http://www.thecairoreview.com/tahrir-forum/a-struggle-for-the-soul-of-islam/

A Struggle for the Soul of Islam

Violent Islamism is not an aberrational accident in Arab and Islamic history. It has always followed the fall of the dominant order.

Tarek Osman | November 2015

It materialized in the periods that followed the fall of the Ottoman-Mameluke state in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean in the early nineteenth century, after the crumbling of the Arab liberal age in the 1940s, and in the 1970s when secular Arab nationalism proved decisively unable to deliver on the grand ambitions it had given rise to. The current forms of violent Islamism, which rage across the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, and increasingly in the Arabian Peninsula, attempt to fill the vacuum created by the fall of the Arab state order that had appeared after World War II and was rattled by the Arab uprisings. It also reflects deep anxieties and dilemmas within the Arab and Islamic worlds.

The Arab revolts of the last five years gave rise to an intense transition. It entails a fight between the pillars of the old system which have lost moral authority but retain many levers of power, and young forces which reject the old system but have limited resources and cannot agree, yet, on what frame of reference they want for their societies. The transition includes attempts by immensely rich merchant (and often ruling) families to secure their future at a time of dramatic economic changes, most notably as Middle Eastern oil is increasingly losing its strategic (and monetary) value. The transition marks the coming to the fore of the largest cohort in Arab history of Arab teens and twenty-and-thirty-somethings.http://www.thecairoreview.com/tahrir-forum/a-struggle-for-the-soul-of-islam/