The infusion of Islam into pluralistic politics: The need to explore the Islamist identity beyond ideological boundaries – The case of the Moroccan Party of Justice and Development

Abstract

This article analyzes the discourse of the Moroccan Party of Justice and Development (PJD) on the plan to integrate women into development. Analysis is grounded in Paul Chilton’s two main analytical approaches, namely, the strategic use of language and the dimension of deixis. The latter provides a central theoretical construct and is a valuable tool for analyzing identity in the context of the PJD since political actors from this perspective are situated with respect to a particular time, place, and group. The deictic and strategic components of the selected corpus are assessed, thereby digging deeply into the representational dimension of language use by the party as well as the construction of reality about particular meaning categories and events. The aim is to explore the Islamist discourse beyond the taken-for-granted assumption that it is mainly premised on ideology, which ultimately reduces the Islamist experience to an ideological frame that is dissociated from the context where it lies situated. The current article presents a case study of the Moroccan Islamist PJD from this perspective to help de-emphasize the ideology with which research on political Islam has been mainly concerned. This in turn highlights the processes of meaning making and identity building as well as contributes potentially to more analytical gains in the study of political discourse.