An Islamist economic habitus: Islamist-affiliated businesses in Egypt

Abstract

The post-2013 crackdown on Islamist-affiliated businesses in Egypt offers a unique glimpse at the Islamists’ economic assets and activities. How could affiliates of the Islamist movement in Egypt accumulate so many assets and become significant market actors since the 1970s despite periodic state hostility and weak property rights protection? I argue that belonging to the Islamist movement endowed affiliated entrepreneurs with an economic habitus. This mode of embeddedness allowed the conversion of organisational, symbolic and social capital from the socio-religious and cultural fields into the market field. However, the Islamist habitus was tension-ridden, hence conflicted, in two principal aspects. It was marked by embeddedness as much as boundedness for the affiliated entrepreneurs. One source of tension was introspective about the actual and perceived (in)compatibility between business activities and the ideological mission of the movement. The other was extrospective related to the power relations with periodically hostile state authorities.