Islamist revivalism mistakes an imagined past for a re-creatable one

Evidence

What does one do about it? The anger, the resentment, the frustration are clear all over the region and no one can dispute that they are well grounded. For the time being, two different solutions are being offered. One is Islam. If all the different imported methods that Muslims have used or copied or imitated have failed, there is obviously considerable persuasive force in the argument that these are the ways of foreigners and unbelievers. They have brought nothing but harm, so the only sensible thing for Muslims is to return to the tired and trusted ways of their ancestors, to be authentically themselves. It is a plausible, indeed a persuasive argument, except of course that one can never re-create the past; one can only imagine a past and try to create it, which is not at all the same thing. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1633

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said-adjacent and postcolonial debates on invented tradition — Hobsbawm’s invented traditions and the critique of authenticity discourses in Orientalism scholarship. — connects to: Hamas emptied traditional religious concepts and refilled them with revolutionary content — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2430
• DEFINE: Marks the mechanism clue for ‘[text_segments]’ annotation field — should not appear here. Removing.