Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit in their book Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies portray contemporary radical Islam as primarily a modern reaction to Western imperialism.

I read the book for the Japanese side, so I can't vouch for their perspective on Islam. But I'll try and explain it, and if another expert here wants to contest they can enlighten us both.

First of all, when talking about Western imperialism you need to understand it has two 'forms', so to speak.

You have the direct material side, Western powers sending gunboats and soldiers, setting up puppet regimes and annexing states. That's pretty standard.

But you also have the cultural side, which is how non-Western people react to this Western material (economical, militarian and technological) hegemony.

What you see on the cultural side is that there was generally a conflation between Western material hegemony and Western culture. That is, a belief that Western power wasn't just about superior knowledge, but about superior culture as well.

Which, I'd point out, is not entirely wrong. Things like statecraft, scientific peer review, capitalism, are all factors in Western power which also have cultural components to them.

In general, which shouldn't be too surprising, the non-Western response to Western material Imperialism was a desire to resist it (though one shouldn't try to erase from history those who collaborated with/supported Western imperialism instead). But the question then becomes: how to best resist the West?

Here, as Buruma and Margalit put it, you see a:

split between nativists and Westernizers. The former dream of going back to the purity of an imaginary past: Japan under the divine emperor, the Caliphate united under Islam, China as a community of peasants. The latter are iconoclasts, who see local tradition as an impediment to radical modernization.

Some believed that to resist the West they'd have to become like the West. But in a total all-consuming fashion which erased all local native traditions. One extreme example they give is of a Japanese intellectual who suggested Japanese should convert to Christianity and interbreed with Europeans as much as possible.

To cut to the chase a bit, Buruma and Margalit portray the history of modern radical Islam as a reaction to the above which seeks to oppose not just the West, but what it sees as Westernised regimes in its own countries. To oppose 'Westoxification' by replacing it with a 'pure' religion. The means of purification being fighting a holy war against the West. This, as they put it:

appealed to those who felt humiliated and oppressed by European colonialism and corrupt, whisky-drinking, womanizing monarchs, followed by military dictatorships.

The primary competition was revolutionary Marxism, which had its own appeal as a way of resisting the West, but the latter of course has over the course of the 20th century failed.

I won't try and explain why it still has such appeal even though by all measures the heyday of Western imperialism is behind us. That is imo more of a sociological issue of the appeal of radical causes in general, but the above is, at least Buruma and Margalit's, history of the idea in general.