Pious Way to Politics: The Rise of Political Salafism in Post‐Mubarak Egypt

The Arab Spring has reshaped the Islamist landscape in the Middle East drastically. After decades of repression and exclusion, Islamist parties have taken power in Egypt, Tunis, and Morocco. However, the startling rise of Salafism (Salafiyya) remains the most visible feature of the new Islamist scene in the region. After decades of eschewing politics for theological and political reasons, Salafi movements and groups have rushed into electoral politics enthusiastically. They became keen to form political parties, contest elections, and vie for power. In Egypt, the Salafi parties fared well in the post‐revolution parliamentary elections and are a key player in drafting Egypt's new constitution. This article explores the rise of Salafism after Mubarak and examines its effects on the democratic transition in Egypt. It investigates the ideological and theological stance of Salafi movements and parties on politics and democracy in particular. The argument put forward is that the extraordinary political openness in Egypt after the revolution has pushed Salafis into everyday politics. Subsequently, Salafis have become more inclined to adopt a pragmatic and practical discourse. Based on field research, this article provides a thematic analysis of Egyptian Salafism and assesses its political future.     

Scholarly Authority and Lay Mobilization: Yusuf al‐Qaradawi's vision of da‘wa, 1976‐1984

The late 1970s and early 1980s were a propitious yet challenging time for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as its elites sought to define the movement's priorities in the face of new opportunities to spread their call (da‘wa). The debate over preaching, while one of strategic assessment, also involved a negotiation of intellectual hierarchy: Should laymen lead Egypt's oldest Islamist organization, or should scholars? In contrast to previous studies that focus on how laymen led the Brotherhood's return to grassroots preaching, this article reintegrates scholars into the story of da‘wa by focusing on the organization's most prominent ‘ālim, Shaykh Yusuf al‐Qaradawi, and his vision of institution‐based preacher education and extra‐institutional activism. Drawing on three books written by Qaradawi on this topic between the mid‐1970s and early 1980s, this article casts lights not only on this Islamist scholar's claim to religious authority as he sought to mold the Brotherhood, but also on the ways in which projects of mass mobilization – whether grassroots preaching or the reform of state‐sponsored educational curricula – have transformed scholarly claims to authority more broadly.     

Secular Façade,Neoliberal Islamisation: Textbook Nationalism from Mubarak to Sisi

Beneath the secular veneer of official rhetoric, nationally unified school textbooks provide a striking image of the Islamist message promoted to young people in Egypt. While distorting the struggles and complexity of Egyptian history and heritage, the textbooks construct patriotic devotion and a form of docile ‘neoliberal Islamism’ as the route to national renaissance. They present a notion of ideal citizenship where personal piety, charity and entrepreneurship are the proposed solutions to ‘Egypt's problems’. However, to actually relieve its ‘problems’, the regime has relied on religious associations for the provision of social services, depended on significant foreign assistance and periodically activated anti‐western nationalism. This article details textbook constructions of national identity and citizenship in the late Mubarak era and reflects on whether the 2011 uprising proves their failure in securing his legitimacy. It describes key changes since 2011 and explores whether the Sisi regime is offering alternative formulas of legitimation.     

Islam,Human Rights and Interfaith Relations: Some Contemporary Egyptian Perspectives

Abstract

This paper explores current discussions and debates on Islam, human rights and interfaith relations in Egypt through an analysis of the public statements and writings of various religious scholars and spiritual teachers and the textbooks used to teach Islam in public secondary schools. It is well known that Islamist perspectives have become mainstream in Egypt, a largely devout and socially conservative country that is also the source of most of the major Islamic trends and political ideologies that have impacted the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nonetheless, there is a broad tendency in government-issued textbooks on Islam and in the population at large to equate Islam with democracy and human rights, despite the authoritarianism of the state and the contradictions between traditional interpretations of Islam and international human rights norms. The rhetoric of democracy and human rights is linked to the threat of terrorism, which is labeled un-Islamic. Among ordinary Egyptian Muslims, even those who support Islamist politics, there seems to be a new concern to eradicate Islamic extremism and more openness to unconventional Muslim approaches. The most liberal example of this is an association that teaches the unity of all religions from a somewhat Sufi perspective, promotes interfaith dialogue, and advocates reinterpreting the Shari'a to promote gender equality and equal human rights for all Egyptians.     

Contentious and Prefigurative Politics: Vigilante Groups’ Struggle against Sexual Violence in Egypt (2011–2013)

This article analyses the drivers, mobilizational tactics and manoeuvrings of informal, youth‐led initiatives that emerged in post‐Mubarak Egypt to counter the growing threat of sexual violence against women in public spaces. The findings are based on empirical research into youth‐led activism against gender‐based violence during 2011‒2013. The approach adopted is a case study of three initiatives, Bassma (Imprint), Shoft Taharosh (Harassment Seen) and Opantish (Operation Anti Sexual Harassment). Informal youth‐based initiatives in the context of the post‐January 2011 uprising have generally been criticized for their lack of sustainability, organizationally and politically. However, the examination of activism against gender‐based vio‐lence through the lens of prefigurative politics shows the inherent value of experimentation and its contribution to innovations in public outreach. The value of the initiatives studied in this article also lies in their mobilizational power which inadvertently produces ‘repertoires’ of knowledge, skills and resources to engage the citizenry and capture their imagination. In the long run, such repertoires may allow for the emergence of organized and sustained forms of political agency. The article suggests that a cross‐fertilization of prefigurative and contentious politics offers a framework for understanding temporally‐ and spatially‐bound forms of collective political agency.     

The chance for change in the Arab world: Egypt's uprising

As the largest Arab country, Egypt has always played a crucial role in the politics of the Arab world; however, the internal political dynamics of Egypt have until the January 2011 uprising hardly attracted a glance from international observers. This article gives an overview of the political arena and the various political forces at play in post‐Mubarak Egypt. With many unpredictable variables currently at play in Egyptian politics, the result of the elections scheduled for November 2011 will likely surprise many, both within the country and beyond. The article also looks at what impact the political changes in Egypt may have had on the relationship between Egypt and Israel. There have been increasingly frequent demands within Egypt to revise the Camp David accords—but not at the expense of war with Israel. While Israel is unlikely to accept any calls to revise the peace treaty, Arab public opinion has become newly relevant for policy‐makers and Israel will have to make corresponding adjustments to its regional security strategy.     

Islamisation and politics in Sudan

Sudan achieved an Islamic revolution recently without violence. Through a ‘creeping’ revolution that started in the 1970s, Islamic fundamentalists have consolidated their power through wealth and systematic control of the civil service, the economy, the judiciary and the armed forces. The fact that the major political parties in northern Sudan, except the Communist Party, have been affiliated to religious sects does not mean all Muslims support the Sharia. Fundamentalists comprise 20% of Sudan's Muslim population, but they are richer, better organised and more highly motivated. The implementation of the Sharia has been accompanied by the entrenchment of dictatorial rule, a weakening of institutions, the erosion of civil liberties, the aggravation of the civil war in southern Sudan and an ever‐worsening economic malaise. The revolution has also caused apprehension in Washington and some African and Arab states, but there is as yet no evidence that Sudan poses a direct threat to its neighbours.     

Christian–Muslim Relations in Egypt in the Wake of the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring protests that brought massive and largely unforeseen political change to Egypt included all sectors of society, including the Egyptian Christian population, known as Copts. Copts participated in large numbers in the protests that brought about regime change in February 2011, but the broader implications of the revolution to Copts are unclear. In this essay, I address the changes in Christian–Muslim relations that attended the development of a new republican regime in Egypt as a result of the Arab Spring. While the former regime of President Hosni Mubarak had formed a stable elite partnership with the hierarchy of the Coptic Orthodox Church (a “neo‐millet” system), the 2011 revolution contributed to the erosion of this partnership in favor of a republican and pluralist model of citizenship in which individual Copts represent their own interests. The increasingly assertive public role of lay movements among Copts, coupled with the death of the Coptic Patriarch (pope) and his replacement by a younger successor, points to the continued erosion of the elite partnership in favor of the new model. Time will tell whether or not pluralist representation or a retrenched corporatism that favors the church will dominate Christian–Muslim relations in Egypt into the future.     

‘They Finally Found Out that We Really Are Men’: Violence,Non‐Violence and Black Manhood in the Civil Rights Era

This article explores how peaceful protest and armed resistance reflected and shaped certain gender identities in the southern US civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, and reveals much about the significance of violence for ‘marginalised masculinities’ within the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. In the Deep South, civil rights organisers found that their non‐violent strategy's connotations of effeminate submissiveness hampered attempts to win over black men to the movement's cause. Conversely, those African Americans who decided to use armed force to protect the movement against racist attacks were proud of their ability to defend themselves and their communities. A comparison of armed resistance efforts in southern civil rights campaigns with those of post‐1965 Black Power groups such as the Black Panther Party shows both commonalities and differences with regard to the inter‐relationship between self‐defence and gender. In the southern movement, the affirmation of manhood remained a by‐product of the physical imperative to protect black lives against racism. Among Black Power militants and their black nationalist precursors, self‐defence, while initially intended to stop police brutality and other racist oppression, ultimately became mainly a symbol of militant black manhood. The Black Power movement's affirmative message countered stereotypes of black male powerlessness and instilled a positive black identity into many activists, but the gendered discourse it produced also tended to perpetuate black women's subordination.     

Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Post‐War El Salvador

This article explores post‐war El Salvador as characterised by disillusionment in the nation's neoliberal rebuilding project. A key part of my argument is that this disillusion‐ment is gendered. Specifically, I focus on a spectrum of gendered experiences and responses to social and inter‐personal violence in El Salvador's recent history. Is there a relationship between wartime political violence, continued processes of exclusion (i.e. education, healthcare, housing), and post‐war waves of domestic violence, youth violence and ‘random’ violence? While some scholars posit questions regarding Salvadoran toler‐ance to violence through time, I tackle this question by focusing on emerging criticisms of El Salvador's post‐war reconciliation. I privilege a focus on the everyday and people's ambiguities as they deal with political change and a neoliberal economy that marginalises the rural sector. In particular, I argue for placing many rural women's stories of gender‐based violence, their assertions of an embodied vulnerability and daily insecurity, within a political economic understanding of the contradictions of El Salvador's peace and nation‐building project. Through a series of ethnographic examples based on seventeen months of research in a former warzone, I suggest that a daily and gendered violence is rendered invisible. My aim is to theorise a range of women's and men's losses and to impart the urgency of their narratives that problematise assumptions of what constitutes pain, sorrow and the challenges of war‐torn life. This is an attempt to write outside privileged texts that ask subaltern women to speak in a collective voice and articulate their past loss and future hopes. In doing so, I discuss methodology and historicise my own fraught positioning as an international witness/researcher at a very particular moment of El Salvador's transition to democracy.     

The predicament of 'civil society' in Central Asia and the 'Greater Middle East'

This article discuses the concept of 'civil society' and how it has been used by the international community to promote democratization. It addresses some of the dimensions and side-effects of the policy, such as the relationship with traditional societies and power networks. It also addresses the importance of attending to the conditions of implementation, political issues such as nationalism and Islam, and political actors who may only have recent democratic credentials. Political democratization—free elections—is clearly popular in the Greater Middle East and Central Asia. During the last two years people have voted every time they have had the opportunity, despite the dangers. The debate concerning the compatibility of Islam and democracy overlooks the fact that the main obstacle to democratization in the area is usually not a religious but a secular authoritarian regime. The difficulty of building a democracy with people we do not consider to be democrats is discussed. There can be no democratization process without taking into account the mainstream Islamist parties and without acknowledging the importance of nationalism. There is a clash between the 'war on terror' approach and the call for elections: one cannot put Hamas and Hezbollah on the terrorist list and call for free elections in which both would emerge as legitimate and representative political movements.     

Islamist violence and regime stability in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia, homeland of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers of September 11, 2001, experienced low levels of internal violence until 2003, when a terrorist campaign by ‘Al‐Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula’ (QAP) shook the world's leading oil producer. Based on primary sources and extensive fieldwork in the Kingdom, this article traces the history of the Saudi jihadist movement and explains the outbreak and failure of the QAP campaign. It argues that jihadism in Saudi Arabia differs from jihadism in the Arab republics in being driven primarily by extreme pan‐Islamism and not socio‐revolutionary ideology, and that this helps to explain its peculiar trajectory. The article identifies two subcurrents of Saudi jihadism, ‘classical’ and ‘global’, and demonstrates that Al‐Qaeda's global jihadism enjoyed very little support until 1999, when a number of factors coincided to boost dramatically Al‐Qaeda recruitment. The article argues that the violence in 2003 was not the result of structural political or economic strains inside the Kingdom, but rather organizational developments within Al‐Qaeda, notably the strategic decision taken by bin Laden in early 2002 to open a new front in Saudi Arabia. The QAP campaign was made possible by the presence in 2002 of a critical mass of returnees from Afghanistan, a clever two‐track strategy by Al‐Qaeda, and systemic weaknesses in the Saudi security apparatus. The campaign failed because the militants, radicalized in Afghan camps, represented an alien element on the local Islamist scene and lacked popular support. The near‐absence of violence in the Kingdom before 2003 was due to Al‐Qaeda's weak infrastructure in the early 1990s and bin Laden's 1998 decision to suspend operations to preserve local networks. The Saudi regime is currently more stable and self‐confident—and therefore less inclined to democratic reform—than it has been in many years.     

Contiguity and Similarity as Poetic Modes in Some Poems of Gongora

This article explores how different authors who suffered the violence of the 1970s and 1980s revolutionary movements and military dictatorships in the Southern Cone countries of Latin America look back from a post-dictatorship present to write the history of their recent past. Nostalgia and critical reflection join forces to recreate the feelings of loss of individuals whose identities crashed due to the failure of political projects that once were conceived as messianic, as well as to critically reclaim the past in order to construct alternative futures for themselves as individuals and for the community. The article focuses mainly on the Chilean Diamela Eltit's novel Jamás el fuego nunca (2007), in which an old couple of former revolutionary militants of the Left imprisoned in a claustrophobic space—an old bed—explore their past as militants and as a couple to understand and question notions of individual and collective identity in the aftermath of traumatic and tumultuous experiences. The novel is read in the context of other narratives such as Chilean Luz Arce's testimonial, El infierno (1993) and Argentine political scientist Pilar Calveiro's essays, Poder y desaparición (1998) and Política y/o violencia (2005), among others. This article's theoretical contribution lies in its emphasis on the ethical consideration of listening to all of the narratives that speak to us about that era cognizant of their differing motivations, desires, tonalities, and subjective trajectories. Only by paying close attention to the polyphony of voices and documents about the past—especially those that speak to us from a time of subjective crisis and trauma—can we achieve a true sense of historicity.     

Luxemburg on Tahrir Square: Reading the Arab Revolutions with Rosa Luxemburg's The Mass Strike

The protests on Tahrir Square in Cairo have come to symbolize the Arab uprisings of 2011. They have proven that Arab political life is more complex than the false choice between authoritarian rule or Islamist oppositions. The popular uprisings witnessed the emergence of “the Arab peoples” as political actors, able to topple entrenched authoritarian leaders, challenging repressive regimes and their brutal security apparatuses. In our contribution we want to analyze the political dynamics of these uprisings beyond the salient immediacy of the revolutionary events, by taking, as our guide, Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet The Mass Strike (2005 [1906], London: Bookmarks). An interesting theoretical contribution to the study of revolution, Luxemburg's book provides us with tools to introduce a historical and political reading of the Arab Spring. Based on fieldwork and thorough knowledge of the region, we draw from evidence from the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the more gradual forms of political change in Morocco. Re‐reading the revolutionary events in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco through the lens of The Mass Strike offers activists on the ground insights into the dialectic between local and national struggles, economic and political demands, strike actions and revolution. The workers protests in Tunisia and Egypt during the last decade can be grasped as anticipations of the mass strike during the revolution; the specific mode in which workers participate as a class in the revolutionary process. This perspective enables an understanding of the current economic conflicts as logical forms of continuity of the revolution. The economic and the political, the local and the national (and one may add the global), are indissoluble yet separate elements of the same process, and the challenge for revolutionary actors in Tunisia and Egypt lies in the connection, organization and fusion of these dispersed moments and spaces of struggle into a politicized whole. Conversely, an understanding of the reciprocity between revolutionary change and the mass strike allows activists in Morocco to recognize the workers' movement as a potentially powerful actor of change, and trade unionists to incorporate the political in their economic mobilizations.     

Ways In and Out of Vulnerability to Climate Change: Abandoning the Mubarak Project in the Northern Nile Delta,Egypt

Abstract: Climate change is already exerting significant pressure on humanity, but some people have the resources to cope, while others do not. What, then, determines vulnerability to climate change? This article presents a case study of one site of vulnerability in Egypt, known as the Mubarak Project villages on the shores of the Mediterranean. The soil of these villages is now undergoing rapid salinization, forcing farmers to apply sand to “elevate” their fields above the rising salty water table—but not all farmers can afford to buy the requisite sand. Accumulation by dispossession under the Mubarak regime has pushed some people towards the frontline of climate change, while at the same time denying them the resources to stay there. Using our case, we explore the connection between accumulation by dispossession and vulnerability to climate change and ask if an end to the former could reduce the latter in Egypt.     

Why the Pakistan army is here to stay: prospects for civilian governance

This article explores the prospects for civilian governance over Pakistan's military in the policy‐relevant future. After reviewing the Pakistan army's past interference in the country's judicial and political affairs, it turns to the ongoing political maneuvering of the current Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, despite Pakistan's ostensible democratic dispensation. The article dilates on the impact of US engagement on the robustness of the Pakistan army's dominance and questions the newfound US commitment to promoting democratization and civilian control. The article argues that while conventional wisdom places the onus disproportionately upon the military's penchant for interventionism, the army has intervened only with the active assistance of civilian institutions, which are subsequently further eroded with every military takeover. It concludes with a consideration of whether or not genuine civilian control would result in a significant change in Pakistan's foreign and domestic policies, particularly Pakistan's well‐known utilization of Islamist militants in India and Afghanistan.     

‘Politicide’ and the Myanmar coup

Can the 2021 Myanmar coup be understood as part of a broader campaign by the Burmese army to commit ‘politicide’? The recent wave of violent raids, detentions and extrajudicial killings taking place across Myanmar is part of a long-standing pattern of systematic violence perpetrated against political groups and social movements that challenge military control and dominance. The author reviews the history of persecution directed at the National League for Democracy (NLD), the 88 Generation, All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU) and others who took part in the Burmese democracy movement. The author also reports findings from a multi-year ethnography she conducted with a community of activists and former political prisoners. She observes that, like ethnic and religious groups, this political community possesses stable, characteristic features, which are transmitted intergenerationally. She advocates for use of the term ‘politicide’ to understand both the recent coup and the history of violence perpetrated against the NLD, 88 Generation ABSFU and other groups inside Myanmar.     

The 2011 uprisings in the Arab Middle East: political change and geopolitical implications

The Arab uprisings of 2011 are still unfolding, but we can already discern patterns of their effects on the Middle East region. This article offers a brief chronology of events, highlighting their inter‐connections but also their very diverse origins, trajectories and outcomes. It discusses the economic and political grievances at the root of the uprisings and assesses the degree to which widespread popular mobilization can be attributed to pre‐existing political, labour and civil society activism, and social media. It argues that the uprisings' success in overthrowing incumbent regimes depended on the latter's responses and relationships with the army and security services. The rebellions' inclusiveness or lack thereof was also a crucial factor. The article discusses the prospects of democracy in the Arab world following the 2011 events and finds that they are very mixed: while Tunisia, at one end, is on track to achieve positive political reform, Syria, Yemen and Libya are experiencing profound internal division and conflict. In Bahrain the uprising was repressed. In Egypt, which epitomizes many regional trends, change will be limited but, for that reason, possibly more long‐lasting. Islamist movements did not lead the uprisings but will benefit from them politically even though, in the long run, political participation may lead to their decline. Finally, the article sketches the varied and ongoing geopolitical implications of the uprisings for Turkish, Iranian and Israeli interests and policies. It assesses Barack Obama's response to the 2011 events and suggests that, despite their profound significance for the politics of the region, they may not alter the main contours of US foreign policy in the Middle East in a major way.     

Egypt,Islamists, and the Internet: The Case of the Muslim Brotherhood and Its Rhetoric of Dialectics in Ikhwanweb

This essay offers an ideological analysis of the rhetoric of the Islamist Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in its official English‐language Web site, Ikhwanweb, between 2005 and 2010 — years preceding the Egyptian uprising of January 2011. The purpose was to examine the ideology manifest in the rhetoric and uncover the instrumental function the rhetoric served. Analysis brought forth a post‐Islamist ideology manifest through a rhetoric of dialectics. The instrumental function of the Egyptian MB's rhetoric in Ikhwanweb was to alter Western societies' monolithic understanding of Islamism — radical, undemocratic, inflexible. The cyber‐rhetoric was also used as a means to disapprove certain Western agents' support for authoritarian regimes. During Mubarak's rule, Ikhwanweb was used as a communicative medium to demonstrate to the West the Egyptian MB's need to be valued — respected regardless of ideological differences, understood rather than essentialized, stereotyped, and prejudged, and supported as a pragmatic, political entity within Egypt.     

Touching history and making community. The memory of the 1980 Turkish military coup in the 12 September Museum of Shame

ABSTRACT

This contribution draws on ethnography conducted in Istanbul to analyse the Museum of Shame, an amateur exhibition dedicated to the memory of leftist militants who were victims of state violence following the 1980–1983 military coup in Turkey. This museification is the work of a group of ex-revolutionaries and can be considered a cultural practice that challenges statist historiography and creates a mnemonic community. By exhibiting the possessions of murdered militants, it inscribes their personal experiences into collective frames and fosters intergenerational transmission. Its temporality reflects the ethos of the revolutionary fighter, turning mourning into a political statement. However, though this museum practice allows the community to become an agent of history, it is unable to encompass the varying experiences of ex-militants. Its aestheticization of violence and its moral injunctions limit the extent of social solidarity and advance essentialisms that contribute to the construction of marginality from the inside.