Islamist Identity Research Articles

The Identity of Political Islam in a Democratic Regime: The Ideology of the Prosperious Justice Party (PKS), Indonesia and the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey

This study focuses on the identity and ideological orientation of two Islamic political parties, as well as their steps towards ideological moderation and specific electoral strategies within the political landscapes of two different countries. This is a library-based research that explores the identity of political Islam ideology in secular democracies, utilizing a combination of historical and political approaches. The sources include literature and writings about political Islam groups in Indonesia and Turkey, specifically PKS and AKP, derived from reputable books and scholarly articles. The study concludes that both PKS and AKP are moderate in ideology and politics. PKS, especially in post-New Order, transformed through moderation and inclusion, maintaining its Islamist identity while forming coalitions with nationalist parties for survival. Meanwhile, AKP combines moderate Islamism with conservative democracy, though Erdogan’s dominant leadership tends toward authoritarianism.

Islamic radicals in Europe: between religion and politics

The article discusses the reasons that prompted the governments and expert of many EU countries to pay increased attention to the activities of the religious and political association of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood (BM) and a number of Shiite groups (primarily Hezbollah) within the EU in recent years. The study indicates that the causes of it are the terrorist attacks in France and Austria in 2020, which gave rise to a wave of retaliatory measures from the authorities, and also a growing influence of this Muslim organizations and groups on social and political life of the countries of the Old World. The article analyses the means, methods and mechanisms characteristic of groups associated with the structures of BM and Hezbollah in Europe, the specifics of their activities. The authority and influence of radical groups are noticeably weakening in the Middle East region. However, in the Old World they manage to fit into the current political-ideological discourse, resorting to the left, “progressist” rhetoric to hide their Islamist identity. They are exploiting the far-fetched feelings of disadvantage and vulnerability that are spreading in Muslim communities in socio-political environment. As inter-civilizational relations in Europe worsen, radical groups publicly claim the status of "defenders of humiliated Muslims", trying to legalize their radical views and strategies. Further aggravation of the confrontation between political elites in the EU and Islamic radicals seems inevitable. Islamist radicalism becomes a factor in political life in the European Union.

“Братья-мусульмане” в странах Магриба: трансформации политического ислама в Алжире, Марокко и Тунисе

Since their formation, the parties of political Islam that exist today in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia were traditionally seen as the “voice of people” in authoritarian states, the means and the vanguard of social movement for a better life. In an attempt to enter political arena, while adapting to different challenges posed by their regimes as well as jihadi Islamism both domestically and regionally, these Islamist parties have undergone a number of transformations both in their ideology and relations with the regime. However, the crucial point of these transformations was becoming a part of the state that they had been aiming to change. After their short-lived electoral success, they find themselves in crisis. First, they are no longer perceived as a sociopolitical force that strives to voice concerns of the oppressed and to fight for their interests against the unjust regimes. Instead, they are now deeply associated with the “old guard”, no less corrupt than the governments and the political elites, against whom people protest. Second, while they were trying to adapt democratic ideas to their narratives, they were moving further away from their Islamist identity. Third, they have learnt the constraints of their political capabilities: in order to preserve their legal status, they have to coopt with the regimes, but when they do they lose their public support, and when they resent this cooptation, the regimes force them to weakness and internal divisions, yet again causing loss of social base.

Turkey’s new identity revisited and its Islamist reflections in North Cyprus

ABSTRACT Some scholars argue that Turkish foreign policy has undergone a structural change since 2002. This shift in Turkey’s identity is primarily linked to the ascendancy of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) and its proactive foreign policy towards Turkey’s eastern neighbourhood. The change in Turkey’s identity and foreign policy is mostly intertwined with the Islamist identity embraced by the AKP, which can be traced back to the National Vision Movement (Milli Görüş Hareketi). This article aims to analyse what are said to be ‘newly’ established preferences in AKP identity and its reflections in Turkey’s foreign policy, particularly since 2009/2010. The main argument is that the emergence of this new ideological discourse has had immediate reflections on Turkey’s relationship with North Cyprus.

The making of an Islamist public sphere in Bangladesh

The article examines the process of making an Islamist public sphere in Bangladesh and identifies the actors involved. It argues that Islamist social Islamization movements in the form of various da’wa (preaching) activities, madrassah activisms, and Islamist political parties’ Islamization projects collectively contribute to the making of an Islamist public sphere. It shows how da’wa movements’ everyday living experiences, madrassah’s absolute authority over public Islam, and Islamist political parties’ social welfare, and associated activities construct an Islamist imagination. A parallel counter Islamist discursive arena with secular discourse is in construction and circulation that formulates oppositional interpretations based on Islamist identities, interests, and needs. The article argues that instead of explicitly challenging the secular hegemonic discourse, Islamist social movements engage in a contested relationship with it, and gradually claim their separate position. It further maintains that although these Islamist movements differ ideologically, and vary the ways they perform and propagate Islam, they invariably contribute to the rise of an Islamist public sphere in Bangladesh.

Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power

Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power

Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power

Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power

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

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.

Security, secularism and gender: the Turkish military’s security discourse in relation to political Islam

This article examines the sexual and corporeal constructions of risk within the security discourses of the Turkish military in response to the rise of political Islam and Islamist identities in Turkey. I look at the Turkish military as the self-proclaimed guardian of the secular Republic, which, until recently, has actively configured political Islam as a risk to national security and ingrained such risk onto the body of the headscarved woman. My analysis covers a time frame from 1980s to late 2000s when the military issued memorandums and public statements against the rise of political Islam and pursued a belligerent campaign to erase ‘Islamist’ identities both from civilian politics and its own structure. The military implemented security regulations and dress codes to detect the ‘Islamist’ military personnel who are most conspicuously identified with the dress style of the women in their families. I explore these security regulations through women’s everyday and personal experiences in relation to their dress, headscarf style and comportment in military spaces and try to understand how ‘Islamism’ is constructed as a security threat in sexually and corporeally specific ways. I demonstrate how secularism is constructed, and needs to be protected, on the basis of a particular regime of gender and sexuality at the merger of traditional gender norms and secular Western modernity.

“Take it outside!” National identity contestation in the foreign policy arena

Turkey’s Islamist-rooted Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) aggressively pursued European Union accession as a primary pillar of foreign policy, only to swing sharply away from the West in subsequent years. Actor- and party-based Islamist identity approaches cannot account for Turkey’s initial European Union-centric orientation, while domestic politics and economic arguments fail to explain the timing of the shift eastward and its domestic repercussions. Examining the advantages that foreign policy offers as an alternative arena in which elites can politicize identity debates helps to distill this complexity. This article argues that elites choose to take their national identity contests to the foreign policy arena when identity gambits at the domestic level are blocked. By taking its pursuit of hegemony for Ottoman Islamism “outside” through aggressive European Union accession measures, the Justice and Development Party could weaken domestic challengers supporting a competing, Republican Nationalist proposal for identity, and broaden support for Ottoman Islamism at home. The theory of identity hegemony developed here thus explains the counter-intuitive finding that Turkey’s European Union-oriented policy helped make possible the rise of Ottoman Islamism. Turkey offers an ideal empirical window onto these dynamics because of recent and dramatic shifts in the dynamics of its public identity debates, and because Turkey’s identity is implicated in multiple international roles, such as North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally, European Union candidate country, Organization of Islamic Cooperation member, and aspirant regional power broker. The framework developed fills a gap in existing scholarship by closing the identity–foreign policy circle, analytically linking the spillover of national identity debates into foreign policy with the changes in the contours of these debates produced by their contestation in this alternative arena.

Turkey's Changing Stance and Paradoxes over the Libyan and Syrian Crises

1 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXVI, No.4, Summer 2013 Turkey’s Changing Stance and Paradoxes over the Libyan and Syrian Crises Muhsin Baran* Introduction The current uprising in the Middle East, the Arab Spring, has been sui generis with respect to the exclusive support from the masses and large protests against the regimes in the related countries. The primary reason for such spectacular public backing lies in the demands for change by the peoples of the region. Since these demands were closely related with democracy, the western world, particularly the United States, was expected to devote close attention to this issue and contribute to toppling these regimes. The support from the western world was well below these expectations as the United States and its allies only launched a military intervention in Libya. Other states, namely Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and Syria, were assisted in different forms rather than direct military intervention. Turkey’s attitudes towards a foreign intervention were a bit blurred in the beginning. No sooner was a military operation launched by the western world on Libya, than Turkey insistently stressed the danger of third parties’ military interventions in the region and urged that, first and foremost, the internal dynamics should be backed rather than going ahead with a direct military intervention. However, it was not long before when Turkey shifted from its past opposition to a military intervention in Libya and backed the operation indirectly. This new stance was based on the grounds of the rising number of casualties. Turkey’s stance during the Syrian crisis was similar to that of Libya. As the civil war became more brutal and the death toll seemed likely to reach *Muhsin Baran is a PhD candidate at Uludağ University, Department of International Relations. His research interests are the Middle East, Kurdish issue, discourse analysis and Critical Security theories. He has been writing his dissertation on relations between Turkey and Kurdistan Regional Government. 2 an alarming level, Turkey called for a military intervention led by international organizations to stop the bloodshed. The reluctance of the western world due to the Islamist factions in the Syrian opposition and the vetoes of Russia and China in the United Nations Security Council blocked a military intervention in this country. Turkey’s new stance started to be severely criticized by both the secular main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and Nationalist Action Party (MHP) as this new policy was different from traditional Turkish foreign policy. The zero problems with neighbor’s policy developed by Ahmet Davutoğlu, the current Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkey, was criticized and recast sarcastically by the Turkish opposition as the zero neighbors policy. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) was blamed for turning once friendly regional states into new foes and deviating from traditional Turkish foreign policy. Apart from the internal opposition, there were serious criticism from regional states such as Iran, Iraq and Russia, for they held Turkey partly responsible for the instability and civil war in Syria. Turkey’s new stance demanding a foreign intervention in Syria was paradoxical with respect to the Islamist identity of the ruling AK Party and Turkey’s treatment of Kurdish opposition in Syria. Calling for non-Islamic third party interventions in a Muslim state contradicted the Islamic approach, which has always urged the unity of the Muslim world. The exclusion of the Kurdish opposition whilst patronizing and arming all other factions including those believed to have connections with al-Qaida was another paradox. This study provides an analytical discussion on Turkey’s paradoxes over the Libyan and particularly Syrian crises. It starts with a brief description of Turkey’s traditional foreign policy during the Cold War era. Then the new policy shaped by Davutoğlu, a renowned professor of International Relations, is explained. Following this, Turkey’s new stance and the paradoxes affiliated with this shift during the Libyan and Syrian crises is discussed in the context of the Arab Spring. The study ends with a conclusion that the foreign policy of a state, as in the case of Turkey, is primarily dependent on national interests. (I) A New Paradigm in Turkish Foreign Policy...

A Decline of Identity Politics

Religious actors and religious language are not absent from the Arab revolutions, but a striking feature of these movements is that they depart from Islamist identity politics, which tended to portray the problems of the Arab world as the result of Muslims’ betrayal of their religious identity. Slogans referencing Islam are remarkably few, even in contexts like Egypt where Islamist movements are an important organized political force. Similar to many Islamist activists, the youth who initiated these movements are exasperated by growing economic inequalities. Unlike the former, however, they do not feel the need to frame this issue in religious terms, but rather mobilize universal notions such as democracy, freedom, justice, and equality. This is the case even in societies with sharp religious divides such as Bahrain, where the overwhelmingly Shiʿi demonstrators oppose a Sunni-dominated regime. Regardless of whether the uprisings will succeed in achieving a genuine regime change, new political movements are likely to emerge that focus on political freedom and the reduction of social inequalities rather than projects maintaining Islam as a solution. The question remains whether this trend simply went unnoticed by the majority of the scholarly community working on the Middle East or whether it is something that emerged in the dynamics of the uprisings themselves. Either way, the phenomenon must now be analyzed. Does it mean a decline of the Islamist ideology? Will it permit an empowerment of existing liberal political movements? Of trade unionism? What does it reveal about the integration of the Middle East within global political trends?

Ideology of the National Outlook Movement

Since religious parties are proscribed in the constitution and law of the political parties, the Milli Gorus movement has elusively but not manifestly used Islam as the reference for its political, economic, and social projects. The Milli Gorus politicians have skillfully used Islamic notions and symbols to communicate its Islamist identity. These Islamist parties of the NOM always resort to binary oppositions and have implied that while they are representing the truth, all other parties are on a diametrically opposite side. The movement regarded Western civilization and Zionism as the source of all evil and as the reason for the country’s underdevelopment problem. According to this view, the West regarded Islam as an obstacle to its exploitation of the Muslim world.

The Plasticity of the Islamic Activist: Notes from the Counterterrorism Literature

Western intelligence analysts fight an uphill battle to avoid parochial habits of thought that lump diverse Islamist identities together. The recent counterterrorism literature gives us tools for understanding a wide spectrum of Islamists, by focusing attention on what they say about themselves rather than on the intelligence labels we must ultimately assign to them. The main challenge for analysts is not the brute diversity of Islamist types, but their plasticity—the Islamist's flexible inhabitation of distinct, sometimes contradictory, identities. Contrary to generalizations about the duplicity of all Islamists, much plasticity is due to ordinary psychological- or ideological strain—the inability to resolve divided allegiances or sustain conflicted principles. Islamist preacher Yussef al-Qardawi and salafist group Hizb ut-Tahrir present prime examples of ordinary Islamist plasticity. In order to understand Islamism in all its complexity, analysts should develop methods for disaggregating and evaluating key components of the Islamist persona.

Beyond Secularism: Orhan Pamuk's <i>Snow</i>, and the Contestation of 'Turkish Identity' in the Borderland

This paper explores the multifaceted discourse on Islam in present-day Turkish society, as reflected upon in Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel Snow. The revival of Islam in Turkish politics and its manifestation as a lifestyle that increasingly permeates urban environments, thus challenging the secular establishment, has occasioned a crisis of ‘Turkish identity’. At the core of this vehemently contested issue stands women’s veiling, represented by its more moderate version of the headscarf. The headscarf has not only become a cultural marker of the new Islamist trend, it has also altered the meanings previously attached to socio-cultural signifiers. Thus, the old binaries of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’ ‘backwardness’ and ‘progress,’ applied to Islamic versus Western modes of living and employed primarily by the secularist elites and by theorists of modernization, prove insufficient to explain the novel phenomenon of Islamist identity politics. New directions in social and cultural theory on Turkey have launched a critique of modernization theory and its vocabulary based on binary oppositions. I argue that Pamuk participates, albeit from the angle of poetic imagination, in such a critique. In Snow the author explores the complexities pertaining to the cultural symbolism circulating in Turkey. The ambiguity surrounding the headscarf as a new cultural marker constitutes a major theme in the novel. I demonstrate that Snow employs multiple perspectives pertaining to the meaning of cultural symbols, thus complicating any easy assessment of the rise of Islam in Turkey. By withholding from the reader a clear guide to unequivocal judgment of right and wrong, the author transcends the parameters of Turkish modernist ideology. 
 Pamuk situates his story in Kars, a border city in North-Eastern Turkey. This location at the geographical and cultural margins of Turkey emerges in the novel as a complex site of contested ideological, political, and metaphysical positions pertaining to the question of Turkish identity. It represents a space where Islamic faith in its esoteric and exoteric forms is carried out over against state-imposed laicism. I argue that it is the other-worldliness of the locale that instigates such a reflection. The protagonist Ka, a Turkish poet who has briefly returned to his hometown, Istanbul, after twelve years of exile in Germany, embarks on a journey to Kars. A member of the secular Istanbul bourgeoisie, Ka seems to be afflicted by an ailment common to his social stratum, a vacuum of spiritual values. Even though Ka travels to Kars with a journalistic mission, he soon becomes entrapped in this alien world of Sheiks, head-scarved girls, and former communists turned political Islamists. The novel oscillates between the Ka’s perspective as a detached observer and his personal quest to find transcendence. By employing multiple perspectives, Pamuk complicates any easy assessment of the rise of Islam in today’s Turkish society. I complement this reading of Snow with a brief excursus to Pamuk’s recent memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, permeated by the author’s critique of the modernist ideology of the Republican era. This critique sheds light on Pamuk’s opaque discourse on faith in Snow. These two books by the Nobel-prize winner have been his most disputed ones among the Turkish secular intelligentsia. I conclude with a reference to these critical commentaries.

European values and the Muslim world: Turkish cases at the European Court of Human Rights

‘Europe’ is supposed to be an Enlightenment project that embodies the accumulated experiences of modernity. This project declares that secularism and human rights are the basic conditions for creating an ideal world that is expected to be embodied within the institution of the European Union. The integration of Europe has been based above all on the acceptance of standardized human rights that are the expression of the heritage of the Enlightenment. The realization of human rights requires political neutrality towards all religions, which in turn guarantees the legal equality of all citizens. It is only if secularism can be made the social and legal foundation of Europe that Turkey's accession to the EU as a Muslim country might be made possible. Otherwise the EU is most likely to remain a Christian-oriented union within a non-secular context. However, there seems to be some resistance to accepting Turkey on religious grounds. This in turn undermines the so-called ‘European values’ (at the top of which is secularism) and revives the religious memory of Europe. The cases investigated in the European Court of Human Rights demonstrate that religious differences are still taken into account within the European project and that this has become a new barrier to the true realization of ‘European values’. This paper aims to analyze the causes and effects of this encounter and the ways in which it is viewed within the Turkish–Islamic world with special references to its role in shaping a nationalist or Islamist identity that may work to counter Turkey's integration with Europe.

Being Muslim: Islam, Islamism and Identity Politics

AbstractThe paper explores the construction of both Muslim and Islamist identities and the ways in which they interact, converge and diverge. This exploration is set against the background of debates on the nature of Islamism and its positioning vis-à-vis modernity and post-modernity. The paper argues that processes of modernity and post-modernity may be at work in the production of Muslim identities, but highlights the need to examine how different dimensions of identity formation such as socio-economic position, gender, age and lifestyle enter into the formation of Muslim selves. This is made necessary if we accept the premise of the sociality and historicity of religion.