Sources of resilience in political Islam: Sacred time, earthly pragmatism, and digital media

Abstract

The essay contrasts the relationship of time and temporality as expressed through the historical arc of Western modernity, with that of political Islam, which derives a very different concept of time from the Quran. The effect, the essay argues, is an asynchronicity between the West and political Islam that goes some way to explaining the persistence of the present conflict—with political Islam deriving forms of media-inflected ‘resilience’ from its ‘sacred’ time; and the West, paradoxically, becoming trapped in a ‘fetishism of efficiency’ whereby technological acceleration and media communication shapes its attitude to warfare. The primary consequence of this for the West is a logic that mi..