Violent and Non-Violent Political Islam in a Global Context

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Bonino
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
The West ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood

The role played by Islamism, or political Islam, in the contemporary world holds the key to understanding current geopolitical tensions both within the Muslim world and between the West and the Muslim world. This article centres on four books that explore some violent and non-violent manifestations of political Islam and offer analyses of the Islamic State, al-Qa’eda, the Muslim Brotherhood and, more generally, Salafi-jihadism. Political Islam considers Islam to be a totalising entity that should shape the contours of society, culture, politics and the law – that is, it ideally seeks to achieve unity of state and religion ( din wa-dawla). It expresses itself in multiple, and at times interlinked, ways that can encompass, among many others, a largely non-violent gradualist approach to power (Muslim Brotherhood), global terrorist action (al-Qa’eda) and sectarian warfare combined with territorial control and state-building (Islamic State). The aim of this article is to capture some of the multifarious ways in which political Islam manifests itself with the aid of the four books under review. Holbrook D (2014) The Al-Qaeda Doctrine: The Framing and Evolution of the Leadership’s Public Discourse. New York: Bloomsbury. Pantucci R (2015) ‘We Love Death as You Love Life’: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists. London: Hurst. Vidino L (2010) The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West. New York: Columbia University Press. Weiss M and Hassan H (2015) ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. New York: Regan Arts.

scholarly journals Contextualizing Salafism

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sedgwick
Keyword(s):  
Related Problem ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Think Tank ◽  
Radical Islam ◽  
The Press ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
The Way

The importance of Salafism, both in the Muslim world and in Europe, has been quickly grasped by scholars and by governments, and some excellent studies of Salafism in individual countries have been published. Methodological and analytical problems, however, remain. One problem is defining the topic: what is and what is not Salafi? Classification is not assisted by internal divisions within the Salafi movement that result in disagreement among Salafis themselves as to who and what is and is not Salafi, nor by the way in which Salafis do not always describe themselves as Salafi, often preferring ahl al-sunna wa’l-jama’a, sometimes shortened to plain “Sunni,” terms which could, of course, describe almost any non-Shi’i Muslim. A related problem is that the term “Salafi” is sometimes applied by outsiders with little justification, often in the press, but also by authorities such as Hillel Fradkin, director of the Center for Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World at the Hudson Institute, a “conservative” American think tank, who classified the Muslim Brotherhood as Salafi, on the basis that they were part of “the worldwide Islamic phenomenon and movement variously known as Islamism, Salafism, radical Islam, militant Islam, political Islam and the like.”

Hasan al-Hudaybi and the Muslim Brotherhood: Can Islamic Fundamentalism Eschew the Islamic State?

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
David L. Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
General Assumption ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Islamic Fundamentalism ◽  
Sacred Texts ◽  
Existing Structures ◽  
General Guide ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood

Beginning with an examination of the writings of the Muslim Brotherhood‘s second General Guide, Hasan al-Hudaybi (from 1951 to 1973), this paper questions the general assumption that Islamic ?fundamentalism,? or Islamism, is necessarily a ?political Islam? that seeks to overthrow existing political entities in order to install an ?Islamic state.? Hudaybi personally denounced any violent means to promote the Brotherhood‘s cause and in his writings defined the Islamic state as a state in which the moral injunctions of the sacred texts are promoted—a program on which in Egypt Muslims and Christians can easily agree. The paper concludes that the key difference between Islamic activists who seek to overthrow existing structures and those who only seek a moral revitalization of society is to be found in their theological approach— both their hermeneutic and the choice of classical authorities they consult.

Mostafa Houssien’s Satan’s Family

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed Abdel-Raheem
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
Political Impact ◽  
Multimodal Text ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood

After the 2013 coup d’état in Egypt, the Egyptian media launched strenuous campaigns against the Muslim Brotherhood and the West. In this paper, I present a cognitive analysis of a multimodal text of a cartoon with labels, with the goal of gauging its social/political impact. Crucially, the cartoon ‘frames’ its message so strongly that even if the viewer is not a speaker of Arabic and all verbal elements in the cartoon are to be erased, he or she (with certain ‘general’ background knowledge) will probably be able to read its moral message. For the analysis, I employ Fauconnier and Turner’s (1998) conceptual blending theory. The analysis shows that metaphoric blends do not just surface in public discourse. Rather, they can have a strong influence on how people perceive political issues.

Contemporary Islamism

2007 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Matthew Cleary ◽  
Rebecca Glazier
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social

Islamism proposes a vision of a society united by religion above all else – a vision that the West has difficulty theorizing and even comprehending. This vision and the social movements that have accompanied it are firmly rooted in the Muslim world’s history and traditions. This paper adopts a frame analytic perspective to examine and understand the progression of political Islam from the nationalism of the interwar period and beyond to the radical jihadism of today. In so doing, it contributes to the literature on framing by providing an analytically rich and theoretically valuable example of framing tactics in social movements. It also contributes to the growing literature on political Islam (Islamism) by providing a new and insightful perspective on its emergence and acceptance in the Muslim world.

History and the West Indian nation

1998 ◽  
Vol 72 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 283-289
Author(s):  
Frank Birbalsingh
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
The West ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Color Class ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Ann Arbor ◽  
English Speaking

[First paragraph]The Art of Kamau Brathwaite. STEWART BROWN (ed.). Bridgend, Wales: Seren/Poetry Wales Press, 1995. 275 pp. (Cloth US$ 50.00, Paper US$ 22.95)Atlantic Passages: History, Community, and Language in the Fiction of Sam Selvon. MARK LOOKER. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. x + 243 pp. (Cloth n.p.)Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History. SUPRIYA NAIR. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. viii + 171 pp. (Cloth US$ 34.50)Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life. LlZABETH PARAVISINI-GEBERT. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. xii + 335 pp. (Cloth US$ 55.00, Paper US$ 18.95)Of the four books to be considered here, those on Brathwaite, Selvon, and Lamming fit snugly together into a natural category of literature that has to do with the emergence of a Creole or African-centered Caribbean culture, and related issues of race, color, class, history, and nationality. The fourth is a biography of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, a white West Indian, who is of an altogether different race, color, and class than from the other three. Yet the four books are linked together by nationality, for Allfrey and the others are all citizens of one region, the English-speaking West Indies, which, as the Federation of the West Indies between 1958 and 1962, formed a single nation.

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