Islamism and Social Movements in North Africa, the Sahel and Beyond

Transregional and Local Perspectives

Aurelie Campana, Cédric Jourde, Aurelie Campana, Cédric Jourde

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367891688
• eBook ISBN: 9781351388269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

As North African, Middle Eastern, and Sahelian societies adapt to the post-Arab Spring era and the rise of violence across the area, various groups find in Islam an answer to the challenges of the era. This book explores how Islamist social movements, Sufi brotherhoods, and Jihadi armed groups, in their great diversity, elaborate their social networks, and recruit sympathizers and militants in complicated times. The book innovates by transcending regional boundaries, bringing together specialists of the three aforementioned regions. First, it highlights how geographically dispersed religious groups define themselves as members of a larger, universal Umma, while evolving in deeply embedded local contexts. Second, its contributors prioritize in-depth fieldwork research, offering fine-grained, original insights into the manifold mobilization of Islamist-inspired social movements in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, and Western Europe. The book sheds light on the tense debates and competition taking place amongst the different trends composing the Islamist galaxy and between other groups that also claim an Islamic legitimacy, including Sufi brotherhoods and ethnic and/or tribal groups as well.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.

The Constrained Institutionalization of Diverging Islamist Strategies: The Jihadis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Salafis between Two Aborted Egyptian Revolutions

Jerome Drevon

ABSTRACT

This research analyses the comparative institutionalization of the strategies of three major components of the Egyptian Islamist social movement family: the jihadis, the Muslim Brotherhood and the salafis. It uses historical institutionalism to amend rational choice paradigms and to investigate the constraints and opportunities posed by these actors’ past trajectories on their subsequent strategic choices. This article argues that 1981 and 2011 were two critical junctures that have shaped these actors’ ideational and organizational construction through path-dependent causal mechanisms regulating their mobilization and socialization processes. It contends that these mechanisms have shaped these groups’ evolution and mediated the institutionalization of their strategies.

Introduction

The Arab uprisings have substantiated that most Islamist actors can endorse participatory democracy when authoritarian regimes liberalize the political process (al-Anani, 2012; Cesari, 2014; Drevon, 2015c; Torelli et al., 2012). The academic corpus on political participation nonetheless contends that the decision to join the political process is not simply a rational choice that eventually sustains these groups’ domestication. The literature on Islamist participation instead argues that, although Islamist groups are responsive to political openings, they do not necessarily adapt their ideological world-views accordingly. The ongoing debate on the inclusion-moderation thesis, which posits that an actor’s political participation can prompt ideological moderation, stresses that this is a partial and conditional process (Brown, 2012; Cesari, 2014; Clark, 2004; Hamid, 2014; Wickham, 2013). This corpus suggests that, regardless of Islamist groups’ rationalities, strategic choices are not solely the outcome of external stimulus that would lead to the comprehensive renouncement of what had previously defined these groups.

Academic discussions of the inclusion-moderation thesis therefore underline the necessity to broaden its scope and investigate the institutionalization of Islamist groups’ strategies more generally. The latter is defined as the development of shared norms and practices sustaining a group’s long-term objectives. This article’s analysis of the comparative institutionalization of Islamist strategies seeks to amend rational-choice paradigms and demonstrates that this process unfolds through complementary causal mechanisms restricting the range of available options overtime. Drawing on historical institutionalism, this research argues that these path-dependent mechanisms stem from the macro-level environment in which these groups are embedded. While these groups’ evolution is not predetermined from the onset, these causal mechanisms trigger distinctive mobilization and socialization processes that delineate available opportunities and regulate the institutionalization of their strategies.

This article argues that the institutionalizations of the strategies of the jihadis, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and the salafis were sequentially catalysed by two critical junctures situated in 1981 and 2011. It demonstrates that these two critical junctures, defined as substantial macro-level changes inducing new strategic decisions (Thelen, 1999), determined the trajectories these three actors followed afterwards. The localization of these junctures in 1981 and 2011 is justified because of their considerable impact on Egypt’s political system (including constitutional and presidential transitions) and on these actors’ interpretations of changing political opportunities. While the period stretching from 1981 to 2011 has witnessed other important political adjustments as well (including a relative closing of political opportunities in the 1990s and subsequent opening in the mid-2000s), the latter did not have the same significant ramifications. This article contends that the 1981 and 2011 critical junctures triggered specific mobilization and socialization processes that gradually entrenched these three actors’ strategic choices and obstructed backtracking.

The assassination of President Sadat by salafi militants in 1981 imposed a clarification of the strategies the components of the Islamist social movement family (SMF) endorsed. Although the jihadis initially maintained their commitment to armed violence, strategic divergences over the nature of their respective endeavours (a popular revolution vs. a military coup) entailed distinctive mobilization and socialization patterns that subsequently regulated their reconsiderations of the rationale for violence. The MB’s decision to pursue political reform and achieve organizational survival similarly informed the group’s mobilization and socialization processes. They explain the development of valuable organizational resources and the expansion of a middle class constituency that could not easily be sacrificed when political opportunities shrank. Finally, the (non-jihadi) salafis’ choice to focus on religious teaching and proselytizing and to distance themselves from the jihadis guided their informal modes of mobilization. These mobilizing patterns subsequently limited their ability to establish strong organizational structures conducive to internal hierarchy and control. In combination with the absence of substantial political change before 2011, they account for the endurance of their strategic dissociation from politics before the uprising.

In 2011, the uprising (temporarily) shattered Egypt’s authoritarian regime and generated unprecedented political opportunities. Egypt’s new institutional configuration led to a broad legitimization of the political process and the rejection of violence by the components of the Islamist SMF, aside from the salafi jihadi trend, which maintained its opposition to party politics. Despite reaching a new consensus on political participation as a route towards political transition, pre-2011 developments critically affected the trajectories of the (ex)-jihadis, the MB and the salafis. Only the ex-jihadis of the Islamic Group (IG), who enjoyed the benefits of a cohesive organizational entity, managed to reach an internal consensus while internal JG divisions widened. The MB was plagued by decades-long construction as a hierarchical and survivalist movement, which hindered internal reforms, sparked internal splits, and informed its contested public political positions. Finally, the salafis built upon the Islamist momentum to gather an unprecedented share of the vote, but organizational weaknesses crippled them, as cohesive pre-2011 mobilizing structures were absent.

Institutionalizing Islamist Strategies

The academic consensus on Islamist groups’ political participation states that joining the political process is a rational choice designed to assure organizational survival, even when elections are structurally unfair. Islamist actors use the political process to bolster their popular legitimacy, secure external allies, increase the cost of repression for their opponents, and protect their fundamental long-term objectives. This rationale is consistent in most movements affiliated to the MB in Egypt, Jordan and Yemen (Blaydes, 2010; Clark, 2004; Hamid, 2014; Schwedler, 2006; Wickham, 2004, 2013) and militant armed groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon (Alagha, 2006) and Hamas in Palestine (Gunning, 2008).

This academic corpus is essential to rationalize Islamist groups’ choices and invalidate essentially ideological considerations. The contextualization of political participation in specific circumstances confirms that these groups are rational actors faced with dilemmas comparable to non-Islamist movements. However, while this rational approach is generally endorsed in the study of the MB and armed militancy, overtly ideological lenses often persist in the study of salafi groups and movements. The reference to the prevailing political preference-based differentiation between three salafi tendencies (Wiktorowicz, 2006) frequently fails to contextualize these actors’ political choices;¹ this reference tends to assume that political preferences are independent variables rather than contextualized choices.² For instance, presumed apolitical salafis would endorse prominent salafi scholar Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani’s ‘our politics is to abandon politics’, regardless of both al-Albani and these salafis’ specific contexts. Non-contextualized considerations are therefore in a predicament to explain why previously apolitical salafis create political parties when external circumstances change, as in post-2011 Egypt. Islamist groups’ political positions should rather be considered partially contingent on the structure of their domestic political systems, regardless of these groups’ theoretical or theological positions on democracy.

Pragmatism and rational adjustment to changing circumstances do not suffice to comprehensively explain these groups’ evolution, however. The academic literature suggests that political participation might unwittingly affect Islamist groups’ behavioural and ideological evolution. The central contention of the inclusion-moderation thesis states that joining the political process can alter these groups’ practices and ideological commitments through rewards and punishments, interaction with state institutions, and cooperation with external actors. A compelling theoretical framework accordingly posits that moderation occurs at the crossroad of changing political opportunity structures, cultural spheres and organizational dynamics (Schwedler, 2006). In the Egyptian MB, for example, new political opportunities to cooperate with non-Islamist actors cognitively affected the young generation that rose from the student movement of the 1970s (Brown, 2012; Wickham, 2013). These cognitive processes are arguably more durable when new political practices are internally legitimized (Schwedler, 2006), even though ideological change does not necessarily concern issues relevant to Islamic Law (Clark, 2004), minorities and religious norms (Cesari, 2014). Two recent challenges to the inclusion-moderation thesis nonetheless postulate that moderation occurred under repression rather than political inclusion (Cavatorta & Merone, 2013; Hamid, 2014), and that this concept is less relevant when conservative Islamist forces enter the fold (Schwedler, 2013).

This article investigates the institutionalization of Islamist groups’ strategies beyond the inclusion-moderation thesis and rational choice models. This process is defined as the development of consensually shared norms and practices sustaining these groups’ long-term objectives. While this research contends that Islamist groups are rational actors susceptible to changing external conditions, it maintains that rational choice paradigms do not suffice to investigate the development of their strategies overtime. These paradigms assume fixed political preferences and overlook these groups’ organizational dynamics and learning processes. This article instead asserts that Islamist groups’ political preferences change overtime through internal and external interactions, changing macro-level environments, and learning processes. This article additionally suggests that Islamist groups’ are both influenced by a set of ideational commitments and norms and constrained by internal organizational dynamics.

This research adopts an actor-centred social movement approach drawing on historical institutionalism and path-dependency models. Historical institutionalism defi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Islamism and social movements in North Africa, the Sahel and Beyond: transregional and local perspectives
• 1. The Constrained Institutionalization of Diverging Islamist Strategies: The Jihadis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Salafis between two Aborted Egyptian Revolutions
• 2. The Egyptian Muslim Sisterhood between Violence, Activism and Leadership
• 3. Disillusioned militancy: the crisis of militancy and variables of disengagement of the European Muslim Brotherhood
• 4. Between social contention and takfirism: the evolution of the Salafi-jihadi movement in Tunisia
• 5. Contention, Violence and Stalemate in Post-War Libya
• 6. Alliances of convenience: assessing the dynamics of the Malian insurgency
• 7. Betrayal, Heresy, Exile and Mystical Attacks: The Cost of Changing Islamic Affiliation in an Ethnicized Society (Mauritania and Senegal)
• 8, Senegal’s Arabic literates: from transnational education to national linguistic and political activism
• Index