Striking from the margins: state, religion and devolution of authority in the Middle East

Abstract

Global trends in social and political polarization have gained a lot of traction in social sciences lately. Many scholars suggest that contemporary transformations point to a broader trend of a gradual disintegration, at the core of many societies, of long-lasting consensuses. The implosion of traditional centres of authority is, for multiple reasons, providing room for former peripheries not only to further contest them, but also to articulate new authority centres of their own. Striking from the margins fits within this trend, as the contributors question what is happening to the conventional centres of authority and peripheries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The book makes an original contribution, scrutinizing the regional transformation of religion, as a political phenomenon, over the last three decades. The contributors examine the profound social transformations, initiated with economic liberalization processes in the 1990s and 2000s and culminating in the revolutionary wave of 2011. As a result of these transformations, the book claims, parallel sources of authority beyond the state have been gaining ground. Most notably, these include religious actors. New expressions of religiosity—including jihadism—and the ‘sectarianization’ of the public space are considered the corollaries of state atrophy (regrettably, the chicken-or-egg question is not fully addressed in the book). Since then, former centres of authority have tried to instrumentalize and co-opt some religious actors to prevent further contestation. At the same time, the former margins are becoming new centres of their own, exercising authority over large segments of the population. Thus, the contributors put up a fight against essentialist accounts: the contemporary importance of religion in the region is not the result of natural, unavoidable realities, as many pseudo-theological explanations about resistance against modernity would suggest. Instead, religion has gained ground as a result of structural and political transformations in the last decades.