Chapter 4 expands on the internal debates dividing the movement to focus on the ongoing polarisation around different responses to repression and on competing strategies to move past the current crisis. It shows that a significant novelty of the post-2013 context is represented by the fact that dissenting members, along with those who do not align with the Brotherhood’s official narrative, remain an active part of the movement. These behaviours were punished with expulsion prior to 2011, but the necessity to maintain unity and safety in numbers after the coup mean that the Brotherhood is characterised by an unprecedented diversity of voices and opinions. The chapter traces the development of two main trends to fight against repression: stagnation and adaptation strategies. It shows that the Historical Leadership takes a generally passive approach, treating the current crisis as yet another time of hardship and calling for unity in the face of oppression. This faction remains faithful to the Brotherhood’s historical strategies and refuses to answer the call for internal reforms that would allow the movement to better adapt to exile. On the contrary, the adaptation trend encompasses a wide diversity of voices and competing strategies that argue for a more proactive response to the current crisis. These are informed by the members’ increased agency and by the development of independent thinking against the Brotherhood’s official stance. By providing first-hand accounts of these strategies, the chapter outlines what the main future directions for the movement might be.

Chapter 3 begins by outlining the Brotherhood members’ emerging processes of self-reflection to show how, in the post-2013 context, the battle between members’ individual agency and the Brotherhood’s organizational structure has taken the centre stage. It looks at the reconfiguration of the movement’s leadership ranks in the aftermath of the coup, showing that open competition over leadership and the emergence of warring Guidance Offices reveal yet another layer of internal fragmentation. The chapter traces the sources and development of various dynamics of dissent, to outline the different ways in which individual members experience repression and forced displacement. These experiences directly shape their relationship with the movement and inform their strategies to counter repression, which often clash with the Brotherhood’s official narrative. It therefore outlines the disintegration of the tanzim and identifies the processes that guide the challenging of the movement’s collective identity in favour of agency and individualism. In doing so, it shows that the main grievances guiding these processes have their roots in the pre-revolutionary period and were therefore brought back to the fore by the perceived failure of the political experience. The chapter concludes by arguing that in the dimension of forced exile the biggest challenges the movement has to face are those posed by its own members, and by the growing calls for internal reforms.

At the basis of Thailand’s contemporary cycle of political volatility are deep questions about the legitimacy of the nation in its current and its future form. This conjuncture raises the broader question: What binds the political in the first place? This chapter considers how the Thai case and its distinct answers to these questions reveals both Thailand’s contested theo-politics and how understanding such politics requires engagements with the materials that hold the political together. By analysing the materiality of two recent protests –one involving blood and one involving cement – this chapter demonstrates how these materials reveal distinct lines of thinking surrounding the forces that bind citizens to the political and mobilise them as distinct sorts of political subjects working towards making differently organised political worlds. By thinking the political through the forces and materials that bind it together, this chapter demonstrates how distinct uses of the materiality reveal how the forces that once held the nation together are quickly becoming the lines upon which it might come apart.

Chapter 2 examines the Brotherhood’s fall from power, reporting first-hand accounts of the quick turn of events that unfolded in July 2013. It relies on members’ personal experiences to tell the story of the brutality that followed Morsi’s removal and begins by outlining the Brotherhood’s descent into deeply unchartered territory. The chapter traces the movement’s scattering abroad and outlines the unprecedented challenges that come with the dimension of forced exile, showing how the disintegration of established lines of command led to emergence of individual responses to repression. It takes a close look at the relationship between the Brotherhood and its members, focusing on the resurfacing of old grievances and the emergence of new ones. The chapter shows how the traumatic experience of renewed repression and exile accentuated the pre-existing divisions between the movement and its members, further aggravated by the lack of a cohesive response to repression. It concludes by showing how the challenges posed by reuniting in exile allowed members the unprecedented opportunity to reconsider their terms of belonging to the movement, outlining how their individual experiences of repression began to dismantle the collective identity that the Brotherhood historically relied on.

The Introduction reviews the recent history of the Brotherhood, providing the necessary background to understand the significance of the new wave of repression and forced exile that the movement has been facing since 2013. It identifies the post 2013 coup period as a new era in the troubled history of the Brotherhood, arguing that a new analytical approach is needed to fully understand the internal transformations dividing the movement. In order to do so, it engages with the seminal works on social movements, repression and political Islam, arguing that to get a more complete picture of the various forces at play within the Brotherhood after 2013 one needs to shift the analysis to the level of individual members. Doing so allows it to identify the main points of contention that are driving organisational renewal – these being questions around organisational identity, ideology, and the emergence of members’ individual agency.

Yoga has always been political, from the ancient past to the present day. In the twentieth century, India’s best-known political figure, Mohandas K. Gandhi, employed yoga in his public politics. For Gandhi, yoga was a way to express his idea that political action always emerged from resolving the tension between the individual and the collective. This chapter considers the political yoga advanced by Gandhi that still resonates in the present filtered through the lens of a modern yogic ethic of development. In doing this, it also offers critical reflections on the political theology of yoga that might be apparent not only in the broadly construed realm of development ideologies, but also in other ideological, intellectual, and political contexts – both in India and abroad.

This chapter applies theories on political theology of sovereignty to contemporary Buddhist Thailand. Based on ethnographic data collected in 2016 in Bangkok, it analyses how a public relations campaign helped legitimise the mandate of the military junta after the passing of King Bhumibol and in the face of pressing calls for popular sovereignty. Organised at a luxury shopping mall, the campaign contained the emergence of a political theology of the people by celebrating the late monarch, venerated for his work in development, as a celestial being. Via astute cosmological framing, the campaign then proposed a new celestial-cum-social political order. It thus subordinated the people to the junta, suggesting the military’s suitability to embody the king’s celestial legacy in a period of transition.

The Conclusion presents a summary of the main points covered in the book, putting the emphasis on the defining characteristics of the post-2013 context. These are the fact that the Brotherhood has grown increasingly fragmented along strategic, ideological and organisational lines. The movement faces several challenges while trying to rebuild in exile, yet, some of the main questions that it needs to address are what kind of organisation it wants to be moving forward, and whether or not its leaders are willing to renegotiate the relationship between the movement and its members in order to maximise survival and resilience.

This chapter investigates the religiopolitical nexus innervating the genesis of socio-political modernity by challenging Eurocentric benchmarks and bias. It does so by employing methodologies of historical sociology with the help of a critical reconstruction of categories of social theory. One of the primary fields of historical sociology concerns how the modern state has emerged and taken form since the Late Middle Ages. The chapter studies the process through the lenses of ‘political theology’ – and via the analysis of the influence of religious knowledge, symbols, and ‘charisma’ on state-formation. It focuses on Islamicate cases drawn from Western, Central, and South Asia. The resulting de-centred view of the religiopolitical nexus as articulated ‘East of Westphalia’ shifts the focus from the Leviathan-centred model of sacral and corporate sanctioning of sovereignty toward Asian Islamicate patterns relying on a religious charisma providing cohesion to assemblages of circles and networks.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among charitable trusts in Pakistan and England, this chapter explores the complex genealogies of contemporary Twelver Shia humanitarianism. Moving away from the notion of linear genealogical connections between specific theologies and contemporary humanitarian practices, this chapter argues that the political theology underlying contemporary Shia humanitarianism is informed by the entanglement of diverse genealogical strands. These include reformulations of the ‘Muslim liberal’, the concept of ‘meritocracy’ deriving from managerial discourse, and memorialisations of the seventh-century Battle of Karbala as an inherently political-theological event. In sum, this chapter purports that – to do justice to the complexity of Shia humanitarianism – it is useful to move away from the notion that an a priori theological foundation underlies contemporary humanitarian work, and instead to think through multipolar and multidirectional interactions.