Introduction
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring of 2011, what formative lessons can be drawn on an epistemological level? What can these uprisings stand to teach us about Arab thought more broadly, its historical underpinnings, and especially, what the revolutionary rupture with the past portends for the future of the Arab world and its politics? Indeed, much ink has been spilled in attempting to wrestle with these existential concerns. For instance, in his Arab Spring : The End of Postcolonialism, Hamid Dabashi stresses that the Arab uprisings, in their transnational spirit, drive us to analyze the Arab consciousness, or rather the transformation of it, against the ‘mystified consciousness’ fixated to it by colonial powers. This transcendent spirit catalyzes a quest for ‘new metaphors’ beyond the world of sheer binarism that marks the condition of postcoloniality, ‘the false dawn of liberation from European colonialism and the decline of the Ottoman Empire,’ and its ideological formations and structures of domination. Under this Arab mode of defiance or protest, Dabashi ’s argument would go, national boundaries thaw and transnational connections reconfigure accordingly. Much like socialism, nationalism and Islamism are ideological formations inherited from colonial rule, which coalesce to produce the hegemonic center-periphery illusion of the West and the Rest.
Indeed, Dabashi ’s thesis is provocative and illuminating and proved deeply influential in the framing of this volume. But in contradistinction to his euphoric claim of the end of postcolonialism tout court, both as a historical movement and as a theoretical framework, the contributions of this collection instead seek to interrogate postcolonial epistemologies—particularly its notion of the ‘régime du savoir,’ a construct utterly steeped in modernity and the nation-state system—through critical engagement with the Arab Spring and the consequent rise of political Islam. In the aftermath of the contemporary popular uprisings in the Arab world, existing modes of production have been thoroughly critiqued as perpetuating Eurocentric modes of production that sustain Western dominance through purist/exclusionary discourses of nationalism, pan-Islamism, and pan-Arabism—outdated discourses that were thoroughly debunked as effete following the Arab nationalist revolts of the 1950s and 1960s. Seeking to replace these anachronistic paradigms of the past, the acephalous Arab revolutions are excavating new metaphors that could encapsulate the burgeoning spirit of revival/renewal. This transformative quest builds on an umbilical link between the ‘national and the transnational’ in what Dabashi terms as a ‘politics of hope’ or for discovery of new geographies of liberation that is sufficiently radical to transcend colonial mapping, as crystallized in the expanding Tahrir Square(s) over vast geographic spaces guided by limitless stretches of imagination.
Accordingly, this volume will explore the largely uncharted historical currents, cultural contexts, and transnational environments in relation to the concept and function of religion in Arab governance today—particularly as it pertains to the notion of the state. The concept of ‘dawla’ as a stand-in for the modern nation-state, for instance, is a distinct product of modernity whereby communities in the Arab world have tried to define and conceptualize the state based on the unique contours of their specific historical and cultural experiences. More specifically, Muslim intellectuals in the modern era, in seeking to internalize the concept of the state, have sought to excavate prescient moments and conceptual frameworks in Islamic history, hoping to uncover precedents of state-like entities—particularly based on constructs of the nascent Islamic community of seventh-century Arabia. This present volume will thus examine how this projection and travel to the past manifested itself in contemporary debates to such an extent that it became often essentialized in present intellectual discourses. Its contributors analyze and interrogate not only the conceptual framework of the state but also the evolution of political language used in various temporal periods throughout Islamic intellectual history to more fully elucidate the intimate vicissitudes between governance and religion. Put another way, this project will examine the changing definitions of ‘religion,’ and specifically the development of the relationship between religion and state throughout the history of Islam. Does religion denote, for example, the inevitability of imposing juristic determinations, forcing certain ethical imperatives, or establishing a value system to the state structure? At a more applied level, moreover, this volume will elaborate on the interconnection between religious figures and government authority, as this relationship is crucial for the legitimization (or delegitimization) of claims of having established a bona fide Islamic state.
This broader debate over the conceptualization of the modern state in Muslim-majority societies has become more acute since the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1914. After all, the Ottoman Empire for centuries constituted the locus of Muslim statecraft globally—in geopolitical, cultural, and ideological terms alike. Accordingly, the fall of the empire galvanized a fundamental rethinking of the nature of the state in Islam and the process by which it adapts itself to urgencies and ideologies of modern times. The Muslim world navigated these challenges, moreover, in a twentieth-century context in which world ideologies about the state vacillated between a series of competing frameworks that largely left aside the question of religion, be it communism, socialism, or liberal democracy. The Arab world, in particular, wrestled with these currents, such that these same ideological frameworks took up root in Arab governance—albeit with the imprimatur of Islamic legitimacy as conferred by creative Muslim scholars and intellectuals, many going so far as argue that modern ideologies like liberal democracy were Islamic in their auspices and principles.
Alternatively, though, the imposition of the competing ideologies of statecraft also gave rise to a distinctly Islamic conception of statecraft. Particularly in the context of independence from colonial rule and the rapid change of political systems in the Arab world, nascent national Arab states had to adopt a new political ideology. Often that ideology conformed to the interests of world powers—be it in the form of liberalism, communism, or socialism. But ultimately, any given chosen ideology required local buy-in from newly minted Arab citizens; accordingly, it made natural sense that the inaugural ideological framework was often clothed in religious garb. The posturing in al-Azhar periodicals and journals during the 1950s and 1960s—particularly, articles published by members of the Majallat al-Azhar during this period that went distinctly against the otherwise politically submissive posturing of the religious scholars during that period—is a testament to this tendency to look for a religious basis for statecraft. Islamic discourse of statecraft was amplified and problematized tenfold, moreover, with the advent of modern Islamic activist movements. The advent of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 and the al-Jama‘a al-Islamiya and al-Jihad groups in the latter half of the twentieth century lent support to a religio-political worldview that was intimately tied to the nature and content of the state—a worldview that would stand to serve as a model for the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. In particular, these groups gave rise to the concept of jihad as an ‘absent obligation’ as a means to revive the idea of the caliphate. Islamization came to color competing state ideologies such that over time the concept of a bona fide Islamic state was confined to the imaginative space of Muslim collective memory, recalled specifically when needed to serve political and ideological positions and projects.
And it is in precisely this context of collective memory, of reactivating revolutionary thinking on Islamic statecraft at crucial historical junctures, that the Arab Spring proves especially germane. Quite unexpectedly, the Arab Spring reshaped the Arab world precisely in terms of conceptualized ideologies and, similarly, tempered the role and function of both civil society and religious institutions in redefining the role of religion as an ideology and regulatory system in building a post-Arab Spring Muslim state. This volume is thus dedicated to critically exploring that process of reconstitution across multiple overlapping frameworks and approaches.
Methods
The volume primarily aims to investigate and assess the latest theoretical approaches toward the issues under discussion, in light of the formative lessons of the Arab Spring, from a multidisciplinary, comparative perspective. It takes into account the breadth of the Arab uprisings in their totality, but deliberately focuses its attention on the case of Egypt, and to a lesser extent on Tunisia and on neighboring Turkey. The reason being the cases under consideration deal with states that have, at least de facto, maintained a certain degree of structural integrity in the aftermath of the Arab Spring—with Tunisia touted as the Arab Spring’s sole success story. The subsequent eruption into civil war as witnessed in Syria, Yemen, and Libya indeed require scholarly scrutiny, but by focusing our attention on cases that remain in democratic transition without having devolved into outright civil war, we stand to more meaningfully further comparative paradigms that can be applied elsewhere to the region, and to democratic transitions more broadly. Under the aegis of this broader approach, sections of the book will be divided into three distinct yet overlapping methodological frameworks:
History
- First, the volume will examine the very idea of political Islam in historical perspective, focusing on its early conceptualization and subsequent evolution in Arab and Islamic historical discourses and developing a historical narrative drawn from rigorous textual analysis. This section will critically deconstruct and reconstruct the very concept of political Islam, being especially sensitive to its place in modern discourse, and to its rise after the Arab Spring.
Culture
- Second, it will investigate the changing political and social conditions in the Arab world to extract a modern cultural portrait of what political Islam means today. Contributions in this respect will thus rely on cultural data to construct a vivid and multidimensional cultural narrative as it pertains to Islam and politics. Such materials will provide heretofore unimaginable access to the societal dimensions of the relationship of Islam with the state, and they will bolster the case that putative threads of conservativism and repression in the Arab world are ultimately driven by ethnic and sectarian divisions. Moreover, the project will raise crucial questions about the sources and origins of these divisions taking into consideration a history of Western intervention and manipulation—covert and overt alike—designed to weaken Arab-Islamic influence and empower imperialist aspirations in the region. In the same vein, this volume will analyze culture and civil society as a site and vehicle of protest more broadly—that is, beyond the immediate scope of Islam and politics as such. In that context, the arts and social media prove pivotal avenues for contesting political repression through culture—particularly on issues germane to gender and sexuality.
Politics
- Finally, it will provide new insights into the experience of living within the contours of an ‘Islamic State.’ It will identify Islamic principles and implementations regarding governance and foreign relations. Put more succinctly, this section of the volume will analyze Islamic views of governance, foreign relations, and diplomacy with both Muslim and non-Muslim actors in the light of Islamic jurisprudence and Arab historiography.
While this volume remains distinctly interdisciplinary in its scope, what unites the totality of our contributi...