political Islam
Middle East: Is Political Islam waning?
I’ve been intrigued to see how the war in Iran has changed the way the country’s Islamic government portrays women. State television features women’s military parades with pink guns and pink jeeps. Most notably, it features women who say they support the regime but are not wearing hijabs.
In the face of attacks by outside powers, the Islamic republic is crafting a new kind of identity, one that is less about religion and more about nationalism. And that shift is emblematic of something bigger happening in the Middle East: Political Islam is waning.
I spoke to my colleague Ben Hubbard about what is emerging in its place — and how Islamic the Islamic republic really is anymore.
Has political Islam’s moment passed?
So, Ben. Let’s start with the basics. Your story is about the decline of political Islam. What is political Islam?
That’s almost the hardest part. It’s a lot of things to a lot of people. Islam is a religion with two billion followers worldwide. Even the scholars who study political Islam don’t agree on one definition. For my purposes, I decided to focus on governments or movements taking inspiration from Islam in the service of statecraft — so groups, parties or rulers who cite Islam as part of their governing philosophy.
And I focused on the Middle East because so much of the conversation since 9/11 has been about political Islam there: parties like the Muslim Brotherhood, terror groups like ISIS and countries like Saudi Arabia, Syria and, of course, Iran.
Say more about Iran. How does it fit in here?
Iran is in some ways the most successful example of political Islam. It has accomplished what many of these other groups set out to do. It was an Islamic revolution where Islamists took charge of the country and laid out a program for how they were going to use Islam to run the place. This included foreign policy, domestic policy, the economy and even land reform. It’s arguably the most elaborate modern experiment of how to put these ideas into practice.
For many years people were talking about the rise of political Islam. You looked at its decline. What did you find?