Islamism is an ambitious book: It seeks to tackle a phenomenon that, for many Westerners, burst vividly onto the global scene in 1979 and has since gained both prominence and, for many, notoriety. Over the course of an Introduction and 11 chapters, Tarek Osman hopes to offer a “serious, stand-alone presentation of Middle Eastern Islamism” for “general international readers [without] prior knowledge of the Middle East, Islam, or Islamism” (p. xx). Prior to delving into the book as a whole, a preliminary note is in order: Readers looking to learn of Islamism in “the World,” as the subtitle indicates, will quickly be disappointed; as suggested in the preceding quote and explicitly stated in the Introduction, “the book limits its discussion of Islamism to the Arab world, Turkey and Iran. It does not cover Islamism in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Pakistan or sub-Saharan Africa” (p. xix).

Indeed, a surprising contradiction early in the book is that, on the one hand, Osman treats “the various types of Islamism outside the Middle East” as “the products of different histories, cultural influences, and social, political and economic contexts,” and yet, on the other hand, “because of Islamism’s long history in the wider … Middle East and because Middle Eastern Islamists have always had a decisive influence on Islamism, it is my belief that they will shape the future of the phenomenon as a whole” (pp. xix–xx; emphasis added). Whereas the former claim is the reason the book focuses exclusively on the Middle East, the latter belief seemingly authorizes Osman to simultaneously ignore and yet bizarrely describe “the world.” As such, this book should be treated as what it is: an introductory treatise on Islamism in the Middle East whose thesis is familiar to all students of the subject—namely, “that Islamism is a multifaceted and complicated movement, which has had different worldviews, references, leaders and advocates, and whose constituencies have varied hugely over the past two centuries” (p. xviii).

As an introductory text, Islamism rarely makes novel arguments; instead, it organizes and represents research on Islamism—a literature that is increasingly unruly, expansive, and often attentive to local trends in single-case studies (whether of a party or country) or focused comparative analyses (typically of two or three states). Indeed, it is revealing, if perhaps unintentional, that the ostensible first chapter (an important, if troubling, Introduction notwithstanding) begins with “the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922” (p. 1), and in a mere 20 pages zips the reader from the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood and key moments in the twentieth century to the post–Arab uprisings in the Middle East of 2012. This much ground can only be covered in a book written for “general international readers,” as Osman’s academic peers would, doubtless, insist upon a more gradual, detail-oriented approach to “The Islamists’ Coming to Power.”

Over the remainder of the book, Osman introduces his reader to key, and occasionally complicated, questions in contemporary analyses of the subject—and particularly those that are of interest primarily to Western audiences. Thus, just as he rapidly covers formative moments and figures for contemporary Islamism in the first chapter, in subsequent chapters he offers expansive claims—for example, about how disparities in wealth helped wealthy Gulf states export Islamism to the region (and then to Europe) by way of employment opportunities for disenfranchised Arabs (Chapter 2). We then turn to the production of, and connections between, “Salafism” and contemporary “jihadism” that includes an extensive discussion of Syed Qutb, something like a typology of violent Salafi struggle, and Osman’s prediction that “peaceful Salafism” will die a gradual death (Chapter 3). Osman pivots from Salafism/jihadism to thinking about the “Islamists’ Fall from Power” on the heels of the Arab uprisings, focusing largely on North African states and experiences (Chapter 4).

In successive chapters (5 and 6) at the heart of the book, the author explores “the Secularists’ Predicament” and “the Minorities’ Fears,” wherein he contends that “the rise of the Islamists” constitutes an “immense peril” to secularists and minorities (p. 119)—even going so far as to suggest that “the demographic supremacy of Arab Muslims” purchased by the departure of Arab Christians “would be a major boon for Islamism” (p. 141). Having discussed the predicaments of Islamists from the vantage of secular-humanist values, Osman then offers overviews of Islamism in the Middle East and North Africa in chapters that explore it in the Gulf (Chapter 7), Turkey (Chapter 8), and Iran (Chapter 9), before a concluding chapter wherein he unpacks the “Dilemmas of Islamist Thinking Now” (Chapter 10).

Although the book successfully covers much of the terrain that an introductory text to Islamism ought to cover, it is unclear whether or how Islamism contributes to our collective catalog. Easily the most perturbing, recurrent issue with the book is the failure to adequately define key terms; for instance, at no point does Osman actually define Islamism itself. This failure to define Islamism affords him significant leeway both to construct a narrative that suits his (admittedly rudimentary) argument and to make the data fit, as it were. Osman serves as the judge, jury, and executioner of a phenomenon that is more vacuous in his depiction than it is in the world.

Unfortunately, similar issues plague concepts that do significant work for the author, including modernity (which, in two successive sentences functions as an agent and then as an apparently neutral adjective that positions the modern as simple, nonviolent chronology: “amidst all of this, modernity was changing Middle Eastern politics, economics and societies. Modern states appeared …;” p. x) and, crucially, “Islam,” which operates in several distinct registers in this text. At times it is a discrete and real system, at others it is an actor, and at yet others it is a socially constructed resource that Islamists both manufacture and deploy as they see fit. Unfortunately, at no point, though, does Osman engage developments in religious studies that articulate Islam as, for example, a master signifier or diverse tradition.

Two distinct and troubling issues emerge from this conceptual sloppiness: First, Osman’s poorly defined terms undertake much of the analytic lifting in the book; for instance, in the absence of identifying what Islamism is, Osman is able to bring virtually anyone he chooses into the category. Second, his strong underlying secularity is obscured by way of his conceptual obfuscation; for example, the book regularly positions “religion and politics” as distinct entities (e.g., p. 5) as though Islamists, too, imagine a world wherein religion and politics exist discretely. Thus, readers are invited to witness Islamism as a phenomenon from a secular vantage; this, of course, motivates Osman’s telling of history and analyses while obscuring that he is participating in a heated debate (between secularists and Islamists) as though he is a neutral observer. For instance, in the Conclusion, he offers two possible routes for “Islamism” in the near future: a “jihadist,” angry, antimodernist approach or a re/turn to “tenets of rational religion and try to merge them with modernity; openness to change and highly flexible understandings of what an Islamic frame means” (p. 257).

Not only does Islamism diagnose these two paths, but it also conflates normative and empirical work, suggesting that the former “could regress Arab Islamism to much earlier points on its historical path” whereas, to Osman, the latter fits the trajectory of Abrahamic faiths in the “modern” era (p. 257). In other words, by not defining key concepts, including “Islamism,” Islamism regularly employs shaky categories, acts as though the empirical is distinct from the normative even as it embodies strong normative commitments, and, therefore, ultimately fails to generate or support innovative arguments. Of course, this does not mean that the book should not be read; to the contrary, it could easily contribute to conversations in an undergraduate class context so long as it is paired with a more explicitly scholarly text, for example, Bobby Sayyid’s A Fundamental Fear (2004) or Jillian Schwedler’s Faith in Moderation (2006).

The scholar in search of new ideas or evidence, however, should look elsewhere. If Islamism is insufficient as a stand-alone text for undergraduates, it is surely of little interest to longstanding students of either the Middle East or Islamism.