An extremely useful post on Daily Kos provides a lot of background on the development and current state of political Islam. It’s a good antidate to the monolithic vision of Islam that prevails in most of the coverage in American media
Daily Kos: Islam as a Modern Political Movement
The Shehada
La ilaha ill’Allah, Muhammad rasul Allah, = there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.
He who says it becomes a Muslim. There is nothing more: that utterance is taken as definitive proof of conversion by every sect of Islam. All else is the deen, the Islamic way of life, and there are as many different ways to be a Muslim as there are Muslims. Two Muslims who argue particulars of Islam both utter the Shehada before and after any dispute of this sort.
I am not a Muslim. I discriminate between Church and State. I am a pro-choice, anti-Intelligent Design, professing Christian. Should an observant Muslim find fault in my analysis of Islam, I beg pardon. I speak fair Arabic, I lived in Islamic countries for many years, and have discussed Islam civilly with several scholars and many imams, without giving offense. Al muslimu man salima ‘l muslimina.
Anyone may utter the shehada. When modern Muslims talk of an Islamic society, everyone has a different definition.
The diarist also references an article in the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly going into more depth on the seminal Muslim Brotherhood that is rewarding in itself:
The rise of “political Islam” is intrinsically associated with the birth of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is why it is so crucial to study the history of this organisation. Founded in 1928 by Hassan El-Banna, its first supreme guide, the Muslim Brotherhood’s calling spread so rapidly that within a matter of years it evolved from a locally based group of proselytisers to a tightly structured socio-political movement whose influence in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East would grow exponentially over the next 75 years. However, if, as some have put it, the “brain” of political Islam is Egyptian, its “muscle” is Asian, in view of the profound impact Wahabi thought and practice had upon its development.