Islamism revisited

While contemporary Islamism is a response to the domestic political situation in many Muslim countries, as well as to US and western policies in the Muslim world, it is also about religious assertion and the forging of an alternative ideology, not only as a means of empowerment but also as a means of establishing a particular social order. The debate is as much an internal one as it is a global one and in many ways mirrors the struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for political and cultural independence.     

The nationalisation of the human rights debate in Egypt

ABSTRACT. The study of nationalism in Egypt has often focused on Arab nationalism and its relevance to the post‐colonial state building process. The current article shifts the focus to the Egyptian state's strategic use of nationalism as a mechanism for survival and for shoring up its failing legitimacy. In particular, the case of the human rights debate is chosen to show the regime's most recent attempt to ‘nationalise’ a rising movement which promotes universalism and poses a threat to the notion of the nation's homogeneity. By misrepresenting human rights organisations as mouthpieces of Western imperialist powers, the regime has managed to create an image of these organisations as posing a threat to Egypt's national security and undermining its international ‘reputation’. More recently, however, the state has refined its discourse on human rights by promoting an image whereby it is the ‘official agent’ of a more nationalistically defined human rights movement.