What forces gave rise to radical political Islamism?

Answer 1

Islamism has come to the fore as a direct opposition to the secular authoritarian regimes that exist in the Islamic World, by asserting a religious morality to curb the excesses of those governments. Since many of those secular governments were run by nationalist parties, the excesses and corruption weakened their appeal significantly.

One of the major traumas in the Islamic World was colonialism that resulted in the rise of numerous secular authoritarian republics that governed in accordance with nationalism. In these states, Islam as a religion was forcibly limited in having a personal or governmental role. In the more extreme cases of Kemalist Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, and Bourquiba/Ben-Ali's Tunisia, women would be forcibly de-veiled, religious leaders executed for ideological disputes with the sovereign, religious holidays would be banned or ignored, and new nationalist "religion" became prominent (such as "Turkishness"). These secular authoritarian republics modeled themselves on Western ideals of what a state should be, specifically using the French concept of laïcité to buttress their modern nation ideal. Laïcité, contrary to American secularism, is not freedom of the populace to choose religion and freely practice while the government takes no sides, but rather a national freedom from religion where personal and political manifestations of religion are banned. For moderately religious Muslims under these sorts of regimes, there was a clear choice: be modern or be religious. Many Muslims did not and continue to not want to have to make that choice and argue that they can be both modern and religious, as many Christians in the West also argue.

However, a significant minority of voices in the Islamic World made it clear that they would both accept the validity of the forced choice and they would choose Islam over modernity. By doing this, they claimed to be going to the roots of Islamic practice and reviving the Islam they believed was the same Islam practiced by the Salaf or Ancestors before modernity had "corrupted the practice of Islam". These individuals became known as Salafists or, in the West, as Islamic Fundamentalists. The Salafi view tends to stress Islamic Superiority, looking to places in the Qur'an, Hadith, and the rest of the Sunna where an inequality between Muslims and Non-Muslims, Believers (Mu'aminin) and Hypocrites (Munafiqin), and other differentiating traditions, becoming the "Puritans of Islam". The Salafists further broke into two camps, those who felt that Salafist practice should be apolitical and those who felt that directed political action was necessary to end the secular authoritarian republics. This second group is better known as Qutbists or Islamists and they openly declared war on both the West and the secular authoritarian republics. Knowing that they could not match those countries' armies stroke for stroke, they decided to use guerrillas, paramilitaries, assassinations, and terrorism to achieve their political goal of forcibly retaking the Islamic World for Islam over modernity.

The Islamists are able to galvanize the latent anger felt in much of the Islamic World because of the cultural and political power that the West wields in much of the Islamic World. Western music, television, communications, foods, etc. are penetrating all corners of the globe, making it appear to more religious Muslims that their peers are choosing to become modern instead of remaining religious because of the strict dichotomy. They lament, what they see, as the loss of Muslims to Western-inspired Atheism and believe that a more religious government will inspire more people to be religious. As for politics, Western powers have historically supported secular Muslim-majority states over more religious ones (such as Kemalist Turkey, Pahlavi Iran, Mubarak's Egypt, etc.), have historically also supported neighbors to Muslim-majority states which are responsible for repression of their Muslim populations or that of their neighbors (such as Israel and Thailand), and openly ignore Muslim-on-Muslim violence (such as the Bengali genocide in 1970, Kurdish separatism, the Darfur genocide, etc.). As a result, the West appears to many Muslims as condoning the activities of the secular authoritarian republics and the view that they must choose to be Muslim or modern. The Islamists cleverly use this narrative to their advantage when recruiting and trying to gain political traction.