Islamists In Power Research Articles

Views: Islamists in Power and the Difficulty of Assimilating Human Rights Principles

Views: Islamists in Power and the Difficulty of Assimilating Human Rights Principles

Iran in a Transformative Process by Woman, Life, Freedom

This article presents an overview of various aspects of the new social movement of “Woman, Life, Freedom" known also as Zhina or Mahsa movement. Intellectually and theoretically, this movement is reflective of an “existentialist moment” in Iran, especially among the younger generation of women and men of urban middle and working classes shaped by the recent decades of “glocal” processes. The movement is strongly expressive of a deep yearning for liberation and reclaiming of a dignified “normal life” and self-determination especially by young women. It indicates a deep cultural, political, and moral chasm between most people and the corrupt repressive ruling Islamists in power. While it is a novel split from the present ideological and political establishments, many of its demands and values are rooted in Iran’s recent history of over 120 years of striving for human/women’s rights, the rule of law, democracy, liberty, justice, and persuasion of happiness and prosperity. The intersectional and multidimensional aspects of the movement, including gender, sexuality, generational, ethnic, socio-economic class, and environmental concerns are analyzed. The paper ends with a brief look at the shortcomings of the movement as well as its prospect based on the achievements made so far.

Religion in Creating Populist Appeal: Islamist Populism and Civilizationism in the Friday Sermons of Turkey’s Diyanet

Drawing on the extant literature on populism, we aim to flesh out how populists in power utilize religion and related state resources in setting up aggressive, multidimensional religious populist “us” versus “them” binaries. We focus on Turkey as our case and argue that by instrumentalizing the Diyanet (Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs), the authoritarian Islamists in power have been able to consolidate manufactured populist dichotomies via the Diyanet’s weekly Friday sermons. Populists’ control and use of a state institution to propagate populist civilizationist narratives and construct antagonistic binaries are underexamined in the literature. Therefore, by examining Turkish populists’ use of the Diyanet, this paper will make a general contribution to the extant literature on religion and populism. Furthermore, by analyzing the Diyanet’s weekly Friday sermons from the last ten years we demonstrate how different aspects of populism—its horizontal, vertical, and civilizational dimensions—have become embedded in the Diyanet’s Friday sermons. Equally, this paper shows how these sermons have been tailored to facilitate the populist appeal of Erdoğan’s Islamist regime. Through the Friday sermons, the majority—Sunni Muslim Turks are presented with statements that evoke negative emotions and play on their specific fears, their sense of victimhood and through which their anxieties—real and imagined—are revived and used to construct populist binaries to construct and mobilize the people in support of an authoritarian Islamist regime purported to be fighting a “civilizational enemy” on behalf of “the people”. Finally, drawing on insights from the Turkish case, we illustrate how the “hosting” function of the civilizational aspect plays a vital role in tailoring internal (vertical and horizontal) religious populist binaries.

Review of Mbaye Lo, Political Islam, Justice and Governance

Mbaye Lo’s Political Islam, Justice and Governance is unique in its attempt to supply an explanation based on the comportment of the Islamists in power...

Islamists in Power

In the first parliamentary elections after Mr. Mubarak’s overthrow in February 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood’s newly formed Freedom and Justice Party had won nearly half the seats in the People’s Assembly. The Muslim Brotherhood, had, over the two previous years, gained political expansion in parliament. The Brotherhood entered into a coalition with other Islamist parties including two Salafist parties, forming an Islamist bloc, but their experience ended with their removal from power and significant changes in the structure of the Brotherhood. Based on the political programs of the Islamist parties in Egypt, this article seeks to analyze the experience of Islamists in power by focusing on their practical perceptions of the Islamist political system. The article concludes that the political Islamist organizations lacked a coherent mechanism to propel them from the stage of the organization’s (political party) management to a stage of state administration. Egyptian Islamist groups had no specific perception of the nature of the state, or of an applied model to implement the “Islamic state.” Although these groups had a declared project, which they had been attempting to establish for decades, their focus was solely on discussing the expected outcome they had hoped to achieve, while neglecting to elaborate on how their affairs could be run, once in power. This shortfall was due to an accumulation of the multiple problems the groups had faced, whether they be conceptual reasons of state, power issues, or the organizational obstacles strewn along the paths of the components that comprised the group, which had prevented them, over decades, from overcoming them. Hence, the traditional mechanisms they continued to apply while in power proved inadequate in responding to the crises inherent in the experience of government. They failed to introduce new mechanisms to address the issues as dictated by the necessity for practical experience and solutions once they had attained power.

The Ties that Bind and Blind: Embeddedness and Radicalisation of Youth in One Islamist Organisation in Pakistan

This article explains the factors that contributed to the socialisation of youth into a radical ideology in one nationally powerful Islamist organisation in Pakistan. It argues that young individuals who join Islamist organisations do not necessarily hold pre-existing extremist views that dispose them towards such organisations. Instead, the radicalisation of personal beliefs and worldview may in fact also occur after joining such an organisation. Findings indicate that young members’ gradual orientation to an Islamist ideology resulted from the interplay of a number of factors. First, their close and significant friendships increasingly became concentrated inside the organisation. Second, participation in various organisational meetings brought a personally meaningful improvement in their skills and self-esteem. Third, the organisation bestowed power and influence on its members, both in psychological and actual terms.

Islamists in power: the case of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt

The article examines the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt, 2012–2013, and how they dealt with the multifaceted challenges. The main argument is that the Brotherhood benefited from their past populist legitimacy to fill the vacuum created by the collapse of the Mubarak regime, but that this legitimacy waned when they did not consolidate this legitimacy with a tangible national achievement. The Brotherhood were unable to count on Egyptians’ sympathy for their endurance of rough treatment at the hands of the previous regime over many years, because the 25 January Revolution changed the Egyptian people's expectations and spread knowledge of how to punish rulers who fail to meet these expectations: with sit-ins and street demonstrations. Despite Muhammad Morsi's victory in the presidential elections, and the forceful curtailment of his four-year term by the army, this leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood failed to translate his legal legitimacy into a wider populist legitimacy based on tangible achievements.

Egypt: Revolutionary Process and Global Capitalist Crisis

The upheaval that has swept the Arab world, beginning in December 2010, reached Egypt on January 25, 2011. The article argues that capitalist globalization and ultimately the 2008 global financial crisis were main causes of the uprising. The Mubarak regime's privatization schemes exacerbated poverty and widened the already huge gap between rich and poor. Mubarak employed repression to ensure that no effective political opposition would materialize to challenge his authoritarian rule and crony capitalism. Strikes and demonstrations beginning in 2006 and the lead up to the uprising demonstrated that the fight for democracy and economic justice had been intertwined. The ouster of Mubarak has not improved the economic situation for the majority of the population and authoritarian rule remained under the military and since the election of the Islamist President Morsi. Popular resistance continues against the Islamists in power to bring about a secular regime that would establish democracy and economic justice.

Islamists in Power? Inclusion, Moderation, and the Arab Uprisings

Political inclusion is a major concern for democratizing states. Among the many groups excluded and repressed by the former regime, which should now be included? Which should be excluded? And who decides? With the extraordinary events of the Arab uprisings that began in 2011, a wider range of political actors than ever before have become directly engaged in debates and processes of political transition. The new political institutions, however, remain unstable and the distribution of power between them unclear. This paper explores the inclusion-moderation hypothesis with special attention to Islamist groups. It examines the literature on Islamist moderation prior to the Arab uprisings and asks whether the central tenets of those arguments hold in the dynamic environments of the post-revolutionary contexts, particularly in Tunisia and Egypt, where Islamists have done well in free and fair elections. I argue that in unstable and changing institutional contexts, the logic of the inclusion-moderation hypothesis is less likely to be present, particularly when more extreme opposition groups challenge Islamists to prove their core commitment to a conservative religious political vision.

Democratic Islamization in pakistan and Turkey: Lessons for the post-Arab Spring Muslim World

This article compares and contrasts democratic in Pakistan and Turkey, two countries where Islamic parties came to power through electoral means. Based on a comparative analysis of these experiences, this article will make the case that democratic can be best understood through a three-fold approach focusing on of educational systems, economies, and social policies. This analysis introduces two models of Islamic democracy: the Conflicted Repressive Islamization of Pakistan, and the Subtle Islamization of Turkey. It also suggests that the Turkish model will serve as the inspiration for future reformers in the Muslim world. Due to a combination of internal and external developments, democracy is on the march in the Muslim world. There appear to exist very few credible political alternatives to democracy, and Muslims worldwide are displaying a noteworthy yearning for greater democracy. 1 As a result, parts of the Muslim world have experienced upheaval and increasing political liberalization, which, in turn, is increasingly linked to the rise of Islamist parties.2 In more recent elections, Islamists have achieved surprise gains in several Muslim states. This is especially the case in those Muslim countries where previous secular governments have commonly proven themselves to be inefficient and corrupt. Furthermore, an Islamic revival in much of the world is contributing to a growing strength of Islamic political parties. The political wing of Hamas won the elections in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Islamic parties are either winning or receiving significant portions of the vote in the post-Arab Spring Middle East, including Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco. Recently, Islamic parties have also won elections in Pakistan and Turkey, two Muslim countries with well-established and potent secular opposition parties. Many are concerned that Islamic parties in power will be antagonistic to democratic governance. Until recently, with the exception of Iran, religious parties had never held important political offices. Concerned with the examples of illiberal governance by Islamists in non-democratic settings, and lacking examples of Islamist rule in democratic environments, the very thought of Islamists in power sends shivers down the spines of many in the West. For example, in the 1980s, Pakistan's autocrat Zia ul-Haq institutionalized a series of sweeping Islamic reforms in politics, law, economics, and social life. These changes included an imposition of severe punishment (hudood laws) for grave crimes and attempts to establish interest-free Islamic banking. Thus, many fear that any Islamist parties in power will be similarly antagonistic to democracy, unwilling to compromise their ideological beliefs, backslide the same democratic system that initially allowed them to rise to power, show intolerance towards minorities, despise the West, and oppress women. The dispute concerning the relationship between democracy and Islam has been much debated indeed. Yet, the debate of whether or not democracy is compatible with Islam seems to be largely transforming into a debate about how democracy is compatible with Islam. Interpretations are varied, ranging from liberal answers that the role of religion for Muslims is to guide norms, attitudes, and values that can provide for peaceful relations between different communities within and outside Muslim societies on equal terms;3 to more restrictive interpretations demanding an unequivocal imposition of conservative and restrictive interpretations of Islamic law (shari'a). As many are struggling to grasp what a mature Islamic democracy could look like, and what Islamic changes Islamist parties in power may institutionalize, an examination of the track record of Islamist party governance in Pakistan and Turkey can teach many lessons. This article develops two models of Islamic democracy through an assessment of Islamic policies and reforms embraced by certain Islamist-led governments of Pakistan and Turkey. …