Dar es Salaam’s politics became radicalised further still in the early 1970s. A series of developments – Britain’s proposal to sell arms to South Africa, a Portuguese invasion of Guinea-Conakry, and a coup in Uganda, plus internal unrest – propelled TANU into a gear-change in its socialist revolution. This resulted in the drafting of the ‘Guidelines’ or Mwongozo. This chapter shows how Mwongozo militarised Tanzanian society and concentrated power in the hands of party activists. These steps were taken with misgivings from Julius Nyerere and proved fractious among several of his trusted colleagues. While the government continued to talk the language of continental revolution, this was accompanied by a toughening of the national institutions of the party-state. The motor for development was increasingly believed to be popular mobilisation through the organs of the party rather than the economic planning that had previously tempered revolutionary interventionism. Meanwhile, the troublesome regime in semi-autonomous Zanzibar was brought to heel. National unity was achieved and enforced from above, but came at political cost.

In Sudan, a deep economic crisis in the 1990s initially facilitated the consolidation of an Islamist-commercial elite that forged an alliance with a segment of the military and capture the state. Having gained control of the state, the Islamists marginalized rival groups in civil society, while continuing to recruit more jihadist elements among poorer segments of the population. In addition to their control over the economy, Sudanese Islamists also consolidated their rule by taking over the civil service in a systematic fashion. However, with the steep decline in labor remittances as a result of a regional recession, and the loss of access to revenues from oil resulting from the secession of South Sudan, the Islamist authoritarian regime lost the financial basis that underpinned its patronage networks. This chapter explains how the latter gradually resulted in popular protests and the demise of the Islamist authoritarian regime in Sudan.

In Egypt, by the mid-1980s, as a result of a deep economic crisis, thousands of Islamic voluntary associations managed to develop a parallel economy and a parallel welfare system. In some instances, these modes of informal organizations translated into an Islamist-inspired challenge to the state. The rise in political influence of the Islamic Investment Houses dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood aided that organization in its recruitment programs that expanded its membership. Moreover, where radical Islamic groups were able to exploit informal financial networks and procure informal labor contracts for their supporters, particularly in the informal settlements around Cairo, they used these as bases of power and influence. Using private sources to establish social networks in defiance of state regulations, organizations such as the militant Islamic Group (al-jama’at al-Islamiyya) have sought to build, literally, a “state within a state.”

This chapter presents the first detailed study of afterlife heroic power in the Oresteia. Aeschylus only uses the word “hero” (hērōs) once in his plays, for the anonymous powerful ancestors who send and receive the expedition to Troy in the Agamemnon. But in the Choephoroi, Agamemnon is prayed to as powerful at his tomb, and in the Eumenides, Orestes predicts his own heroic power from beyond the grave. The Oresteia famously relocates these two mythical heroes to Argos to associate them with that city’s treaty with Athens. This chapter demonstrates that the representation of father and son after death reverses expectations not only from the world external to the play, but also from their living actions within the trilogy. Agamemnon becomes an ethically whitewashed ancestor figure; conversely, Orestes, who killed his mother, becomes a political hero. These radical afterlife transformations are a major part of the Oresteia’s “poetics of the beyond.”

This chapter turns to early Byzantine homiletics, beginning with the works of early fifth-century preachers including Hesychios of Jerusalem, Attikos, and Proklos of Constantinople. Problems with the dating and attribution of many of the earliest Marian hymns persist; this chapter offers new approaches to this subject. The preoccupation of fifth-century homilists remained Christological and we find few, if any, references to Mary’s intercessory power in the surviving sermons. However, the situation begins to change in the sixth century, with the homilies of (ps-)Basil of Seleucia, Severos of Antioch and Abraham of Ephesus displaying more interest in Mary’s human aspect and intercessory role between humanity and God. The sixth century is thus a turning point, as scholars have already remarked; with the addition of Marian feasts to the calendar during this period, preachers began to focus increasingly on the Virgin’s importance as a holy figure in her own right.

The emergence, and proliferation, of Islamist militant organizations, ranging from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Al-Shabbaab in Somalia, to Boko Haram in Nigeria and other parts of West Africa, has once again demonstrated that political Islam is an important global political issue. It has also highlighted a number of challenging, but increasingly crucial analytical questions: How popular a force is militant Islam, and how is it distinguishable from more conservative and moderate forms of Islamic activism? Does the rise of Islamic militancy across many regions of the Muslim world represent a “clash of civilizations,” or is its emergence a result of locally embedded, but globally linked, economic and social forces? And, finally, given the considerable diversity of socioeconomic formations within Muslim societies when, and under what conditions, do religious rather than ethnic cleavages serve as the most salient source of political identification?

This section provides the main argument of the book, followed by historical background on the development of doctrine and devotion to the Virgin Mary up to the end of the fifth century and the flourishing of the cult from that period onward. This section is followed by one on literary genre, which attempts to justify the structure and argument of the book as a whole. A section on gender, which takes into account recent approaches to this subject in the Byzantine context, develops a methodology for studying the cult of the Virgin Mary. The Introduction finishes by outlining once again the goal of this study: it is to assess early and middle Byzantine texts on the Byzantine Virgin according to the diverse settings and audiences for which these were intended.

Conclusion: The final chapter sums up the findings of the book as a whole, assessing again whether its literary approach to the subject is productive. I also return to the question of gender, suggesting here that Mary embodies the characteristics (or virtues) of both genders to the extent that she becomes a paradoxical figure. I conclude that she appealed to both female and male devotees, since evidence of successful petitions from both genders survives. Finally, I point the way towards future studies that might follow the methodology that is employed in this book. Other literary genres that deal with the Virgin Mary require examination too; these include histories, chronicles, poetry, epistolography, polemical treatises and others.

Chapter 7 explains how militant Islamist leaders adapted “traditional” Egyptian rural norms in ways that allowed them both to supplant the political power of local notables, while simultaneously institutionalizing extortion practices and implementing their own brand of “law and order.” Islamic militants exploited the high levels of social and economic uncertainty in Cairo’s informal housing areas. An important reason behind the popularity of radical Islamists among local residents is due to the ways in which their leaders have utilized highly coercive methods to settle local disputes and enforce informal labor contracts for their members, while simultaneously preaching against the ills of conspicuous consumption in their sermons and imposing strict Islamic modes of conduct. The chapter shows how the socio-economic conditions that have served, as a “recruiting ground” for Islamist radicals was made possible as result of economic change at both the international as well as domestic level.