Islamism and social movement theory

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 26, Issue 6, 2005, Pages 891-908

  Bayat, Asef ^a  

^a LEIDEN UNIVERSITY   (Netherlands)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ISLAMISM; POLITICS; RELIGION; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR;

EID: 32144458907     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01436590500089240     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. Anthony Parsons, 'The Iranian Revolution', Middle East Review, Spring 1988, pp 3-9.
2. A very useful recent publication is Quintan Wiktorowicz (ed), Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
3. Niel Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, New York: Free Press, 1963
4. and R Turner & L Killian, Collective Behavior, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987.
5. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, New York: Viking, 1960.
6. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, London: Addison-Wesley,1978
7. and Meyer Zald & D McCarthy (eds), Social Movements in an Organizational Society, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987.
8. James Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997
9. Hank Johnston & Bert Klandemans (eds), Social Movements and Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995
10. and Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
11. Elsewhere I have attempted to conceptualise what, for instance, youth and women's movements mean in the context of contemporary Muslim societies. See Asef Bayat, Post-Islamism: Social Movements, Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming.
12. E Gellner, Post-Modernism, Reason and Religion, London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
13. M Riesebrodt, Pious Passion, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.
14. Keddie, 'New Religious Politics: Where, When and Why Fundamentalism Appear?' in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40, 1998.
15. Charles Hirschkind, 'What is Political Islam?', Middle East Report, No. 205, October-December 1997, pp 12-14.
16. Gellner, p 9.
17. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations;
18. Bernard Lewis, 'Roots of Muslim rage', Atlantic Monthly, September 1990
19. and Lewis, What Went Wrong, London: Phoenix, 2002.
20. Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes, p 104
21. A Touraine, The Return of the Actor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p 64.
22. See also Touraine, 'Do social movements exist?', paper presented to the World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, 26 July-1 August 1988.
23. M. Foucault, 'An interview with Michele Foucault', Akhtar, 4, 1987, p 43.
24. A Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Society, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987, p 50.
25. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, p 9
26. and John Esposito, 'Religion and political affairs: Political challenges', SAIS Review: A Journal for International Affairs, 18(2), 1998, p 20.
27. Gille Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern World, State College, PA: Penn State Press, 1994, p 3.
28. Francois Burgat & William Dowell, The Islamic Movements in North Africa, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
29. Emad Eldin Shahin, 'Secularism and nationalism: The political discourse of Abd al-Salam Yassin', in John Ruedy (ed), Islamism and Secularism in North Africa, New York: St Martin's Press, 1994, pp 167-186.
30. Here I have cited only sources in English which are accessible to non-native readers. See Ali Shariati, 'Return to self', in John Donohue & John Esposito (eds), Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp 305-307
31. Abul-ala Mawdudi, 'Nationalism and Islam', in Donohue & Esposito, Islam in Transition, pp 94-97; 1983, p 5
32. Abdulaziz Sachedina, 'Ali Shariati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution', in John Esposito (ed), Voices of Resurgent Islam, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp 191-214
33. and Yvonne Haddad, 'Sayyid Qutb: Ideologue of Islamic revival', in Esposito, Voices of Resurgent Islam, pp 67-98.
34. I would like, however, to point to a curious convergence between the often totalising discourse of the Islamists and the post-structuralist framework of these authors. This probably results from their 'essentialism of difference', a notion which says that, whatever they are, Islamists are different from the West.
35. See Castells, The Power of Identity, p 71.
36. Ibid (emphasis in original).
37. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983
38. and John Foster, 'The declassing of language', New Left Review, 150, 1985.
39. For instance, Castells' account of Islamism and the Chiapas movement is informed by this type of envisioning.
40. Shahin, 'Secularism and nationalism', p 169.
41. See Melucci, Challenging Codes, p 336.
42. Abdullah Nouri, Shoukaran-e Eslaah (Proceedings of Nouri's Trial), Tehran: Tarh-e Nou, 1378/1999, pp 51-52.
43. Ayatollah Ali Khameneii, Friday sermon, May 2000, available at http://www.iran-emrooz.de/khabar/khamenei.html#top.
44. EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London: Penguin, 1963.
45. See Asef Bayat, 'Revolution without movement, movement without revolution: Islamic activism in Iran and Egypt', Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42(1), 1998, pp 136-169.
46. Ibid.
47. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
48. See Bayat, 'Revolution without movement'.
49. Gamson, Strategy of Social Protest, 1990, ch 1.
50. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p 177.
51. Ibid, ch 10.
52. Asef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran, London: Zed Books, 1997.
53. See Abul-ala Mawdudi, 'Political theory of Islam', in Donohue & Esposito, Islam in Transition, pp 252-260.
54. For Abdul-Salam Yassin, see Shahin, 'Secularism and nationalism', 1994, p 173.
55. Linda Herrera, 'The sanctity of the school: New Islamic education in modern Egypt', PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2000.
56. Issac Balbus, 'The concept of interest in pluralist and Marxist analysis', in I Katznelson, G Adams, P Brenner & A Wolfe (eds), The Politics and Society Reader, New York: David McKay, 1973.
57. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest;
58. and Melucci, Challenging Codes.
59. See, for example, Balbus, 'Concept of interest', 1973;
60. and Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution.
61. Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso, 1985.
62. This perception of fragmented interests is a useful way to assess the position of women under the Islamic Republic of Iran today. Are they oppressed or empowered? The answer is both, depending on what domains and interests one is speaking about. For instance, women are more literate, assertive and publicly active, but their individual freedom and modes of expression are more limited.
63. I am grateful to Emma Naughton for bringing the case of Hizbullah to my attention.
64. D Snow, EB Rochford, SK Worden & RD Benford, 'Frame alignment processes, micromobilization, and movement participation', American Sociological Review, 51, 1986, pp 464-481.
65. D McAdam, J McCarthy & M Zald (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p 6
66. An example is Hizb al-Amal in Egypt, which slandered the allegedly immoral novel, A Banquet for Seaweeds, by the Syrian author, Haydar Haydar, to instigate religious outrage among ordinary Muslims. The conservative Islamists in Iran also apply similar methods of characterising the discourse and behaviour of their adversaries as un-Islamic.
67. For instance, in their struggle against the reform government of President Khatami, they have ruled that dialogue with the USA is haram, or religiously forbidden. See Iran Farda, 44, July 1998, p 29.
68. Hanspeter Kriesi, 'The organizational structure of new social movements in a political context', in McAdam et al, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements.
69. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1983.
70. Asef Bayat, 'Does class ever opt out of the nation? Notes on identity politics in Iran', in Willem Schendel & Eric Zurcher (eds), Opting Out of the Nation: Identity Politics in Central, South and West Asia, London: IB Tauris, 2000
71. and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
72. Bayat, Workers and Revolution, p 48.
73. Ayandegan, 24 Tir 1358,
74. cited in Nimeye Digar, No. 11, 1990, pp 114-115.
75. For some useful documentation on women's activism during the revolution and in the aftermath, see Nimeye Digar, 10, 1989 and 11, 1990. These are special issues on women's experiences during the revolution.
76. Indeed, one should look at these ethnic movements with the same de-totalising scrutiny as at the revolution itself.