Post-Islamism | Iran and Egypt

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I already wrote about Bayat’s Coming of a post-Islamist Society, where he provided a definition of ‘post-Islamism’. The term is used to refer to a distinct historical, social and political context, namely post-revolutionary Iran. It is important to remember this aspect, as it distinguishes Bayat’s approach from others informing the theoretical debate around the issue of political Islam.

In the late 1990s, the experts and commentators were debating over whether political Islam, and its project, had come to a fatal halt. Olivier Roy, in particular, advanced the hypothesis that political Islam had in fact “failed“. By receding from its political project for a transnational Islamic Ummah, focusing instead on the morality of the nation, Roy argued that political Islam lost its revolutionary character and, on an individual level, was being swallowed up by consumer culture.

A few years later, Salwa Ismail will refute his argument in The Paradox of Islamist Politics. Contrary to an alleged “whithering Islamism”, she argued that Islamist groups and activists developed different strategies of action and perspectives. Egyptian radical groups such as Gama’ah and Jihad reconsidered their ideological position renouncing to violence, accommodating difference in ideological interpretations, seeking a gradual process of accommodation with the state. Ismail’s main concern was that of stressing the fluid nature of Islamism. Rather than regarding it solely as a project, she is more inclined to see political Islam as a complex and dynamic “process”, evolving according to structural conditions and socio-political relations. Furthermore Roy’s conception of politics, which he narrowly equates with state politics, is highly problematic for Ismail, as it makes him unable to appreciate the political significance of other spaces, practices and idioms.

While Ismail prefers to put emphasis on the fluid and dynamic character of Egyptian militant Islam, in Iran Bayat sees a major break occurring within the ranks of Iranian Islamists. To him, their political project of Islamization from above had come to a major turning point, a “post-Islamist turn”. In this respect, then, Bayat’s hypothesis is quite different from Roy’s, even though they both postulate some kind of a rupture. Rather than approaching the subject as a unitary (and ahistorical) phenomenon, as Roy did, Bayat’s notion of post-Islamism is formulated as a result of a detailed account of post-revolutionary Iran, a specific historical manifestation of political Islam. He will first examine Islamism, as it was constituted in Iran, and then the effects of its concrete actualization. Among those effects Bayat will isolate some of them which, in his view, best signalled the coming of a post-Islamist society. However this argument has been illustrated in the previous post.

Here I want to specifically follow the evolution of the term post-Islamism. Bayat tried to formulate it to serve both as an analytical category generally applicable to the study of the Middle East, and as a contribution to the fields of comparative politics and social movement theory. The term has been gradually incorporated into a broader conceptual vocabulary which he developed throughout his recent books. Each of them will refine both his analytical framework and the conceptualization of post-Islamism. This development benefited from the adoption of a comparative perspective to investigate the subject, something which will inform later works such as Making Islam Democratic and Life as Politics. The first of these works constitutes a major refinement of Bayat’s hypothesis on Islamist movements in the Middle East. Yet, it is composed of different important threads which are worth being considered in isolation. One, in particular, can be said to form the backbone of his analytical construct.

In 1998, Bayat publishes a paper, “Revolution without Movement, Movement without Revolution: Comparing Islamic Activism in Iran and Egypt”, which will later become the theoretical chapter of Making Islam Democratic. It is important to pause at some length on this article because, by comparing the trajectories of Iran and Egypt’s Islamist movements, it broadened the scope of the term post-Islamism. As I already said, the paper examines the political trajectories of Islamist movements in Iran and Egypt, from 1960s to late 1980s. These countries both witnessed the impressive growth of Islamism, which however had quite differing outcomes. Iran had a repressive regime, backed by powerful international allies, and a growing middle-class. Yet there was a revolution. On the contrary, Egypt had a more liberal regime and a poorer economy. Yet Islamists only succeeded in creating a social movement. Hence Bayat’s main question: “[w]hy revolution in Iran, but not in Egypt?” (138).

Before responding to this question, however, Bayat first reviews the existing scholarship on the Iranian revolution (136-137). He notes a division between those who put emphasis on either internal and external factors. Among the former Bayat lists Dabashi and Moaddel, who both reserve a preeminent role for the religiosity of Iranian society and the “Islamic discourse”. As for the latter, authors such as Anthony Parsons and Nikki Keddie interpreted the revolution as an identitarian reaction to Western cultural and political domination. Yet others relied on structural and class-based explanations. Arjomand regarded the Islamic revival as a response to urbanization, whereas Misagh Parsa focused on the role of the state within the economic sphere. Against these arguments, Bayat raises two main points:

First, despite their differences, these authors grant an overestimated agency to a supposed strong Islamic movement which is said to have evolved since the 1960s or earlier, and to its role in carrying the revolution to victory. […] Second, the proposed models, in general, may be able to explain not the revolution per se but help to identify the major causes behind popular resentment and mobilization. One still needs to examine how a massive mobilization and movement articulates into a revolution (138).

in progress …

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