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Managing Religion and Renegotiating the Secular: The Muslim Brotherhood and Defining the Religious Sphere

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2013

Rachel M. Scott
Rachel M. Scott*
Affiliation:
Virginia Tech
*
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Rachel M. Scott, Department of Religion and Culture, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061. E-mail: rmscott@vt.edu
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Abstract

This article questions the assumption that — prior to July 2013 when the Egyptian military removed former President Mursi from power — the Muslim Brotherhood was in the process of implementing an Islamic state that would have involved a reversal of secularization and an upheaval to the status quo in terms of fundamental shifts in institutions and legal categories. Rather, the article argues that the Muslim Brotherhood evolved to embrace secularism of a certain sort-a statism in which it is the state that determines the boundaries of religion and politics. It illustrates this by looking at the role the Muslim Brotherhood envisaged for the Supreme Constitutional Court — and how this relates to the religious scholars of al-Azhar — in the formulation of legislation and in the assessment of whether legislation conforms to Article 2 of the constitution, both the 1971 one and the 2012 one, which was suspended in July 2013. In addition, the article will show how the Muslim Brotherhood has defined the public order with a particular focus on the idea of the Islamic “framework,” the rights of non-Muslim minorities, and personal status law.

Type
Articles
Information
Politics and Religion , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 51 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © Religion and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association 2013 

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