| Summary: | The central argument of this paper is that the political expressions of Islamism, as an alternative project to the crisis of the secular State in the Middle East, emerged not from the 1979 Iranian Revolution but from diverse contentious actions led by influential Islamist intellectuals since the 1950s. Although certainly the 1979 Iranian Revolution exported Islamism as an attractive project thanks to the diffusion of an heroic image of Ayatollah Khomeini in the popular imaginary of several countries in the region, the crisis of Nasserism is the place from where we can trace the fusion of anticolonial, anti-Zionist, nationalist and Islamist ideologies, explaining the popular disenchantment of secular nationalism on the one hand, and the strengthening of Islamism, on the other, at least in some parts of the Middle East.
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