Excerpt from The Islamic Enlightenment by Christopher de Bellaigue, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A new era opened in Islamic history in the 1980s when this book closes. Iran's revolution of 1979 twinned Islamic militancy with regime change and altered the terms of Islam's political engagement. When in 1981 Egypt's President Sadat was assassinated by his own soldiers, it was a triumph for takfiri Islamism, which declares impious or unjust Muslims to be deserving of death and is the basic precept behind many of today's militant groups. Turkey also embarked on a new path in 1980 when the military took over the country. The dictatorship of the military led indirectly – and inadvertently – to an electable Islamism that brought the AK Party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to power in 2002.

These developments took place in the context of a strengthening internationalist jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which in turn permitted Saudi Arabia, the jihad's sponsor, to muscle onto the world stage and challenge Iran, Turkey and Egypt as the motors of development in the Islamic world. Indeed, with the internationalisation of global Islamic causes, from the Afghan, Algerian and Bosnian wars to the emergence of transnational Islamic players such as al-Qaeda, established geographical centres of ideology and politics ceded ground to a global, virtual market of religious barter and exchange. No longer would Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran exercise leadership to the Islamic world, in thought, politics, and society. The very idea of a geographical physical centre exercising leadership over Islamic thought became outmoded and quaint. The relatively peaceful coexistence of Sunnis and Shias collapsed after the Western invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s, with Saudi Arabia and Iran squaring up against each other to divide a devastated landscape. In 2011 the Arab Spring briefly promised a revival of Enlightenment values before succumbing to further violence and totalitarianism, exacerbated by mass migration and environmental disaster.

This later chapter of Muslim history – since 1980 – has been much pored over and written about. The origins of its present-day predicament lie further back.

Excerpted from The Islamic Enlightenment by Christopher de Bellaigue. Copyright © 2017 by Christopher de Bellaigue. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.