Abstract
People of the western societies usually get confused when it comes to Islam and its political transcriptions. This makes people feel some kind of “Islamic threat”. Analyzing the relations between Islam and politic is difficult because there is no one Islam timeless and unique. On the contrary there are a lot of diverse practices and opinions among Muslims intellectuals about Islam and more precisely about what should be the ideal political transcription of the religious principles contained in the Koran and the Sunnah. Islamism is one of them.
According to the definition of Olivier Roy, it is a contemporary movement which considers Islam as a political ideology. It emerged recently, within the twentieth century. It is felt in western societies as an absurd return to the path, to the archaism of the middle ages but it is a product of the modernity.
What is really Islamism? First we are going to go back to the meaning of
words– Islam, Islamism, and fundamentalism - in order to avoid confusion. Second we will try to show both the similarities and the divergences between the different Islamists movements. Then we are going to study the limits of the Islamist ideology with the view of explaining the thesis of Olivier Roy: political Islam had failed.
