PostIslamism | “The Coming of a post-Islamist Society”

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The term “post-Islamism” was proposed by Asef Bayat in The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society (1996). The article opens with a remark on Olivier Roy’s Failure of Political Islam (1994). Contrary to Roy’s hasty judgement, which will be critiqued by Salwa Ismail (2001; 2006), Bayat argued that Islamism was entering a new historical phase and that this mutation was occurring, somewhat ironically, in post-revolutionary Iran. He observed that while “[p]olitics in Muslim Societies is still predominantly religious”, Iranians seemed surprisingly “preoccupied with secular concerns”. This led Bayat to ask whether Iran had entered its “post-Islamist phase” and, if so, what this would look like (1996: 43).

However, before dealing with post-Islamism he needs first to define Islamism. To do so, Bayat reconstructs the political trajectory of post-revolutionary Iran. Throughout the 1980s, the Iranian Islamic order was actualized through the implementation of different measures, aiming to a gradual Islamization of society imposed from above. Government, for example, was Islamized through the introduction of the Valayat-i Faqih; society was subjected to the same discipline (compulsory hijab, tolerance of poligamy, Islamization of leisure etc.).

The project comes to a turning point with the end of Iraq war, in 1988, and Khomeini’s death a year later. Following these events, and driven by the urgency of post-war reconstruction, Iran enters its post-Islamist phase, which Bayat defines as follows (1996: 45-46):

By “post-Islamism” I mean a condition where, following a phase of experimentation, the appeal, energy, symbols and sources of legitimacy of Islamism get exhausted […]. [P]ost-Islamism is not anti-Islamic, but rather reflects a tendency to resecularize religion […] the idea of fusion between Islam (as a personalized faith) and individual freedom and choice […] [it] is manifested in acknowledging secular exigencies, in a freedom from rigidity, in breaking down the monopoly of religious truth, in the sacred giving way to the profane.

To further define the subject, he isolates and discusses three cases signalling the coming of a post-Islamist Iranian society: the Tehran municipality, the Alternative Thought Movement and Islamic Feminism (1996: 46-49). These examples touch upon themes – urbanization processes and everyday forms of cultural resistance practiced by ‘ordinary people’, in particular by marginalized groups such as young and women – that will become central in Bayat’s future research. In Life as Politics (2010), he will use the term “social nonmovements” to describe how these non-organized actors apply societal pressures for change at the everyday level, without directly challenging the state but rather resorting to what he elsewhere defined “quiet encroachment” (1997a; 1997b).

These pressures began mounting in late 1980s, when the contradictions and failures of the Iranian state emerged. The Islamic economy failed to deliver a comprehensive re-distribution of wealth, excluding large sectors of the society and exposing the rest to the rather “mundane” preoccupations of everyday life (eg. wage, housing, health). Likewise, the Islamization of school curricula failed to reproduce a generation of Islamic citizens, with the youth growing instead more and more disaffected. At the same time, the religious clergy was dealing with an internal contradiction. Faced with the exigencies of government, Islamists had to confront a situation where the state was actually secularizing religion (1996: 51):

[T]he very Islamization has led to a growing secularization of fiqh, or jurisprudence. […] For the first time in its modern history, the shi’i ulama in Iran are losing their independence and power and this development, ironically has been happening under an Islamic state.

This double front of mundane pressures -the state secularizing religion, the people resisting the Islamization of society- made the religious clergy reconsider its involvement in politics. Religious leaders were afraid to be too closely associated with the ruling class and its inability to solve society’s troubles. Also, they feared that Islam could lose its legitimacy as a source of power and authority. These considerations better defined the historical phase he was trying to describe:

Post-Islamism should be viewed in the light of these contradictions and failures, which some religious leaders see as undermining Islam per se. In a sense, post-Islamism seeks to save Islam as faith by undoing Islamism as politics. (1996: 52)

Post-Islamism was to be further developed in following works. The term was borrowed by Patrick Haenni and Olivier Roy (1999), who used it to describe a general condition of Islamist movements in the region. Although he rejects such an understanding – saying that he rather aimed to capture a specific shift in terms of social, religious, cultural and political trends in post-revolutionary, post-Khomeini Iran (2007: 10) – Bayat will continue to elaborate on post-Islamism adopting a comparative approach which will constitute the basis of his future research.

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