Real-world events, not scholarship, propelled political Islam to academic attention

Evidence

Despite several decades of scholarly output there are still many misconceptions about Islam as a global religion and civilization, and especially a high degree of ignorance about the various Muslim communities that reside in different parts of the Middle East and have chosen the vocabulary of Islam to express their identities (Asad, 1993; Glavanis, … 1998; Sayyid, 1994). In part this is due to the absence of studies which can account for these various communities for whom Islam is more than just a privatized religion. Of greater significance, however, are events in the Middle East region itself, where Islam has become a potent political force with some “disruptive” potential, as perceived from a Eurocentric Middle East studies discourse. It was the politics of political Islam in the region that challenged the existing status quo, and in particular the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the militant Islamic groups in such areas as Egypt and Palestine. These events quickly moved political Islam to the top of the political and media agendas. As a consequence the second half of the 1980s and the early 1990s saw an increase in academic research and publications that dealt specifically with political Islam in the Middle East. Nevertheless, this increased attention to different identities, albeit religious in this case, did not signal any departure from the conventional Middle East studies paradigm. On the contrary it appears to have reaffirmed the validity and adequacy of such paradigms and allowed the conventional Middle East studies account to re-emerge in a new guise. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3534

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: how does an academic paradigm survive absorbing phenomena it failed to predict — does it reconfigure or merely re-label?
• XREF: Parallels the reader’s notes on how institutions and research programs resist paradigm shift (Kuhnian dynamics, Gramscian common sense).