Islamism is a term used in both public and scholarly discourse to designate a wide-ranging current of Muslim activism that emerged in the second quarter of the twentieth century. The term’s definition has been much debated, as have its ideological implications. The term surfaced in Western academic publications in the first half of the 1980s and has since become widely accepted in English, with cognates in French (islamisme), German (Islamismus), and other Western languages, inside and outs…