Liv Tønnessen documents trends in the study of women’s involvement in political Islam movements. The chapter draws on examples from various country contexts, followed by a case study of Sudan, to illustrate how women within these movements respect foundational rulings while adapting specific aspects of Islamic law to contemporary realities.

The second chapter provides a brief description of the Sunni political Islam as an ideology with a focus on its historical provenances of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and its diffusion to the broader MENA region. This chapter gives an overview of the psycho-biographies of individual Muslim Brotherhood leaders: Mohamed Morsi, Rashid Ghannouchi, and Khaled Mashal. The authors discuss the operational code analysis results and deliberate on what kind of generic foreign policy behavior and strategies we should expect from the Sunni political Islamist leaders. The chapter also sheds light on what these results and strategies mean for MENA politics. The chapter concludes that despite the conventional portrayal of Muslim Brotherhood leadership, these leaders resort to negotiation and cooperation to settle their differences, hence the best way to approach them is to engage in a Rousseauvian assurance game that emphasizes international social cooperation.

After 84 years of struggle, the Muslim Brotherhood rose to prominence in Egyptian politics in the wake of the Arab uprisings. On the night of his election, Mohamed Morsi promised to unite all Egyptians – Muslim and Christians, men and women – and to advance the revolutionary cause for democracy, human rights, and dignity. Over the next 365 days, rather than uniting and democratizing his country, he alienated large segments of the population through exclusionary politics, majoritarianism, and polarization. Why did the Muslim Brotherhood follow majoritarian and polarizing politics after coming to power? This chapter seeks to solve this puzzle by way of unpacking the Brotherhood’s internal power dynamics and disagreements regarding democratic politics. To that end, the chapter begins with a short historical account, tracing the Brotherhood’s changing relationship to politics and emerging splits within. Then, it turns to the shifting power balance between the old guard and liberal Islamists, and how the former sidelined the latter. The chapter discusses three critical episodes in this process: the Wasat Party initiative of 1996, the 2009–10 internal elections, and the post-2011 purge of the liberals. It concludes with a discussion of what the old guard’s perception of democracy looks like in action with details from Morsi’s year in presidency.

This chapter analyzes how the distinctive institutional environments and their corollary ramifications on religious authority drive religious movements to adopt different strategies in shaping their political activism and creating religious parties, focusing on religious competition and conflict. Islamist movements, unperturbed by a hierarchical religious authority, found the liberty to pursue hybrid organizational structures. This carte blanche to assume religious authority enabled Islamist movements to operate both as a religious movement that serves in religious, social, and educational areas and as a religious party in the political arena. The Church hierarchy, by contrast, forced Catholic mass movement leaders to choose between expulsion and avoiding political activism in the name of Catholicism. Catholic political activists largely responded to this challenge by formally parting ways with mass movements and creating their own Catholic parties without the Church's blessing, ultimately deprived of the ability to rely on religious authority in their political ventures. In addition, this chapter focuses on the implications of distinct organizational trajectories on the electorate.

The politicization of religion and emergence of a religious political identity in the modern era is firmly anchored in the rise of mass religious movements – a hitherto unknown phenomenon. These movements became the main instruments for fulfilling the newly developed religious sociopolitical vision. Not only did they play a crucial role in raising a religious generation to confront social change and secularization, but they also aimed to confront deviant ideologies and remake the political system in line with their religious visions. In this distinctly political objective lie the seeds of religious political parties, which carry the missions of religious mass movements into the political arena. Religious movements embody the ideal organizational form of modern religiopolitical activism – they can lay out a vision for societal and political transformation, teach and preach this vision, and mobilize resources and communities to achieve it. These movements translated the bourgeoning religious responses to modernization and secularization into tangible social, religious, and political agendas. This chapter analyzes the emergence of mass religious movements in the Middle East and Western Europe.

This chapter looks at Mehmed Akif’s fundamental acceptance of the nation-state and reconciliation of Turkish and Islamic identity and sets that against Sabri and Kevseri’s theoretical objections, which centre on the argument that the shariʿa system with its notion of a legal and moral core above the manipulations of politics and society was superior to man-made law. Noting that their work came (1) as Egypt finalised the process of codification and de-Islamisation of its courts and (2) as the era of military authoritarianism began its long reign in the Arab region, it goes on to examine Sabri’s development of a radical view of Islamic faith and identity in the context of the modern state and how this may have impacted Sayyid Quṭb’s thinking.

In Sudan the era of the oil boom resulted in a flood in labor remittances that circumvented official financial institutions, thereby undercutting the state’s fiscal and regulatory capacity and fueling the expansion of the informal foreign currency trade. Initially, developments in Sudan paralleled those in Egypt as the boom witnessed the rise of an Islamist-commercial class that formed as a result of its successful monopolization of informal financial markets. However, in contrast to Egypt, by 1989 Sudanese Islamists were able to take over the levers of the state via a military-coup. This development was made possible by Sudan’s weaker state capacity and the extreme weakness of its formal banking system. As a result, the financial power of the Muslim Brotherhood continued to increase in relationship to the state as they continued to profit from participation in the lucrative speculation in black market transactions and advantageous access to import licenses.

In Egypt migrant remittances and the flow of petrodollars in the era of the oil boom provided capitalization of Islamic banks and a host of Islamic investment companies that operated outside the system of state regulation. Such bankers drew on the rapidly growing wealth of those businessmen with long-standing connections in the Gulf, including, most importantly, members and sympathizers with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). This boom in labor export and remittance flows also helped shape Egyptian national economic functions, out-migration and the burgeoning informal economy afforded the Egyptian state enough “relative autonomy” to allow it to expand the private sector and begin to decentralize the country’s economic system. It enabled the Egyptian state to relax foreign exchange regulations to stimulate a foreign capital influx. However, the unintended consequences of these policies were opening the door for Islamic financial institutions, which helped finance and popularize the middle class-based Islamic movement.

This chapter focuses on Egypt and Tunisia, as the two states experienced political revolutions after 2011. In Egypt, the brief political revolution was overturned by the counter-revolution of 2013, while in Tunisia an unsteady democratic transition was achieved at the cost of the social demands of the uprising. Using the framework of counter-revolution from above, below, and without, the chapter demonstrates how counter-revolutionaries in both states were able to rely on the inheritance of previous anti-colonial revolutions from above to build a base of support – one aided by the record of Islamist parties once in power. The greater independence of the organised working class in Tunisia hampered a more fully counter-revolutionary outcome: while the external influence of the EU was concerned with fostering political revolution against social revolution. In Egypt, by contrast, the military as the core of the state was supported by a coalition of Gulf states already financially well-embedded in the country’s ruling class and pursuing a policy of outright counter-revolution.

Islamic Jihadism has deep ties to National Socialism, both in its history and in its vision of a world that is “purified of the Jews.” Chapter 8 demonstrates the influences of Nazi exterminationist Jew hatred on modern Islamic Jihadism. It should be noted that I use the term Islamic Jihadism to distinguish Jihadists from other Muslims who are not part of this movement. Tracing the path from Hitler to Hamas, the chapter brings out the connections between the antisemitism of the Muslim Brotherhood and National Socialist Jew hatred, with particular attention to the Nazi war criminal Haj Amin al-Husseini. I incorporate primary texts of Jihadist ideologues such as Hasan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam, Ruhullah Khomeini, and others. Like the Nazis, but with theological differences, the Jihadists maintain not that all Jews are evil but that all evil is Jewish, to which and that to resolve it there can be only a Final Solution.

The events in Egypt between 2011 and 2013 present a series of empirical puzzles unanswered in the comparative political scholarship: We see puzzling variation with respect to the particular processes of party formation, political mobilization, and opposition group survival or dissolution in the context of regime transitions. These puzzles are particularly evident in Egypt, where a repressed opposition group (the Muslim Brotherhood) won the 2011 founding elections only to be forced from office eighteen months later, while other opposition groups that were active in protesting the Egyptian regime did not even form a political party to run in the 2011 elections. Common explanations for events in Egypt focus on idiosyncratic features of the Egyptian political landscape and fail to explain similar events in other cases in Eastern Europe, Africa, and South America. An approach that takes into account the mechanisms linking the authoritarian past to the events surrounding founding elections offers not only an explanation for events in Egypt but also illuminates comparative cases of founding elections more generally. The book uses comparative process tracing to excavate the mechanisms at play in Egypt and then test them in five comparative cases, linking the authoritarian political ecosystem to the outcome of founding elections.

In Sudan the era of the oil boom resulted in a flood in labor remittances that circumvented official financial institutions, thereby undercutting the state’s fiscal and regulatory capacity and fueling the expansion of the informal foreign currency trade. Initially, developments in Sudan paralleled those in Egypt as the boom witnessed the rise of an Islamist-commercial class that formed as a result of its successful monopolization of informal financial markets. However, in contrast to Egypt, by 1989 Sudanese Islamists were able to take over the levers of the state via a military-coup. This development was made possible by Sudan’s weaker state capacity and the extreme weakness of its formal banking system. As a result, the financial power of the Muslim Brotherhood continued to increase in relationship to the state as they continued to profit from participation in the lucrative speculation in black market transactions and advantageous access to import licenses.

In Egypt migrant remittances and the flow of petrodollars in the era of the oil boom provided capitalization of Islamic banks and a host of Islamic investment companies that operated outside the system of state regulation. Such bankers drew on the rapidly growing wealth of those businessmen with long-standing connections in the Gulf, including, most importantly, members and sympathizers with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). This boom in labor export and remittance flows also helped shape Egyptian national economic functions, out-migration and the burgeoning informal economy afforded the Egyptian state enough “relative autonomy” to allow it to expand the private sector and begin to decentralize the country’s economic system. It enabled the Egyptian state to relax foreign exchange regulations to stimulate a foreign capital influx. However, the unintended consequences of these policies were opening the door for Islamic financial institutions, which helped finance and popularize the middle class-based Islamic movement.

This chapter focuses on the theme of dignity as faith. First, the chapter attempts to clarify the use of the term “faith” as opposed to “religion.” The notion of dignity/karama is not just related to Islam, but also to a social condition that is embedded in one’s religious status and the accompanying process of socialization. The discussion of a human’s worth, central to understanding dignity/karama, is often related to religious studies. Given the broad context of this relationship, the focus here is to look only at the scholarship suggested from the interviews: notably dignity for Spinoza, for Pico della Mirandola, and for the secularists versus Islamists and in their debate with each other. The chapter gives milestones for the understanding of the discussion of karama and faith/religion in the interviews presented in this chapter.

The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Syria raised the prospect of a Turkish-led regional order, backed by Qatari economic power, and based upon the regional ideological co-dependencies of the AKP. At the same time, the renewed potential for a grand bargain between the United States and Iran held out the possibility that empowered Iranian reformists might substitute integration into Western economic and security frameworks for the Axis of Resistance. This chapter first examines the ways in which Turkey and Qatar sought to consolidate a new regional order based on alignment with Western-friendly Islamist governments. It then elaborates upon the counterrevolutionary forces within the region, emanating from both pro-Western and Axis of Resistance actors, that militated against the realisation of a new regional order. The final section of the chapter sketches the main features of a restored regional order based on authoritarian resurgence and sectarianised antagonisms across all pivotal powers in the region.

Regional order in the 1970s can be apprehended in relation to three interacting conflict dynamics, which this chapter examines in turn. The first was the competitive support-seeking dynamic between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the latter of which remained Washington’s default partner in the Gulf due to its contiguity with the Soviet Union and apparently greater internal stability. Riyadh’s main asset in this contest was its structural power within a second, Arab–Israeli arena, through consolidating its economic and political influence over Egypt and Syria. Resistance to the stabilisation of this emerging state conglomerate fed into a third conflict dynamic revolving around Syrian and Iraqi ideological externalisation strategies. The hegemonic strategies of each of these states necessitated continued confrontation with Israel.

This chapter considers Egyptian sociocultural politics in the run-up to the revolution of 1952 and beyond. Dar al-ʿUlum’s victory in the culture war was cemented in 1946 when it became a fully fledged faculty of the University. Furthermore, the immense impact of the darʿamiyya on fields related to Arabic, Islam, and education gives them a stronger claim than Europhile modernists to the legacy of Islamic modernist Muhammad ʿAbduh. Their histories demonstrate that schools can be the key to understanding social and cultural histories, that hybridity is a major engine driving sociocultural change, and that Islamic knowledge was most authoritative in colonial and postcolonial contexts when expressed in explicitly modern, ocularcentric ways. However, efforts by alumni to defend the school and its legacy in the decades since demonstrate the lasting sting of Husayn’s critique. As early as the 1926 dress strike, Hasan al-Banna decided to take his ability to be modern and religious in a different direction. Yet, considering him alongside the bulk of the darʿamiyya makes it clear that the role of the Muslim Brotherhood during the 2011 Revolution needs to be viewed within the 130-year history of engagement between Islamic knowledge and Egyptian modernities.