The Future of Political Islam

Revisiting Political Islam: Explaining the Nexus Between Political Islam and Contentious Politics in the Arab World*

“…As a political ideology rather than a religion, political Islam is a widely used concept in the social sciences. At the most general level, political Islam or Islamism can be broadly defined as “a body of faith” that “has something important to say about how politics and society should be ordered in the contemporary Muslim world and implemented in some fashion” (Fuller, :xi). In more specific terms, Islamism is “a form of instrumentalization of Islam by individuals, groups and organizations that pursue political objectives,” which “provides political responses to today's societal challenges by imagining a future, the foundations for which rest on reappropriated, reinvented concepts borrowed from the Islamic traditions” (Denoeux, :61).…”

Religion and Place

“…Scholarship on the Islamic resurgence has primarily focused around several main themes: political Islam (Effendy 2003 ;Muzaffar 1987 ;Jomo and Cheek 1992 ;Kepel 2002 ;Tibi 2002 ;Fuller 2002 ) , sharia law (Hussin 2007 ;Henderson 2003 ;Mir-Hosseini 2006 ;Lee 2009 ) , madrasa schools (Lukens-Bull 2000 ; Daun and Arjmand 2005 ;Daun et al 2004 ;Bergen and Pandey 2006 ) and terrorist networks and Islamic militancy (Rashid 2001 ;Abuza 2002 ;Ramakrishna and Tan 2003 ;Croissant and Barlow 2007 ;Hussain 2005 ;Khan 2006 ;Hiber 2009 ;Abuza 2003 ;Speckhard and Akhmedova 2006 ) . Scholarship on the Islamic resurgence has primarily focused around several main themes: political Islam (Effendy 2003 ;Muzaffar 1987 ;Jomo and Cheek 1992 ;Kepel 2002 ;Tibi 2002 ;Fuller 2002 ) , sharia law (Hussin 2007 ;Henderson 2003 ;Mir-Hosseini 2006 ;Lee 2009 ) , madrasa schools (Lukens-Bull 2000 ; Daun and Arjmand 2005 ;Daun et al 2004 ;Bergen and Pandey 2006 ) and terrorist networks and Islamic militancy (Rashid 2001 ;Abuza 2002 ;Ramakrishna and Tan 2003 ;…”

The War on Terror and the Transformation of Political Islam

“…Islamist activists such as Rachid Ghannouchi of the Tunisian Ennahda or Abdessalam Yassine of the Moroccan Al‐Adl had already theorised the Islamic reasons as to why political pluralism was not only acceptable but necessary to the revival of Islam in the late 1980s (Ali Abdelkader 2011). While the extent to which liberal values were accepted was not as great as in Western societies (Fuller 2004), both in‐depth case studies (Cavatorta 2006) and larger quantitative studies have demonstrated that support for Islamism does not translate into support for authoritarian forms of government (Tessler 2002; Garcia‐Rivero & Kotzé 2007). By and large, Islamist movements accepted that democratic procedures and mechanisms should form the basis for political rule in any society.…”