"Abdul Wadod Shalabi speaks of 'spiritual entropy,'

a topos rooted in a genre of pessimistic hadiths.[64] For him, such entropy is "the backbone of history, a dialectic far more profound than that of the Marxist, who sees the process from beneath, as it were, and imagines it to be grounds for optimism."[65] The conclusion must be that modern Islam is hence deeply ambivalent, with Islamists, as befits their Enlightenment roots, generally more upbeat than traditionalists and Sufis. It is significant that messianic expectations, common in the Islamic past and conspicuous in nineteenth century responses to Western encroachment (Mahdism, Bahii'ism, Qadianism), are largely absent from modern Islamist discourse, which instead stresses "planning" and "unity" as the keys to establishing the "Islamic State."

Islamism's implicit repudiation of classical Muslim messianism is demonstrated further in its rigorism. Again, this is a sign of distance from classical assumptions: Prophetic predictions of entropy came coupled with the idea that God will require less from his servants as time goes on. One hadith tells the Prophet's companions, who lived in the "Age of Felicity" ('asr al-sa'ada): "You are living in a time when someone who renounces a tenth of what is enjoined upon him will be destroyed; but a time will come when someone who performs a tenth of what is enjoined upon him will be saved."[66] Traditional Sunnism took this to mean that the law should be applied more gently as time went on. For instance, even one of the most rigorous of Ottoman jurists, al-BirgivI (1523-1573), thought that his age was so distant from the Prophet's time that it was forbidden for the jurist to apply any but the most easy and gentle interpretations of the Shari'a.[67] Under modern conditions, however, Islamists, heirs to Enlightenment beliefs about instrumental reason and the Utopian perfectibility of the world, have repudiated this by typically insisting on interpretations more rigorous even than the mainstream Sharia of early Islamic times.

-Tim Winter, ‘Ishmael and the Enlightenment’s crise de coeur: a response to Koshul and Kepnes,’ in Basit Bilal Koshul and Stephen Kepnes (eds.), Scripture, Reason, and the Contemporary Islam-West Encounter: Studying the ‘Other’, Understanding the ‘Self’ (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 165-166.