance; Islam, as recent events have demonstrated again and again, provides the most effective system of symbols—one might say of slogans, though no derogatory sense is meant—for mobilizing public opinion, for arousing the people in defense of a regime that is perceived as possessing the necessary legitimacy, or against a regime that is perceived as lacking that legitimacy, in other words, as not being Islamic. It was and is in Islamic terms that those who overthrew the Shah, murdered Anwar Sadat, seized the Great Mosque in Mecca, and now threaten the existing order in many Muslim countries justified their actions and appealed for popular support. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1473

Categorization

• XREF: Mechanism passage explaining how political appeals get coded in religious terms — corroborates cluster claims about how Islamic politics becomes legible to Western observers.
• SEED: Angle: the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure as a case where the same Islamic symbolic repertoire served both a monarchist defense and its overthrow, complicating easy ‘Islam vs secular’ readings of the region.