Governing Political Islam

Sami Al-Daghistani

doi:10.5617/jais.9160

Abstract

This paper analyzes what I define as an anti-Islamist discourse (or an “Islamistphobia”) both as a social reality and as conceptual innovation in contemporary Egypt. The paper focuses on four interrelated actors—the current Egyptian regime and its discourse on political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood and its historical entanglements with the Egyptian state, the Salafi al-Nūr and Rāya Parties, and al-Azhar’s relation with both the regime and the Islamists. I advance an idea that anti-Islamist sentiments channel primarily through official (state) and media discourses in Egypt, rooted in both a colonialist locale and in a contemporary religious framework and its anticolonial rhetoric. It is, however, directed primarily against the Muslim Brotherhood, rather than against all Islamist groups across the board. Keywords: Anti-Islamist discourse, Islamistphobia, Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt, political Islam

Highlights

This work is part of an international project “INTERSECT: Global Flows of Islamophobia,” launched in 2019 at the Center for Advanced Study of Religion, at the Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo
Four years after al-Sīsī’s proposition, al-Ṭayyib, in a speech delivered in honor of Laylat al-Qadr that aired on Egyptian Channel 1 TV in June 2019, asserted that Muslim scholars and intellectuals have tried to expose Islamophobia for more than a decade, yet to no avail, and that its existence would not have been possible without the funding and support of modern colonialism, which is often disseminated by Western media machine.[73]
Throughout the 20th century, various Egyptian regimes resorted to particular language when deeming the organization a violent movement, and pursued structural changes geared toward dissolving the movement, such as imprisonment of their leaders, torture of their supporters, freezing their assets, and labeling it as a terrorist organization

Summary

Introduction

This work is part of an international project “INTERSECT: Global Flows of Islamophobia,” launched in 2019 at the Center for Advanced Study of Religion, at the Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society in Oslo. The paper focuses on four interrelated actors— the current Egyptian regime and its discourse on political Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood and its historical entanglements with the Egyptian state, the Salafi al-Nūr and Rāya Parties, and al-Azhar’s relation with both the regime and the Islamists.

Results

Conclusion