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others. Such men are drawn from the same social groups as those who were involved in the earliest Islamist movements of the colonial period. They dominated Islamic militant leadership cadres in 1970s and 1980s as well as filling the ranks of more moderate organizations. They also share many common elements with radical political activists on both the left and the right. In fact, they don’t fit just a particular model of Islamic activist over recent decades, they fit a model of revolutionary cadres over several centuries. There is no space here to look at the similarities in background between Egyptian Islamists in the 1970s, Russian anarchists, Bolshevik activists and French revolutionaries of an earlier age but it is striking how often it is elements from the newly educated lower-middle classes in societies in flux who are most active. These are the people who are so often at the forefront of calling for change, even if change is justified by retrospective appeal to a nostalgically imagined ‘just’ golden age. They are men who are articulate, intelligent and relatively worldly. They have aspirations and experience profound resentments when those aspirations are frustrated. When their expectations cannot be met, they perceive it as an injustice. If there are no effective ways to resolve the problem within the bounds of state-sanctioned political or social activism then alternatives are sought. Radical Islamic militancy is one.
    The concept of injustice is key. It is not absolute deprivation that causes resentment but, as many scholars have noted, deprivation following a period of aspiration-raising relative prosperity. In very general terms, and over the long term, the history of the Middle East and the Islamic world can be read in these terms. A lengthy period of international political and cultural dominance has left a legacy of expectation that is very much at odds with the region’s current second-rank status. The recent economic success of east Asia, for example, is felt as wrong . It is not fair, right or just. The relative economic success of Jews is profoundly resented, as outgoing Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohammed made clear in a grossly anti-semitic speech in November 2003 in which he queried why so few Jews could amass ‘so muchpower’ when such a large number of Muslims were so feeble by comparison. 11
    This model of expectation, disappointment and perceived injustice works over a shorter time-span too. The expectations of the populations of many Middle Eastern countries were raised hugely as the Western imperialist system fell apart and the old regimes that had governed so incompetently and repressively were overthrown. Yet expectations of democracy and prosperity were swiftly disappointed. The number of intellectual activists whose fathers were involved in anti-colonial struggles is significant. So too is the number whose families unexpectedly suffered under the post-colonial regimes. Their sense of injustice is often deep.
    And in the short term aspirations have been raised in an unprecedented way both by the extension of education to so many and by the exposure of virtually everyone in the Islamic world to images of the West, with its apparent democracy, sexual opportunity and wealth. Again the model of expectation, disappointment and perceived injustice fits the experience of millions of graduates, provincial immigrants to cities, doctors who drive cabs and ambitious civil engineers who teach basic arithmetic. It matches the experience of the 17-year-old Pakistani lower-middle-class youth torn between the mullah and MTV. If he accepts his desire to be part of the Westernized world he will have to address the fact that he will only ever enjoy an ersatz, inferior version of the ‘Western’ life of his equivalent in London or Los Angeles. His clothes will never be as up to date, his skin will never be the right colour, his chances of pre-marital sex will always be infinitely lower. An alternative, of