Martin Amis,neo-Orientalism,and hubris

This article puts forward a reading of Martin Amis’s 2008 book The Second Plane with an emphasis on its cultural politics. It reconsiders Amis’s book from a distance of almost a decade in light of recent global developments, including the rise of ISIS in the Middle East, the resurgence of acute Islamophobia in Europe and the US, and Tony Blair’s public acknowledgement of the shortcomings of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. With these factors in mind, the essay argues that it is possible to detect in Amis’s book early warning signs of how the West’s relationship with both Islamism and Islam would develop in the period following its publication. Drawing on William Connolly’s work on tragedy and Edward Said’s work on Orientalism, the essay argues that The Second Plane ought to be read as advancing a hubristic ‘neo-Orientalist’ cultural and political agenda which today threatens to lock much of the world into an ongoing cycle of recrimination and revenge. Against this, a case is made for an appreciation of the complex circumstances which give rise to suicide terrorism and for a sense of history largely absent from Amis’s writing on the subject.     

A Christian Islamist?

Abstract

In this review, the author discusses Volf’s paradigm from an Islamic perspective, and compares and contrasts some of Volf’s assertions with those of his avowed counterpart: the Muslim fundamentalist Syed Qutb. Some interesting questions are raised, and the differences between these two paradigms, it is claimed, is not as great as what might initially appear.     

Explaining the 2016 Islamist Mobilisation in Indonesia: Religious Intolerance,Militant Groups and the Politics of Accommodation

There has been an intense scholarly debate about what caused the unprecedented Islamist mass demonstrations in Indonesia in late 2016. Some scholars have argued that increasing intolerance and conservatism among the Muslim population are responsible, while others have disputed such notions, claiming that there is no evidence of widespread support for an Islamist agenda. In this article, we analyse a unique set of polling data to show that a) conservative attitudes among Indonesian Muslims were declining rather than increasing prior to the mobilisation, but that b) around a quarter of Indonesian Muslims do support an Islamist socio-political agenda. Importantly, we demonstrate that this core constituency of conservative Muslims has grown more educated, more affluent and better connected in the last decade or so, increasing its organisational capacity. We argue that this capacity was mobilised at a time when conservative Muslims felt excluded from the current polity, following the end of a decade of accommodation.     

Iran and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: Ideology and Realpolitik in Iranian Foreign Policy

The Islamic Republic of Iran has pursued full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). In doing so, Iran has appeared to be unfazed by the prospect of allying with Russia and China, two countries which have systematically suppressed their Muslim minorities for decades. Similarly, the SCO's Central Asian member states are led by individual leaders who are generally believed to rule in spite of their populations. As a result, Iran's eagerness to join the SCO may appear to contradict its self-promoted image as the champion of Muslim interests, but in reality it sits nicely within its overarching enmity for the USA. Indeed, the SCO is seen as a geopolitical counterweight to the USA. For Iran, this geopolitical opportunity overrides ideological imperatives, with the gap between ideology and geopolitics most evident under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.     

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.     

Islamism and Iran’s Islamic Period Museum

The Islamic Period Museum of Iran was established, almost 16 years after the Islamic Revolution, as an addition to the previous National Museum building – the Iran Bastan, or Ancient Iran Museum – in 1996. By examining the components of state Islamism, the space of the museum and key exhibits, this paper reveals the analogous relationship between the museum and state ideology. That relationship suggests that the museum embodies fundamental ambiguities and inconsistencies inherent in Iranian state Islamism. Those ambiguities and inconsistencies are only concealed, in the museum as in the ideology, by employing traditionalist rhetoric with regard to religion and identity.     

Religion and nationalism: four approaches*

ABSTRACT. Building on recent literature, this article discusses four ways of studying the relationship between religion and nationalism. The first is to treat religion and nationalism, along with ethnicity and race, as analogous phenomena. The second is to specify ways in which religion helps explain things about nationalism – its origin, its power or its distinctive character in particular cases. The third is to treat religion as part of nationalism, and to specify modes of interpenetration and intertwining. The fourth is to posit a distinctively religious form of nationalism. The article concludes by reconsidering the much‐criticised understanding of nationalism as a distinctively secular phenomenon.     

The post-Islamist problematic: questions of religion and difference in everyday life

The term post-Islamism has been broadly applied to suggest that we are witnessing a new phase of Islamist politics in which the goal is not to make the state Islamic but to change the lived experiences of Islam. Whether post-Islamism applies to the Turkish case has been a matter of much debate. We approach post-Islamism in Turkey using a feminist geographic analytic that shifts our focus from formal politics to the embodied and the everyday. Drawing upon eight focus groups with men and women in Istanbul in 2013 and 2014, we analyze discussions of education reform, the possibility of religious politics and religious difference to demonstrate how the premises of post-Islamism depend upon the (often unsuccessful) papering over of multiplicity. We argue that everyday, embodied solutions to the questions of post-Islamism often undermine the very categories (state, society, religion and secularism) upon which the post-Islamic problematic is based.     

The recovery of a non-violent identity for an Islamist pesantren in an age of terror

This article examines the ways in which one of Indonesia's largest local, non-violent fundamentalist Islamist groups, Hidayatullah, has worked towards recovering a non-violent identity in the aftermath of allegations of terrorism made by the international community at the height of the War on Terror. Significantly, in international circles post-September 11, Indonesia's pesantren (Islamic boarding school) network more generally became associated with terrorism as they were seen as potential breeding grounds for Islamist extremism. Subsequently, allegations emerged implicating Hidayatullah as part of an extremist organised network linked to Jemaah Islamiyah and, by extension, Al Qaeda. The article demonstrates how, in the aftermath of the allegations, the group negotiated with the wider society and the state's national security laws on terrorism as it worked to recover its non-violent identity. In doing so, it also raises further questions about methodological practices in distinguishing between the heterogeneity and subjectivities within wider Islamist movements, especially in terms of militant and non-violent forms of Islamism.     

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.