Critical Studies on Islamism Series – Serie

Human rights abuses and violations in Saudi Arabia attract international condemnation. But within the country, an Islamic civil rights movement, ‘HASM’, has called for change. While its members have received international human rights awards, the Saudi authorities have persecuted and imprisoned them.This book is the first to study human rights in the kingdom from the perspective of these prominent Saudi civil rights activists, uncovering the actual ideas that motivate their activism. Based on analysis of the group’s texts, the book highlights that HASM neither supports an overthrow of the government, of which they are accused, nor are they “liberal” advocates of universal human rights. Their complex thought is a contribution to contemporary Islamic discourse because they make a case for ‘peaceful civil jihad’ through the protection of citizens’ basic rights, but within a rigid, Salafist interpretation of social affairs that imposes heavy limits on politics, human rights and democracy. Furthermore, HASM’s texts use war rhetoric and anti-Semitic language, with different arguments and words for domestic or international audiences.The most comprehensive text on this Islamic civil rights movement, the book employs detailed discourse analysis and includes sources from HASM texts in both Arabic and English.

Human rights abuses and violations in Saudi Arabia attract international condemnation. But within the country, an Islamic civil rights movement, ‘HASM’, has called for change. While its members have received international human rights awards, the Saudi authorities have persecuted and imprisoned them.This book is the first to study human rights in the kingdom from the perspective of these prominent Saudi civil rights activists, uncovering the actual ideas that motivate their activism. Based on analysis of the group’s texts, the book highlights that HASM neither supports an overthrow of the government, of which they are accused, nor are they “liberal” advocates of universal human rights. Their complex thought is a contribution to contemporary Islamic discourse because they make a case for ‘peaceful civil jihad’ through the protection of citizens’ basic rights, but within a rigid, Salafist interpretation of social affairs that imposes heavy limits on politics, human rights and democracy. Furthermore, HASM’s texts use war rhetoric and anti-Semitic language, with different arguments and words for domestic or international audiences.The most comprehensive text on this Islamic civil rights movement, the book employs detailed discourse analysis and includes sources from HASM texts in both Arabic and English.

Drawing upon extensive fieldwork, this book unveils the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood intra-dynamics by examining the emerging pathways of political disengagement and radicalization in the aftermath of 2013 Coup. It explores how the 2011 waves of protest and the 2013 military takeover of power – two contradictory phases, in terms of their implications for political Islam – shaped young members’ perceptions towards Egyptian politics, violence and the role of Islamic political groups. This offers a key to understanding the ideological and strategic evolution of Islamists, in alignment with regional changes such as the rise of transnational jihadist groups and the fading of popular protest in the Arab region. The book relies on Social Movement Theory and contentious politics literature to develop a relational approach for analysing the positionalities of the young Brothers. This elucidates change within Islamic groups as a multi-layered, evolving phenomenon that cannot be attributed solely to either ideological or structural changes, but rather to manifold factors operating at different levels. It also rejects the prevailing binary classification of moderate versus radical activism when seeking to understand the effects of repression on the trajectories of Islamic movements’ members.

Drawing upon extensive fieldwork, this book unveils the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood intra-dynamics by examining the emerging pathways of political disengagement and radicalization in the aftermath of 2013 Coup. It explores how the 2011 waves of protest and the 2013 military takeover of power – two contradictory phases, in terms of their implications for political Islam – shaped young members’ perceptions towards Egyptian politics, violence and the role of Islamic political groups. This offers a key to understanding the ideological and strategic evolution of Islamists, in alignment with regional changes such as the rise of transnational jihadist groups and the fading of popular protest in the Arab region. The book relies on Social Movement Theory and contentious politics literature to develop a relational approach for analysing the positionalities of the young Brothers. This elucidates change within Islamic groups as a multi-layered, evolving phenomenon that cannot be attributed solely to either ideological or structural changes, but rather to manifold factors operating at different levels. It also rejects the prevailing binary classification of moderate versus radical activism when seeking to understand the effects of repression on the trajectories of Islamic movements’ members.

This study presents a comparative, case-study approach to analyzing the foreign policies of ruling Islamist parties in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. The book investigates whether democratically elected ruling Islamist parties apply their ideology to foreign policy and how their foreign policy approaches differ to that of non-Islamist parties.Taghreed Alsabeh provides in-depth analysis of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in Egypt, the Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Morocco, and the Ennahda Party in Tunisia, over a period of twelve years, and compares their foreign policy approaches and outcomes to those of their own internal non-Islamist counterparts. What emerges is a detailed picture of each country’s foreign policy trajectories through successive governments – both Islamist and non-Islamist rule – and clear sites of commonality as well as divergence. Alsabeh demonstrates that ultimately Islamist parties’ foreign policies have been ideologically constrained to a large degree by national contexts such as limited time in power, limited control of the government, and their relationships with other domestic political actors.

This study presents a comparative, case-study approach to analyzing the foreign policies of ruling Islamist parties in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. The book investigates whether democratically elected ruling Islamist parties apply their ideology to foreign policy and how their foreign policy approaches differ to that of non-Islamist parties.Taghreed Alsabeh provides in-depth analysis of the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) in Egypt, the Justice and Development Party (PJD) in Morocco, and the Ennahda Party in Tunisia, over a period of twelve years, and compares their foreign policy approaches and outcomes to those of their own internal non-Islamist counterparts. What emerges is a detailed picture of each country’s foreign policy trajectories through successive governments – both Islamist and non-Islamist rule – and clear sites of commonality as well as divergence. Alsabeh demonstrates that ultimately Islamist parties’ foreign policies have been ideologically constrained to a large degree by national contexts such as limited time in power, limited control of the government, and their relationships with other domestic political actors.

The emergence of Islamist and Salafi movements – the actors of Islamist Politics – has been a critical area of scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa. But there is no theoretical framework to understand political Islam as a phenomenon that includes both Islamic ideology and modern activism. This book uses the Gramscian concept of political activism to provide this much-needed perspective. As Arab societies have had a similar historical development and trajectory to the society Gramsci was analyzing, his ideas are shown to be particularly relevant for understanding the post-2011 democratization and politicization of Islamist and Salafi movements.Based on the case study of the Tunisian Islamist movement, al-Nahda, and the Tunisian Salafi movement, Ansar al-Sharia, political Islam is given a useful explanatory framework to explain how the ideological/theological side of Islamic activism realizes itself into practical political action. The book establishes the term ‘Islamic politics’ to describe this combination of socio-religious mobilization - commonly defined as dawa - and political organization, including party or revolutionary organizations. Furthermore, the authors show that Islamists and Salafists can be described as ‘post-Islamist’ in the same way communist parties became ‘post-communist’ and ‘post-ideological’.Written by two renowned experts on political Islam, the innovative theoretical framework used here can explain the development and behaviour of Islamist groups in other contexts, moving scholarship beyond traditional approaches.

Why did Islamists respond so differently to the Arab Spring? What do these different responses tell us about Islamists’ ideological commitment and resilience, or the contexts within which they were functioning? This book is based on fieldwork on Islamists in eight Middle Eastern countries: Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Yemen, Jordan, Kuwait and Syria. The contributors trace the transformation of the Islamists’ ideology, behaviour, and strategy since the beginning of the Arab Spring. The aim of the book is to show that Islamists necessarily have an interactive and dialectical relationship with the environments in which they find themselves, and that their behaviour and political calculations are based on a wide range of local, regional and global factors. They take into account the impact of the different contexts the groups found themselves in from authoritarian to open and reformist, and contexts of armed conflict and civil war. An interdisciplinary project, the book captures the ongoing transformation of Islamist parties to explain the reasons why some movements could adapt and make shifts in their discourse and strategy, maintaining organizational coherence and unity, while others fell short and suffered major splits and schisms. The robust theoretical findings update existing literature on Islamism and advance the state of the field.