For over twenty years the politics of Islamic activists have broadly been explained and understood in the West as a threat to all that is most valued in modern political discourse. Salwa Ismail now proposes a whole new way of examining the political culture of the world of Islamism. She revisits the main arguments and explanations that have been used over the past twenty years to understand Islamist activism, moderate as well as militant, and proposes a rethinking of Islamist politics.