Introduction

Abstract

The Arabs entered modernity with the entry of the modern world – soldiers, merchants, diplomats, and capitalism – into Arab lands. Modern history removed Arabs from the cultural and civilisational continuity that they came to think had persisted for centuries, and impelled them to changes and breakthroughs in all domains of society, culture, and political structures. These changes traversed these domains and sectors, provoking new developments unevenly, articulated by a structural connection between the Arabs and world history with its centre first in Europe, and then the Atlantic, and finally in the Atlantic and East Asia, with a dispersed geographical centre uniting the world into the single temporal unit of today’s advanced capitalism....

Law and political Islam’s transformations: Egyptian Islamists and the notions of a civil state and a religious party

“…In the context of Sunni-majority societies, the opposite of secularization could be specified as ‘Islamization’, that is to say, the process of bringing positive law into conformity with sharī‘a , narrowly understood as a ‘scripturally-derived religious legal doctrine’ (Quraishi-Landes, 2015). Both phenomena should be understood in relation to each other: the secularization process marginalized religious spaces and institutions, and political Islam can be analyzed as a reaction against this marginalization (Al-Azmeh, 2019: 407–446; Dalacoura, 2018; Zubaida, 2005). Recently, some authors have shown how state-controlled religious institutions played a role in the birth of political Islam (Cesari, 2018), and in the 1970s re-Islamization, co-constructing it along with Islamist organizations through competition and cross-pollination (Rock-Singer, 2019).…”

“…By ‘secularism’, we mean the idea that ‘religion as a source of authority in social and intellectual questions is not privileged over other sources of authority in societies internally differentiated’ (Al-Azmeh, 2019: 8). Then, in Sunni-majority societies, secular political forces are those that oppose the deep effective translation of the above-mentioned narrow conception of sharī‘a into positive law (or at least its limitation to the realm of family law), even if they can express a generic support for the word sharī‘a (Berger, 2019) and accept its symbolic role in the Constitution (Blouët and Steuer, 2015).…”

“…The word ‘civil’ ( madanī ) appeared in the work of nineteenth-century philosophers such as Faraḥ Antūn or Muḥammad ‘Abdū as an alternative to the term ‘secular’ (‘ ilmānī ), and it was used to refer to institutions with a non-religious basis (Al-Azmeh, 2019: 7). The notion of a ‘civil state’ is characterized by an important semantic haziness due to the fact that the word madanī means ‘civil’ as well as ‘civilian’.…”