The Politics of Islam

Abstract

This book traces how state-religion relations in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have changed from the 1950s to the 2010s, narrating the unfolding of two historical processes: Gulf states’ relations with an Islamist movement, the Muslim Brotherhood and their religious policies. First, the book narrates how state-Muslim Brotherhood relations had been cordial in five Gulf countries from the 1950s to the 1970s, but eventually deteriorated in Kuwait, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, but not Qatar and Bahrain in reaction to geopolitical developments such as the rise and demise of pan-Arabism, the Iranian revolution, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the 9/11 attacks and finally the Arab Spring and domestic circumstances dictated by necessities and challenges of (rentier) state building and regime formation. Second, the book shows that Gulf states have never undergone any kind of forceful state secularization and therefore have been, and still are, quite religious states with Saudi Arabia always being more religious than other Gulf states.Tracing the continuities and discontinuities in both historical processes this book makes a simple yet intriguing claim: the level of state religiosity seems to have little impact on whether an Islamist opposition emerges in a country and the emergence of an Islamist opposition has similarly no major impact on the level of state religiosity. With this claim the book sheds light on Islamism's inherently oppositional character and challenges the premise that Islamist oppositionality and state religiosity are causally linked in the Middle East.