The Different Models of Political Islam and Their Interactions with Global Politics

Political Islam is a concept germane to the current century and contrary to conventional Islam. In this regard, Islam plays a functional role in political contexts and creates a theoretical framework for social regularity and its requirements. Nowadays, this issue has been defined not just in its abstract sense, but also in its practical sense in the political arena. In recent decades, the Islamist political agents not only have shown strong impacts on the cultural, political and economic processes of their contexts, but also have challenged the global policies. Several factors such as Palestine issue, the victory of Iranian Islamic revolution, the occupation of Afghanistan, the collapse of Soviet Union, the September 11 events and Arab spring have accelerated pragmatism in Islamic policies. There is no doubt that political Islam confronts other paradigms. Yet, its intra-paradigmatic changes are very important and noticeable. This means that despite the common reference of political Islamic readings to a religious source, in practice, there have been partly different socio-cultural outcomes in the face of globalization, modernity, secularism, new world order, Americanization, Eurocentrism, anti-Westernization and so forth. These specific sociological schools of political Islam and cultural politics associated with it, could at least have multiple social and political manifestations. This study tries to explain and interpret the paradigm of political Islam, its intra-paradigmatic changes in terms of West’s interpretation (i.e., in view of World Politics) and in comparison to different readings of political Islam.
In this paper, descriptive, analytical and explanatory methods were used to describe different models of political Islam, their intellectual forms, structures and agents. In the meantime, their internal components and functional outcomes were analyzed. Then, the nature of thought and its interaction with global policy were explained.