Conceptualizing Islamist Movement Change

ON JUNE 30, 2012, Muhammad Mursi, a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood, was sworn in as Egypt's new president. To longtime observers of politics in the region, the event felt surreal. An Islamist organization that had spent most of its existence denied legal status and subject to the depredations of a hostile authoritarian state was now in charge of the very apparatus once used to repress it. And it had reached those heights not by way of coup or revolution but through the ballot box.

Just eighteen months earlier, the idea of a Brotherhood president of Egypt was so far-fetched as to be laughable. The Mubarak regime appeared too deeply entrenched and the Egyptian people too afraid of the security police and too exhausted by daily struggles to survive to imagine a breakthrough occurring any time soon. Yet on January 25, 2011, a massive uprising broke out in cities and towns across the country, and eighteen days later, after thirty years in power, President Mubarak was forced to step down.

The Egyptian uprising was part of a seismic wave of protest that began in Tunisia and rapidly spread to other Arab states. Millions of men, women, and children poured into the streets to demand their freedom, and Middle East experts, as surprised by the protests as everyone else, struggled to explain why what were considered some of the region's most durable regimes had proven more fragile than anyone had thought.

The "Arab Spring" has set a new dynamic in motion in a region long afflicted by political stagnation. Though the contours of the region's new landscape are still taking shape, one trend is clear: the power of mainstream Islamist groups is on the rise. As the largest, most popular, and best-organized sector of the opposition in most Arab states before the protests erupted, Islamist groups were uniquely positioned to ride the openings that occurred in their wake. In Tunisia and Egypt, Islamist parties emerged as the resounding victors in parliamentary elections, and in Egypt, a Brotherhood career politician was elected president. Even in countries where longstanding rulers retained power, Islamists gained ground. For example, in Morocco constitutional reforms enacted after the Arab Spring prompted King Muhammad VI to appoint the head of the Islamist-oriented Justice and Development Party, the largest group in parliament, as prime minister.

The emergence of Islamist actors as a leading force in Arab politics has triggered competing reactions in the region and around the globe. While some have witnessed this development with equanimity, others have reacted with consternation and dismay. Such different reactions reflect the fact that the motives of such actors are hard to fathom. The information we have about Islamist groups is sketchy and incomplete, and the observations we have to go on are subject to conflicting interpretations. As a result, the broader implications of the Islamist surge, including its impact on the future of democratic governance, economic development, peace, and stability in the region, are open to dispute.

Perhaps the central issue is whether and to what extent contemporary Islamist groups have moved away from the illiberal features that characterized them in the past, including their support of violence, their rejection of democracy as an "alien" system imported from the West, and their calls for the application of Shari'a, or Islamic law, based on a conservative reading of Islam's sacred texts and juristic precedents. While Islamist leaders have welcomed and, indeed, actively supported recent democratic reforms, skeptics contend that they do not support democracy as an end in itself but as the first step toward establishing a system governed by the laws of God as they define them. From this perspective, the greater the influence of Islamist groups in the Arab world, the dimmer the region's prospects for democracy and freedom. Others, by contrast, claim that mainstream Islamist groups that once rejected democracy have become some of its greatest proponents and that the region's nascent transitions to democracy will hinge on their support.

The main objective of this book is to challenge these and other sweeping generalizations. Taking aim at much of what has been written about the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and other Arab Islamist groups in recent years, I argue that they cannot be described as "for" or "against" democracy, any more than they can be characterized as "moderate" or "extremist." First, by "breaking into the black box" of Islamist movement organizations and exposing the factional divisions and debates within them, I show that they are not monolithic entities whose members think and act in lockstep. Second, while demonstrating that Islamist groups have undergone an important evolution, I show that it has not been a linear, unidimensional progression toward greater "moderation." Rather, such groups have traced a path marked by profound inconsistencies and contradictions, yielding agendas in which newly embraced themes of freedom and democracy coexist uneasily with illiberal religious concepts carried over from the past. Third, I highlight the complex motivations of Islamist actors and demonstrate that recent shifts in their rhetoric and behavior cannot be attributed to a single chain of cause and effect. I argue that such shifts bear the imprint of strategic and ideational processes of change occurring simultaneously.

To gain leverage on the scope and limits of Islamist movement change, as well as its underlying causes and dynamics, I examine the trajectories of mainstream Sunni revivalist movement organizations in four Arab states. The main contribution of the book is a finely grained analysis of the evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt from its founding in 1928 to the inauguration of Muhammad Mursi as president in 2012. My analysis draws on insights and observations from twenty-two years of research on the Brotherhood, beginning with the fieldwork I conducted in 1990 and 1991 for my first book, Mobilizing Islam (2002), and including research conducted specifically for this project during multiple trips to the region between 2004 and 2012. Rather than treat the Brotherhood as a unitary actor, this book highlights ongoing disagreements within the organization over ideology and strategy as well as the shifting power balance among its competing factions. In so doing, it endeavors to explain why the Brotherhood opted for one path over another at various points in the past and to illuminate how such developments have shaped its priorities today.

Toward the end of the book, I compare the trajectory of the Egyptian Brotherhood to those of its counterparts in Jordan, Kuwait, and Morocco, highlighting the features they share as well as those that set them apart. In Jordan and Kuwait, I focus on regional offshoots of the Brotherhood, as well as their political affiliates, the Islamic Action Front (IAF) in Jordan and the Islamic Constitutional Movement (ICM) in Kuwait. In Morocco, I focus on the Movement of Unity and Reform (MUR) and its political arm, the Justice and Development Party (Parti de Justice et Developpement, or PJD). While formally independent of the Brotherhood's network, the MUR and the PJD were historically influenced by the Brotherhood's ideas and institutional arrangements and retain a close "family resemblance" to their Brotherhood counterparts.

To be clear, the four cases chosen for inclusion in this book cannot be said to represent the wider universe of Islamist movement groups and organizations around the globe, or even within the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa. All of the groups covered in this study are situated within the movement of Sunni revivalist Islam. They also have focused primarily on issues of domestic social and political reform, committed themselves to a path of nonviolence in pursuit of their objectives, and accrued long records of participating in electoral politics. Such characteristics distinguish them from Shi'ite Islamist groups and parties, "national resistance" movements like Hamas (Sunni) and Hizbollah (Shi'ite), and militant Islamist groups engaged in a holy war or jihad against incumbent rulers and their foreign patrons, such as al-Qa'ida and its regional affiliates. They also distinguish them from Islamist movement organizations such as al-'Adl wa al-Ihsan (Justice and Charity) in Morocco that have chosen to boycott the formal political system. Fikewise, such characteristics set them apart from Salafi Islamist groups that engage in grassroots religious outreach but, except in Kuwait, have not until recently participated in electoral contests for political power.

The four Islamist groups included in this study hence constitute a distinctive subset within the broader matrix of groups and movements that define their identities and objectives in Islamic terms. My objective is not to articulate a general set of propositions that apply to all Islamist groups. Rather, it is to capture the impact of political participation on four groups that started out with similar agendas and sought to pursue them under roughly similar conditions: as nonviolent opposition groups situated within systems of authoritarian rule.

In all four of the countries under study, Islamist groups took advantage of regime experiments with political liberalization in the 1980s and 1990s by expanding their participation in electoral politics. Participating in the political systems of "un-Islamic" regimes was intended to advance such groups' partisan objectives, but it triggered fundamental changes in the Islamic movement itself. The aim of this book is to specify the changes that have occurred, the causal processes that produced them, and the impact they will have on Arab politics and society. My hope is that by offering new leverage on such issues the book will make a significant contribution to the fields of Middle East studies and comparative politics, as well as to the study of social movements and contentious politics more generally.

Yet as those who have worked the longest and thought the hardest about such matters are often the first to admit, the effects of participation on the goals and strategies of Islamist opposition groups are extraordinarily difficult to pin down. In recent years, a number of Middle East scholars have begun to explore the impact of political participation on Islamist movement organizations, goals, and strategies. A pathbreaking work in this regard is Jillian Schwedler's Faith in Moderation (2006), which traced the divergent effects of participation on Islamist groups in Jordan and Yemen. Other scholars who have made noteworthy contributions to the analysis of Islamist participation within and across countries in the Middle East and North Africa (including the non-Arab states of Turkey and Iran) include Asef Bayat, Michelle Browers, Nathan Brown, Janine Clark, Mona El-Ghobashy, 'Amr Hamzawy, Quinn Mecham, Curtis Ryan, Samer Shehata, Joshua Stacher, Gunes Murat Tezcur, Eva Wegner, and Michael Willis. In order to gain traction on such issues, some Middle East scholars, myself included, have turned to the work of Przeworski and Sprague (1988) and Kalyvas (1996) on the democratic integration of socialist and Catholic parties in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western Europe and of Share (1985), Huntington (1991), Mainwaring (1992), and others on the deradicalization of leftist parties and movements during "third wave" democratic transitions in southern Europe and Latin America. Although they differ in their particulars, such studies generally frame the ideological and behavioral moderation of former radicals as a response to incentives generated by the democratic (or democratizing) environments in which they are embedded. For example, socialist parties renounced violence and diluted their calls for revolutionary change in order to gain the acceptance of erstwhile rivals, achieve legal status, and appeal to wider sectors of the electorate. Hence the prime movers in such accounts are considerations of strategic advantage, which prompted "rational" movement actors to adapt their goals and methods to changing political opportunities and constraints.

Yet the application of causal models derived from Western scenarios to the analysis of contemporary Islamist groups is hardly a straightforward endeavor. First, it is unclear whether groups that seek to establish a political system based on God's instructions for humankind are analogous to leftist parties, or even to Catholic parties that have a religious foundation but whose platforms contain nothing akin to the call for the application of a comprehensive system of divine law. Second, the participation of Islamist groups during the time frame in question occurred within the context of stable "semi-authoritarian" regimes, not within established democracies or during turbulent and open-ended periods of regime change. Finally, the resonance of Islam, the weakness of rival secular ideologies, and the limited—and largely disappointing—record of previous experiments in democracy in the Arab world have arguably lessened the pressures facing Islamist groups to dilute their agendas in order to appeal to wider sectors of the electorate. Indeed, the leaders of mainstream Islamist groups routinely contend that their agendas are already supported by a majority of the public at large.

Equally if not more vexing for those seeking to capture the effects of participation on Islamist groups in the Arab world is the fact that key terms in the "participation-moderation" thesis remain woefully underspecified. Indeed, a review of the literature on the subject reveals a striking lack of consensus on the definition of the outcome(s) to be explained, the conditions under which they occur, and the causal processes presumed to be at play. Let me describe each of these areas of contention and briefly explain how I will approach them in this book.

Characterizing Islamist Movement Change

Much of the literature on contemporary Islamist groups seeks to identify whether and how their participation in the domain of formal politics has contributed to the "moderation" of their goals and strategies. Yet the concept of "moderation" suffers from a high degree of imprecision. First and most obvious, it can refer to both an end state and a process. Second, as a relative rather than an absolute concept, it begs the question, "Moderate in comparison to what?" Third, it may refer to changes in behavior, such as a renunciation of violence, and/or to changes in broader worldviews, goals, and values, such as a growing commitment to freedom of expression or women's rights. Fourth, the term can be applied to changes both at the level of individual actors and at the level of the complex organizations of which they are a part. Yet when used as a descriptor of an Islamist organization as a whole (the Muslim Brotherhood is or is not "moderate") or to capture change over time in an organization's rhetoric and behavior (the Muslim Brotherhood is or is not "moderating"), it may gloss over some important vectors of internal differentiation. First, the term implies an overarching, internally consistent, and linear process of behavioral or ideological change when in fact an Islamist group may "moderate" its official rhetoric and practice in some areas while retaining, or even radicalizing, them in others. Second, treating Islamist organizations as unitary actors entails the risk of exaggerating the extent of the ideological and behavior uniformity within them—that is, of failing to discern instances in which the beliefs and practices of some individuals or factions of a group have changed while those of others have not.

Rather than aiming to determine whether the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups are "moderating," I take a more open-ended approach to the study of Islamist movement change. That is, I seek to capture the effects of participation on Islamist groups without assuming a priori that such change is likely to assume a particular form or direction. Like many other Middle East scholars, I am particularly interested in the type of changes implied by the concept of "moderation." But rather than employ "moderation" as a shorthand, I disaggregate the concept and attempt to specify the multiple dimensions of change it encompasses while leaving open the question of whether such changes have in fact occurred. Below I summarize the dimensions of primary interest.