This chapter traces how, in an increasingly unstable domestic and regional context, the ruling coalition of religion and secular nationalists promoted a “Turkish-Islamist Synthesis 2.0” (TIS 2.0). This agenda infused the anti-pluralist, Turkish-Islamic synthesis of the 1980s with an attempt to Islamicize public life. Such efforts culminated in a major critical juncture: abandonment of Turkey’s 150-year-old parliamentary tradition for an executive presidency.

In the early 2010s, Turkey’s citizens continued to contest the role of religious, ethnic, and other forms of identity in public life. This chapter traces these contests over a series of transformative episodes from a constitutional referendum in 2010 to the nationwide Gezi Park protests three years later. Two key emergent properties are identified: (i) the AKP’s illiberal turn despite ongoing “openings” toward ethnic and religious minorities and (ii) the growing popularity of a neo-Ottomanism that came in more and less pluralistic variants. These included a multicultural approach to the Ottoman inheritance, but also a Sunni majoritarian strand. Both shaped domestic and foreign policy at a time of regional upheaval with the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

This chapter explores the work of Hanif Kureishi and, in particular, his 1995 novel The Black Album. Set in London in 1989, the novel engages with the fall of the Berlin Wall, with terrorism, and, most prominently, with the Rushdie Affair. It stages debates around religion, free speech, and cultural identity. Kureishi conceives of multiculturalism as premised on a vibrant exchange of ideas, and in The Black Album he portrays Islamism – and, by extension, fundamentalism of any kind – as a pseudo-idea which can only constitute a threat to, and never a part of, an effective multiculturalism. However, this chapter identifies a key paradox in The Black Album: it implores readers to treat ideas seriously, and yet there is very little serious treatment of particular ideas in the novel itself. As such, Kureishi’s novel is far more invested in the idea of ideas than in any particular body of them.

Is nationalism compatible with Islamic belief and practice? Debates on this question began with the rise of modern nationalism in the Muslim world during the nineteenth century and continue in varying forms in the twenty-first century. The middle of the twentieth century marked an important moment in the evolution of these debates. Muslim leaders and activists worked to define the political and cultural identity of the Muslim countries that were becoming independent from European imperialism. They were also defining the possible relationships between Islam and nationalism. The broad spectrum of their views reflects the fundamental issues involved in deciding whether nationalism is compatible with Islam.

This book brings together diplomatic and social history to narrate the history of US–Iranian relations. It argues that cultural openness and cooperation brought benefits not only to America and Iran, but the region more generally. The rift in US–Iranian relations had to do with more than the Mosaddeq coup or the dramatic shift in Iranian politics after 1979. Iran was confronted with competing nationalisms along its borders that forced Iran to adopt a defensive posture. Finally, America and Iran operated on both elite and non-elite networks that showed the ways in which social divisions affected diplomacy.

Zakat returned to Middle Eastern political discourse in the 1930s, through modern Islamism. It became one of two concrete initiatives distinguishing an Islamic modern economy from economies ostensibly corrupted by secularists and colonialists. The other was Islamic finance. In both cases, the focus was more on the symbolism of Islamizing a secularized sphere than on solving actual economic problems. Islamism tacitly stripped zakat of all but one of its original functions: poverty alleviation. Sidelining zakat’s role in public finance and the protection of property rights, it frittered away golden opportunities to draw from Islam’s rich history universal lessons for economic progress and rule of law. Focusing on the functions that made zakat a pillar of Islam would have initiated a dialogue with secularists inclined to dismiss Islam as a source of backwardness. A similar scenario has played out in relation to Islamic finance. Nowhere has a categorical ban on interest, which is absent from the Quran anyway, been enforced. In any case, it is unfeasible. In making Islamic finance seem interest-free through euphemisms and accounting tricks, Islamism reduces economic transparency and institutionalizes dishonesty. Weakening rule of law, it also compounds mistrust.

Although entry into Islam is costless, exit was banned early on. According to a widely accepted interpretation of early Islam, soon after Muhammad’s death a precedent for banning apostasy was set. In fact, the underlying dispute was over zakat, and the episode amounted to enforcing the tax code. But recasting this historical detail would not necessarily settle controversies over Muslim religious freedoms. Certain Quran verses speak of retribution against nonbelievers. Others preclude compulsion, arguably establishing a right to leave Islam. Insofar as a textual inconsistency exists – and that itself is debatable – for advocates of liberalizing Islam the challenge boils down to prioritizing liberal verses. Blasphemy and heresy charges, used repeatedly to persecute heterodox sects, also restrict sundry liberties. The fear of getting accused of religious offense constrains political discourse and inhibits collective action. But a broadening of Muslim religious freedoms through the liberalization of apostasy and blasphemy rules is not unthinkable. Analogous transformations have occurred in other religions. Besides, Islam has been reinterpreted repeatedly since its emergence, radically so in modern times. Innovations include Islamic banks, which are business corporations, and various Islamic NGOs, which are organized as nonprofit corporations. Evidently, no absolute barrier exists to broadening Islamic religious freedoms.

Pan-Islamism represents a radical search for Islamic unity and empowerment in the modern world. Today, Jihadi Salafists are the most aggressive proponents of pan-Islamic solidarity, yet paradoxically they are divided by intense ideological debates about sectarianism, anti-Muslim violence, and the need for a territorial state, rendering their movement ineffective.

The abandoned and contentious state of nationalist rituals in schools embodies the realities of everyday legitimation reflected in the striking expressions of the lack of national belonging among students across the schools. By exploring both school rituals and student narratives, this chapter is concerned with how legitimation is lived in the everyday and how citizenship is imagined from below. The first part of the chapter discusses the organization of the morning assembly (tabur) in the different schools and the performance of its nationalist components. The second part develops the key themes that emerge from observations and interviews with students and teachers relating to the narratives of national belonging and citizenship, and their classed and gendered dimensions. It tracks the influence of Islamist narratives on school activities and everyday discourses and shows how students and teachers articulate themes of Islamism and neoliberalism.

The condition of education in Egypt is driven by the management of the socioeconomic sphere by successive regimes and their ideological and strategic directions. In the late Mubarak era, the three features of crony neoliberalization, a weak informalized state and a deficit of legitimacy shape the practices of everyday governance and legitimation examined in the schools. This chapter sketches the political and economic context of the late Mubarak era and the ideological transition from Arab socialism to neoliberal Islamism. It provides essential background on tracking, quality and equity in the education sector, especially as crystalized in secondary schooling, and outlines the historical evolution of nationalist and ideological narratives as reflected in textbooks and schools and the securitization and Islamization of education. Finally, it describes the key attributes of the research sites and respondents in the two phases of research before and after the uprising, the key methodological issues involved in conducting the research in schools, the selection and analysis of textbooks and the most significant limitations of the research.

This chapter synthesizes the similarities and differences among three Islamist parties – the AKP, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ennahda – in power and shows how internal dynamics matter more in charting their democratic commitments than do external forces. The chapter then assesses how far this theory travels to other cases of Islamist parties and regimes like Iran and discusses the implications of these findings for the relationship among Islam, Islamism, and democracy. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the rise of right-wing populism elsewhere in the world and the role of party capture in fueling such authoritarian trends.

The Introduction sets the framework for the analysis and introduces the central research question of The Politics of Religious Party Change: when and why do religious parties become less anti-system? This chapter explains the significance of the question, discussing the rising prominence of religious parties globally and the need to better understand the dynamics of change in these parties. Likewise, the Introduction details the methodology used in this book and the six empirical cases: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Tunisian Ennahdha, Turkish AKP, German Center Party, Italian PPI, and Belgian Catholic Party.

This chapter reviews the existing literature on religious party change. The scholarly literature offers three major explanations for the divergence we observe in Catholic and Islamist parties’ trajectories and for why religious parties change, or moderate: religious, political, and institutional explanations. Despite major contributions to our understanding of religious parties, the literatures on Catholic and Islamist parties grew virtually independent of each other, focusing on entirely different sets of questions or factors that explain change in these parties. Building on the existing literature, this chapter lays out the theory developed in this book to explain religious party change. First, an overview of the political economic approach to the study of religion is presented; next, the chapter outlines the effect of institutions on political behavior, and in particular how religious institutions affect political behavior and religious parties. Finally, the major actors in the theory are analyzed before concluding with a comparative assessment of how Islamist and Catholic parties fit into the theory.

The Politics of Religious Party Change addresses the timely question of ideological change and secularization of religious political parties and asks, when and why do religious parties become less anti-system? In a comparative analysis, this book traces the striking similarities in the historical origins of Islamist and Catholic parties in the Middle East and Western Europe, chronicles their conflicts with existing religious authorities, and analyzes the subsequently divergent trajectories of Islamist and Catholic parties. Religious parties are embedded in distinct religious institutional structures that shape their actions as they chart their paths in electoral politics. Counterintuitively, the book finds that centralized and hierarchical religious authority structures – such as the Vatican – incentivize religious parties to move in a more pro-system, secular, and democratic direction. By contrast, less centralized religious authority structures such as in Sunni Islam create a more permissive environment for religious parties to operate as anti-system parties hostile to democracy and secularism.

Tripoli, October 2019: Young people from various religious backgrounds and all walks of life sang and danced together in the city’s central al-Nour Square, shattering the myth of Tripoli as a ‘cradle of terrorism’ or ‘citadel of Muslims’. The Islamists who had often dominated Tripoli’s urban space retreated, and youths, families, and members of the educated middle class filled al-Nour Square during Lebanon’s revolutionary moment.

Why and how did Tripoli become the country’s prime centre of contentious politics in otherwise-peripheral Lebanon?

The introduction presents the main argument of the book, introducing the concepts of the dethronement of secondary cities, politics of autochthony, and erosion of city corporatism in Tripoli. It then discusses the broader lessons of the Tripoli case, which speak to three strands of literature: studies of Lebanon and the Levant; discussions on sectarianization in the Middle East; and debates on the ‘Sunni Crisis’ in the Middle East. Lastly, the research methods used for data collection are presented.