Islamism, secularization, secularity: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a phenomenon of a secular age

Abstract

The paper outlines parallels between the processes of secularization and secularity in the West, as interpreted by José Casanova and Charles Taylor, and Islamism as a modern social and political phenomenon. It focuses on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's history and ideas and specifically on a number of public documents detailing its social and political vision. I argue that if we define 'secularization' not only as the weakening of religious belief, but as the institutional differentiation of modern state structures and the marginalization of religion; and 'secularity' as the process whereby faith becomes one option among others and religion becomes an identifiable set of beliefs seen as guidelines for reform, the Brotherhood, similarly to other Islamist entities, is a phenomenon of a 'secular age'.

Moral approval of xenotransplantation in Egypt: associations with religion, attitudes towards animals and demographic factors

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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).…”

Inventing Islam(ism): De-Islamization under Secular Authoritarianism in Bangladesh

“…The important distinction between religiosity in a secular age and that before it is that, in a secular age, it is the individual who consciously makes the choice to engage with religion, whereas in previous times it was part of a tradition -the "default option" -that everyone, almost without giving it a thought, accepted (2007: 3, 12, 143). Based on Taylor's conceptualization of secularization, Dalacoura (2018) claims that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is "a phenomenon of a secular age" insofar as it makes Islam(ism) one of many choices, and then relies on individuals, not customs or traditions, to make a conscious choice to accept or reject its program. Shadi Hamid, in the same vein, observes that in the pre-modern era, "[n]o one, then, questioned the www.plutojournals.com/reorient organizing premise that Islam and sharia were the order of things", which changed with modernity and the arrival of Western ideologies (2016: 96).…”