What were the main contradictions early Islamists saw between Islam and modernity?
Here, I think there is an issue that European scholars have perhaps not sufficiently understood. The idea of laïcité—a state without religion—is quite literally incomprehensible to traditional Muslims. Among Turks particularly, the idea of the state is infused with what you might call a religious or spiritual meaning. Q: How is that “spiritual” meaning expressed? One of the expressions you find very frequently in the communications of Ottoman bureaucrats is din u devlet: in other words “religion and state.” The two are inseparable. Among Ottoman intellectuals, meanwhile, one of the most common expressions for the same thing is din asil, devlet fer’idir: “religion is the foundation, the state one of its parts.” These are ideas that were shared by ordinary people, and still are. Q: So Islamism played a sort of bridging role, then? In a sense, yes. Islamism started because modernization movements imported from the West proved unable to provide a religious legitimization for change. It is