What has been the effect of the rise of political Islam in the region?
Well, it is a new phenomenon; it is not a reproduction of anything that existed in the past. I think it’s driven by dissatisfaction with existing regimes; it is driven by poverty and the terribly unequal distribution of wealth in the Middle East at large. When did this start? Scholars generally accept, though you can’t say it started at a particular date, that the results of the 1967 war marked the beginning of this great disillusionment with the socialist experiment of Nasser and his imitators. It hadn’t worked. In the 1967 war Israel defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan and occupied vast amounts of territory that had formerly belonged to each of the three states. 1967 is a major watershed and turning point in the history of the modern Middle East. Among other things, a result of this was the rise of political Islam: a belief that imported systems, whether it was the parliamentary or pseudo-parliamentary systems of the interwar years, or the socialism and state capitalism of the post-1950
